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Opinion
The Harm Data Centers Cause Isn't Only Local
Data centers are not just toxic installations in communities’ backyards—they are a driving force behind wars and instability, and they keep American workers tied to the endless cycle of wars for fossil fuels.
May 03, 2026
Across the country, resistance to data centers is rising even as plans are steadily being made to build new ones.
According to the Pew Research Center, a majority of new data centers—67%—are being built in rural areas. And three-quarters of those are in Midwestern and Southern towns.
The negative effects have not gone unnoticed. A new data center in Southaven, Mississippi, for example, is reportedly terrorizing the community with high levels of noise and air pollution, and residents are now regretting its existence.
But it’s not just the pollution, the depletion of water systems, and the increased energy costs to consumers that should lead communities to resist data centers. When you dig a little deeper, you begin to see how data centers are built on exploitation that goes far beyond small-town USA.
In defense of the planet, our communities, and communities around the world, I hope urban and rural communities alike can unite to stop data center projects.
Data centers are both products and producers of wars that kill people and destroy the planet on a global scale. The rapid expansion of these data centers requires raw materials, especially fossil fuels—resources often obtained through violence—and they fuel a technology that is increasingly used to commit war crimes.
Fossil fuels provide almost 60% of the power for data centers, especially for “emergency generators.” AI data centers run almost 24/7, so these “emergency” generators are consistently operating.
Control over fossil fuels, of course, is a driving factor behind the US regime change efforts in Iran, Venezuela, and other resource-rich regions. And the extraction of other needed minerals—like silicon, gallium, lithium, and cobalt—requires both the destabilization of the sovereign regions in which they are found and inhumane mining practices, including the use of child labor.
Then there is the question of the moral and ethical use of generative AI. The expansion of data centers comes at a time when AI and LLMs (large language models) are increasingly being used by the Pentagon for militarism domestically and internationally.
The Pentagon recently agreed to massive deals with both Palantir and OpenAI. The employment of AI in military operations has already resulted in war crimes. For instance, Anthropic’s Claude was used in the bombing of the girls’ school in Minab, Iran, which killed around 170 students and teachers. Do towns that pride themselves on family values want to be behind a killing machine capable of murdering young girls?
It’s easy to understand why the announcement of these data centers can seem like good news for areas facing dire economic conditions. Existing low-wage jobs are difficult to survive on. But the evidence suggests data centers create very few local jobs in the towns where they’re built. Should this small number of jobs come at the expense of people and the future of our planet?
The state officials brokering these deals with tech companies could instead work on bringing jobs that design, install, and maintain renewable energy systems to replace fossil fuel reliance. They could sign contracts with companies that manage and protect the beautiful natural ecosystems, habitats, and biodiversity that often surround rural towns.
We need jobs that sustain the heartbeat of the Midwest and the charm and hospitality of the South—not jobs in an industry that terrorizes communities and kills people.
Data centers are not just toxic installations in communities’ backyards—they are a driving force behind wars and instability, and they keep American workers tied to the endless cycle of wars for fossil fuels.
In defense of the planet, our communities, and communities around the world, I hope urban and rural communities alike can unite to stop data center projects—especially across the Midwest and the South, where they have so much beauty and love to protect.
Rural communities’ future is not AI. We should be investing in what makes us great: the people and the land.
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The Tragic Transformation of Todd Blanche
Someday Blanche’s progeny may ask him why—as the chief law enforcement officer in the United States—he helped a rogue president run roughshod over the rule of law.
May 03, 2026
During President Donald Trump’s first term, he bemoaned the failure of his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to protect him from the Justice Department’s investigation of Russia’s efforts to elect Trump in 2016.
“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump erupted, referring to his notorious former fixer who had also been Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s hatchet man during the 1950s Senate hearings into communist activity. Trump later fired Sessions.
For a time, Attorney General William Barr was the answer. But the two men parted ways after Barr told him repeatedly that no evidence supported Trump’s obsessive claims that voter fraud had cost him the 2020 election.
