Democrats Attack Trump’s Venezuela Imperialism... From the Right!

On Friday, the Trump administration announced a “deal” handing the United States 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan crude oil, roughly a fifth of the country’s total reserves (the largest on Earth), on leases running up to 100 years. They would give $200 billion, or just about $3 a barrel (just 3% of market value) to Venezuela. If this was a fair “deal,” following market value, it should be over $6 trillion. That may be the biggest fraud in human history.

Billionaires are already circling like vultures. A Coinbase co-founder is in talks to run his own Venezuelan oil fields, and pro-Israel megadonor Paul Singer is positioned to profit too. The arrangement comes eight months after US special forces stormed and carpet-bombed Caracas and abducted President Nicolás Maduro.

Marines have openly occupied the streets of Caracas since, doing numerous muscle-flexing helicopter raids across the city. The administration has said Venezuela is “not ready yet” for elections, despite running their own elections for decades—plus, why does the US get to dictate when and if countries can have elections, anyway?

The Pentagon itself reportedly holds a 35% stake in the venture set to extract the oil, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio runs the country as its de facto “viceroy," according to The New York Times. The whole scheme was backed by neocons like the Vandenberg Coalition and the Florida lobby.

Would the US accept it if China, Russia, Iran, or Mexico kidnapped a US president, bombed American fishermen, seized American oil fields, and installed a puppet government because officials in Beijing or Tehran deemed it “in the national interest”?

I guess they’ve stopped pretending this was ever about democracy or drugs (the original bogus reason). It is now even being sold as the cure-all for a worsening recession and a pre-midterm buy-off, even as the affordability crisis worsens.

President Donald Trump and the neocons’ message seems to be: It’s fine to steal trillions from other countries, kidnap their leaders, kill civilians, and install puppet governments, for profit. We skipped the Cold War and went straight back to old-school imperialism.

As almost always, most of the windfall from this “deal” will go to the super rich. Gas prices keep climbing, but oil majors are hitting record highs on Wall Street. Chevron’s stock sits near an all-time high as it committed $7 billion to the new venture. Canada’s largest oil investor also hit an all-time high in the stock market the day of the news.

You may ask yourself, how have Democrats responded to all this depravity and barbarism? Well, would it shock you if I said most Democratic politicians have attacked Trump from the right, and legitimated his warmongering? Unfortunately, it probably won’t.

My home state’s senator, the ever-boring Tim Kaine (D-Va.), joined by Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), filed a war-powers resolution to block what they called an “illegal war” with Venezuela. “Illegal” is the operative word. Their objection is that Congress never voted on this, not that invading, bombing, and looting a sovereign country is morally wrong.

In a Tweet, quoting the right-wing oil-funded Wall Street Journal, Kaine added that Trump had "Invaded Venezuela, Removed the dictator Maduro but... Kept his VP in power While blocking opposition leader and Nobel laureate Maria Corina Machado from returning home and delaying all talk of elections," ending on "So the US could control Venezuelan oil in violation of its constitution!"

He's basically saying, "We want to coup foreign governments to put in a far-right puppet and take their oil, LEGALLY." We don't need Mickey Mouse anti-imperialists.

If Congress had passed a resolution approving all of it, the way it did for the wars in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, would that make it morally acceptable? Of course not. Torture under the Bush administration was legal, as was the US colonization of the Philippines, and even the Transatlantic Slave Trade, for that matter.

But for Democratic leadership, this was never about principle, or backing a truly progressive foreign policy vision; they just care about opposing Trump for its sake, and respecting the oh-so-perfect process. Though legislating morality is the purpose of law, legality and morality are not the same—and in this case, legal approval means nothing.

This is nothing new. Democrats have spent decades backing a hawkish, neoliberal Venezuela policy. During the 2002 coup that briefly ousted democratically elected president Hugo Chávez, then-Sen. Joe Biden dodged the question on television before pivoting, months later, to demand Washington “ratchet this up” against Chávez. By 2006 he was warning of an “axis of oil” led by Venezuela, echoing talking points from neoconservatives like Iraq War architect John Bolton.

