History doesn’t repeat itself, Mark Twain liked to say, but it often rhymes. On January 3, 2026, Washington struck a familiar chord. Thirty-six years after U.S. troops seized Manuel Noriega and flew him to Florida in handcuffs, American forces once again extracted a Latin American leader and deposited him on U.S. soil. This time it was Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s long-serving president, detained alongside his wife and transferred to a federal detention center in New York to face drug-related charges.

The official justification was law enforcement. The subtext was power. The motive, barely concealed, was energy.

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Hours after Maduro’s removal, President Donald Trump dispensed with diplomatic euphemism and went straight to the point: the United States would “tap” Venezuela’s oil reserves and sell them abroad. The statement mattered less for its legality than for its candor. Regime change, in this case, was not framed as a humanitarian intervention or a democratic rescue mission. It was presented as a transaction. Oil in exchange for order. Energy in exchange for sovereignty.

This logic has a long pedigree. When Noriega fell in 1989, the Panama Canal was the strategic prize. Control over a chokepoint mattered more than the character of the man who ran the country. In Venezuela, the prize is subterranean. The country sits atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves, larger even than Saudi Arabia’s. For decades, that fact has shaped Venezuela’s politics, distorted its economy, and invited foreign meddling. It has also made the country indispensable and expendable at the same time.

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Maduro’s real offense was not authoritarianism. Washington has tolerated worse, and often for longer. His cardinal sin was ideological defiance........

© The Nation