In Trump’s second term, it appeared that Pam Bondi fit the bill. She tried valiantly to meet Trump’s every legal need. She transformed the Justice Department into Trump’s personal tool, prosecuted Trump’s perceived enemies, and tried to protect Trump from the fallout over the scandal involving Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking of minors.
Bondi's Deputy, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, is now auditioning to remove the “Acting” from his title. He hopes to succeed where his predecessors have failed—to become Trump’s enduring Roy Cohn.
But she bungled the Epstein files. She tried but failed to prosecute two key targets on Trump’s vengeance list: New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey. She savaged her own reputation but could not save her job.
Bondi’s deputy, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, is now auditioning to remove the “Acting” from his title. He hopes to succeed where his predecessors have failed—to become Trump’s enduring Roy Cohn.
From Democrat to Trump Enabler
Blanche began his legal career in 1999 as a paralegal in the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Working days and attending Brooklyn Law School at night, he graduated in 2003. After a stint as an associate in the Davis Polk firm and two federal court clerkships, he returned in 2006 to the US Attorney’s Office as a prosecutor and eventually became co-chief of the violent crimes division.
In 2014, Blanche joined the WilmerHale firm as a partner before moving to another big New York firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham, & Taft. In 2019, he represented Paul Manafort on state mortgage fraud charges similar to federal crimes for which Manafort had already been convicted in 2018. (Trump pardoned Manafort in December 2020). Blanche got the state law claims dismissed on double jeopardy grounds.
But in April 2023, Cadwalader balked when Blanche, then a registered Democrat, sought to represent Trump in the hush-money case involving payments to Stormy Daniels. So Blanche left Cadwalader and started his own firm. The jury eventually convicted Trump, but for Blanche it began a profitable relationship that generated over $3 million from Trump’s Save America PAC in the new firm’s first year alone.
Blanche went on to represent Trump in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case and in the election obstruction case involving Trump’s efforts to overthrow the 2020 election. In 2024, Blanche switched his registration from Democrat to Republican.
Trump’s Latest Roy Cohn
Blanche is no longer Trump’s personal attorney, but you wouldn’t know it from his conduct in office.
Although he was the No. 2 official in the Justice Department, in July 2025 he tried to quiet the MAGA backlash over Trump’s breach of an election pledge to release the Justice Department’s Epstein files. Blanche went to Florida where Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislane Maxwell was in prison and interviewed her personally. Openly seeking a pardon, Maxwell said that she had never seen Trump do anything inappropriate.
Mission accomplished.
Shortly thereafter, Maxwell was transferred to a “club fed-type” prison camp—even though her conviction had rendered her ineligible for such placement under Bureau of Prisons policy. Blanche said that threats against her were the reason for the transfer.
As acting attorney general, Blanche has now picked up where Bondi had failed to put Comey behind bars. At an April 28, 2026 press conference, he announced Comey’s indictment alleging that in posting an Instagram photo of sea shells that formed “86 47” on a North Carolina beach, Comey “knowingly and willfully made a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, the President of the United States.”
A sea-shell death threat via Instagram.
“So, I think it's fair to say that threatening the life of anybody is dangerous and potentially a crime,” Blanche said indignantly as he explained that the charges against Comey came with a 10-year potential prison sentence. “Threatening the life of the President of the United States will never be tolerated by the Department of Justice.”
Blanche continued, “[W]hile this case is unique and this indictment stands out because of the name of the defendant, his alleged conduct is the same kind of conduct that we will never tolerate and that we will always investigate and regularly prosecute.”
Really? How about these?
“Hang Mike Pence”—Trump pardoned more than 1,500 January 6 insurrectionists, some of whom may have been responsible for the sign carrying that message and the gallows accompanying it. The statute of limitations on such “threats” is five years. Where was that indictment?
“86 46”—Anti-Biden Trump social media personality Jack Posobiec posted this in January 2022. It also appeared on T-Shirts, caps, and Republican fundraising messages.