Washington-aligned opposition forces also waged the 2002-2003 PDVSA oil lockout meant to strangle Chávez’s government economically. In 2019, when Trump anointed the unelected Juan Guaidó as president, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) recognized him, and most congressional Democrats stayed silent or lined up behind her.

Now, with the Pentagon routinely bombing fishing boats off Venezuela's coast for months, which it says, without evidence, are narco boats, killing hundreds of civilians, Democrats’ loudest objection was, again, that Congress hadn’t authorized it.

They wanted to see “proof” of these being narco boats, rather than focusing on the more important point: Are we okay with just murdering any suspected criminal? This is the kind of logic that leads to right-wing politicians arguing to kill thieves and petty drug peddlers, like in Brazil and the Philippines.

Hillary Clinton, of all people, said more than many elected Democrats would. Now Democrats are lining up behind Delcy’s far-right replacement-in-waiting, María Corina Machado. Even the Central Intelligence Agency thought she was too extreme and alienating to be Maduro’s replacement. Yet, Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) met with Machado months before she shamefully won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize (before giving it to Trump). Durbin later co-sponsored a resolution honoring her alongside far-right Republican Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Rick Scott (Florida). Most Democrats have been backing her as the next president, calling her a “champion of democracy,” among other ridiculous stolen valor.

Machado, backed by the Bush administration and US intelligence agencies, backed the 2002 coup; relentlessly pushed for and defended the sanctions that starved her own country; wants to privatize PDVSA and hand away her country’s, in her own words, “trillions of dollars of natural resources” to the US on Donald Trump Jr.'s podcast; and has praised autocrats like Daniel Noboa, Javier Milei, and Nayib Bukele.

Machado is “completely aligned,” historian Greg Grandin told Democracy Now!, “with the most militarist and darkest face of US imperialism. She was the main force lobbying for the coup against Maduro, and has supported the boat strikes on fishermen, her own fellow citizens. She has been supported by neocon war criminals like John Bolton, Elliott Abrams, and Mike Pompeo—does that sound like someone the Democrats should be backing?

There are, still, some exceptions worth naming. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) has made the actual moral case, not just the legal one, calling Trump’s approach a return to "the era of gunboat diplomacy where might makes right” and saying plainly, “It's not just that it's strategically wrong. It's morally wrong.” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) has also warned against letting “control of the world’s most powerful military” rest in one man's hands, and called out Trump’s imperialism plainly.

Expanding the anti-war coalition, libertarian Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) has repeatedly co-sponsored bipartisan war-powers resolutions with Democrats Rep. Jim McGovern (Mass.) and Joaquin Castro (Texas), arguing, “This is not about drugs; this is about oil and regime change... our troops are not pawns to be risked for the profits of oil companies and investment bankers.” A real transpartisan anti-war bloc is possible, it just needs bold politicians to lead it.

We face an unprecedented fascist and imperialist threat. Washington is using its world-bending power to expand its territory, remove leaders who won’t play ball with US crony and intelligence interests, and turn sovereign countries into de facto American possessions. Venezuela, as even the often-disappointing New York Times has reported, has effectively become a US colony.

Mealy-mouthed centrist imperialism just won’t do the trick. A legal invasion is still an invasion. Pursuing “US interests” doesn't give any official carte blanche to roam the world like rogue thugs. Would the US accept it if China, Russia, Iran, or Mexico kidnapped a US president, bombed American fishermen, seized American oil fields, and installed a puppet government because officials in Beijing or Tehran deemed it “in the national interest”? They might nuke them within the hour.

All empires end at some point. When it does, no power will grant the US the mercy it denied the countries it pillaged.

Democrats, and American officials generally, should recognize their precarious position in a world increasingly turning toward rivals like China, and finally build that coalition in earnest. Thankfully, there are now constituencies challenging Washington’s neo-imperial consensus, in academia, in think tanks, at the State Department, and even in Congress, that are growing too significant to ignore.