Fallout from Trump’s Venezuelan aggression

How shocking and strange is Donald Trump’s America?
Is the recent aggression in Latin America merely another Trumpian misadventure, or does it mark a new chapter in the US’s long and systematic imperial pursuit?

The rogue capture of Nicolás Maduro amid US military action against Venezuela, in the early days of the New Year, leaves much to be asked. The midnight abduction of a sitting president and first lady by the military of the world’s most powerful nation sends an unmistakable signal: the rules-based world order is eroding, and brute power is back in charge.

Trump now says the US will “run” Venezuela. According to reports from Washington, the administration is preparing to “fix” the country’s energy infrastructure and control its oil sales “indefinitely” – as if it were its own territory.

What makes this moment especially surreal is that such reckless military interventions and naked assertions of power come from a US president who, just months ago, desperately pursued humanity’s highest honour for peace building.

The moment you return to the Trump-sparked Nobel Peace Prize controversy, everything starts to feel strange.

The Nobel imbroglio
While the US president keenly coveted it, the Nobel went to Venezuelan democratic rights activist and opposition leader María Corina Machado. “They’ll give the Nobel Prize to some guy who didn’t do a damn thing,” Trump sneered, lashing out at the Norwegian Nobel Committee and desperately marketing himself as a peacemaker who ‘prevented’ major global crises.

However, within a couple of months of 'losing the Nobel', Trump launched an attack on a sovereign country, openly mocking the UN Charter and international law, and effectively fulfilling the wishes of the Venezuelan Nobel laureate.

“January 3 will go down in history as the day justice defeated tyranny. It’s a milestone. It’s not only huge for Venezuelans, but also a huge step for humanity, freedom, and human dignity,” said the Venezuelan opposition leader.

Responding to the US capture of Maduro, María Corina Machado declared that President Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, claiming he had proven himself.

As Trump continues to campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize, Machado moved beyond words – presenting the prize medal to the US president at the White House last week. This unusual sequence of events compelled the Norwegian Nobel Committee to clarify that the prize cannot be transferred or shared.

In 125 years, the Nobel Peace Prize has never been demeaned by a world leader. Tragically, a President of the United States has now done so.

Naked business, this time…
Engineering regime change is nothing new for the United States. In a historic address to the UN Security Council on 5 January, condemning the aggression in Venezuela, noted scholar Jeffrey Sachs pointed out that the United States has attempted nearly 75 regime changes since 1947 – through force, covert operations, and political manipulation.

Professor Sachs argues that the United States has always functioned as a military-industrial state apparatus, where foreign policy is determined by the CIA, the Pentagon, and the business interests of American corporations. Such an argument suggests that US presidents may change, but their security and economic imperatives remain constant.

The roots of Trump’s aggression toward Venezuela can be traced to an economic imperative – or a fundamental intricacy – of the American oil economy.

America has abundant oil reserves, but 80 per cent of it is light, sweet crude known as shale oil.

Light shale oil extraction has expanded rapidly over the past two decades in the United States. Yet the country’s most capital-intensive refineries, built in the last century, are designed to process heavy, sour crude imports.

The United States is the world’s largest oil producer; nonetheless, it is economically rational for Americans to export high-value light crude and import cheaper heavy crude.

Venezuela, endowed with the world’s largest known heavy oil reserves and located nearby, thus emerges as a strategic necessity for US energy security.

American companies have played a key role in establishing Venezuela’s oil industry since the 1920s; it is therefore unsurprising that Donald Trump believes the United States has a “birth right claim” over Venezuelan oil.

Hugo Chávez and his political successor, Nicolás Maduro, asserted state control over the oil economy and imposed extensive restrictions on US companies.

While economic imperatives drive US invasions abroad, they are always masked by rhetorical camouflage – such as restoring democracy or neutralising a threat to global peace. For instance, the fabricated claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction became the convenient pretext for the 2003 invasion of oil-rich Iraq.

What sets Trump’s aggression toward Venezuela apart is its unabashed projection of business interests, stripped of any moral or humanitarian justification.

In his address to the nation immediately after the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the US President spoke of bringing to justice the perpetrators of deadly narco-terrorism against the United States and its citizens. But in the coming days, his focus blatantly shifted to business.

The White House meeting with oil industry executives on January 9 is a clear illustration.

At the meeting, Donald Trump sounds less like a head of state and more like an enthusiastic CEO, pitching business opportunities to oil executives and urging them to invest in what he repeatedly calls “tremendous” Venezuelan oil.

At the meeting, there was very little emphasis on issues beyond business, such as curbing cocaine trafficking into the United States and ending Maduro’s so‑called repressive regime.

Coarse politics
Like any US president, Donald Trump is driven by American military and economic interests; however, it is Trump’s own psychological makeup – often marked by vindictiveness – that complicates everything.

Revisiting Donald Trump’s New Year posts on X from a decade ago is worthwhile.

“Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don't know what to do. Love!” (2016)

“To EVERYONE, including all haters and losers, HAPPY NEW YEAR. Work hard, be smart and always remember, WINNING TAKES CARE OF EVERYTHING!” (2015)

Such statements cannot be dismissed as mere verbal bravado when read alongside Trump’s recent actions in office, where personal grudges and coarse political practices spilled over into foreign policy. Let’s not forget what happened to the abducted Venezuelan president.

After their capture, Maduro and his wife were not moved to any decent housing facilities but instead to the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, New York, to face trial – one of the harshest prisons on the US mainland.

Dubbed a ‘hell on earth,’ the facility is notorious for poor sanitation, inadequate heating during winter, frequent power failures, and substandard medical care.

On multiple occasions, federal judges have characterised conditions at the MDC as barbaric and contemptuous of human life and dignity. According to a 2024 New York Times report, the judge declined to send the defendant in a drug case to the “troubled” Brooklyn MDC.

Maduro’s brutal treatment before any court verdict is meant as a warning to leaders who dare defy US interests. Trump’s threat that Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez would pay a higher price than Maduro “if she doesn’t do what’s right” is the most explicit example.

The ultimate irony: the abducted leader of a sovereign nation now awaits trial in an infamous New York jail, alongside hard-core criminals, just a few miles from the Statue of Liberty – a symbol long celebrated as a beacon of freedom and democratic values that Americans proudly tout.

(Social anthropologist and novelist Thomas Sajan and US-trained neurologist Titto Idicula, based in Norway, write on politics, culture, economy, and medicine.)