Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Over the weekend, the Trump administration fast-tracked its efforts to oust Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, the successor of Hugo Chávez and his policies of nationalizing key industries and pushing out most U.S. companies. The U.S. government conducted a bombing raid in Caracas, with a swift operation to capture Maduro and his wife, transporting them to New York, where they face federal charges that include using Venezuela’s government to run a narco-terrorism conspiracy.

Venezuela is well-known as the home of the world’s largest known oil reserves. In its Annual Statistical Bulletin for 2025, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) reported that the country had more than 303 billion barrels in reserves. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s report on the country notes, “Most of Venezuela’s proven oil reserves are extra-heavy crude oil from the Orinoco Belt,” and several recent estimates say that the total oil in place in this region exceeds 1 trillion barrels. Still, industry insiders say that the raw numbers associated with the Orinoco Belt’s vast wells of oil, both oil in place and oil regarded as technically accessible and recoverable, can be misleading given other important factors. The oil in the Orinoco region is thick and viscous, difficult to extract and producing a lower yield of usable finished product. Many in U.S. policy and business circles believe that such difficulties can be overcome with the proper levels of investment and needed updates to the industry’s infrastructure and technologies in Venezuela. As Reuters reports, “[O]utput has plummeted over the past decades amid mismanagement and a lack of investment from foreign firms after Venezuela nationalized oil operations in the 2000s that included the assets of Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips.”

Trump has never been a peace president or a principled opponent of aggressive war and imperial looting. His crude rhetoric, with its open acknowledgement of Venezuela’s oil riches, merely removes the polite, decorous language we’ve come to expect from our political figureheads. The U.S. government is not pursuing a new logic or discarding old values. It is reinstating our political-economic system’s commitment to imperialism and extraction, only without any pretense to humanitarian motivations or democracy-building. If the past several years have taught us anything politically, it is that the old categories of identity and ideological narrative are no longer capable of assuaging........

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