Former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) posted this in February 2024: “We’ve now 86’d: McCarthy, McDaniel, McConnell. Better days are ahead for the Republican Party.”
Wasting Taxpayer Money
Prosecutors face a daunting task proving Comey’s subjective intent to harm Trump. Even longtime Trump apologist Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, acknowledged that the indictment “is unlikely to survive constitutional scrutiny. If it did, it would allow the government to criminalize a huge swath of political speech in the United States.”
When asked at his press conference how he would prove intent, Blanche said “with witnesses, with documents, and with the defendant himself,” adding: “It's very premature for me to do that today.”
That non-answer won’t suffice when Comey’s lawyers provide evidence that this is just another vindictive prosecution on Trump’s behalf at taxpayer expense.
Someday Blanche’s progeny may ask him why—as the chief law enforcement officer in the United States—he helped a rogue president run roughshod over the rule of law.
He probably won’t tell them about Roy Cohn.
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Trump's Border Wall Is a Destructive Monument to Greed and Fear
As it devastates borderland communities and wildlife, the wall stands for shutting out complex things, possibly complexity itself. It represents Trump’s promise to his base that their worldview will be fulfilled.
May 03, 2026
A leading preoccupation of the first Trump administration has all but slipped from view. Except when ostensible conservatives speak out against it, the major media have scarcely breathed a word on the subject. But it’s still there, 30 feet tall, aspirationally 1,952 miles long, obliterating habitats, dividing families, and sucking down public funds faster than a carrier-based air squadron.
The media’s lack of attention is understandable. All-too-real wars of choice and metaphorical wars against science, universities, and the environment have dominated our airtime and the headlines. The rise of a new medievalism in medicine and the abrogation of international trade and security agreements have also won attention. Add to all of that a federal paramilitary kidnapping people, even from what still passes for the halls of justice, while murdering the occasional protester, and one’s journalistic cup runneth over.
The meta story of the US government’s comprehensive abandonment of its Enlightenment heritage needs telling, too. Goodbye to empiricism and the troublesome scientific discourse it produces. Goodbye as well to empiricism’s political collaterals, including the “created equal” credo of the Declaration of Independence, which the current regime finds distinctly irritating. There is simply too much to report on as the new monarchy, as if in a sped-up nature film, blossoms flowerlike, its palace under renovation, the king’s signature being prepared to grace the currency, and myriad kickback mechanisms whirring like gold-plated turbines to enrich an aristocracy of tech bros and oil emirs.
So, dear reader, it’s not just logical but inevitable that Donald Trump’s border wall, a major story during his first administration, has essentially fallen out of the news. Rest assured, though, that the world’s least pragmatic and most performative construction project continues to prosper.
Spend Now, Think Later
Modern border management relies on three tools: human patrols, remote detection backed by quick response teams, and the construction of physical obstacles. Smart gatekeepers coordinate those tools to maximize effectiveness and minimize cost. But there’s no need for thrift in Trumpworld. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA, which Trump signed into law last July 4, negated all need for fiscal restraint. Among other things, it appropriated $46.55 billion for border wall construction, $7.8 billion for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents and their vehicles, $6.2 billion for high-tech border surveillance, and a hefty $10 billion for anything else border-related. The total: $70.55 billion. Those funds will be available through Fiscal Year 2029. By comparison, the government will spend about $10 billion less over that same period to fund the entire Department of the Interior, which manages half a billion acres of surface land as well as the continental shelf and vast subsurface mineral deposits.
Such border largesse means that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can go all out on all three tactical approaches at the US-Mexico border—patrol, surveillance, and a wall—simultaneously, without troubling to eliminate redundancies, tailor tactics to the environment, or streamline coordination. Daddy has proudly given DHS his credit card.
In addition to bifurcating the wildlife habitat and scarring a gemlike landscape, the wall builders will extract large amounts of groundwater to make concrete for the wall’s foundation, almost certainly desiccating wetlands that are hotspots of biodiversity.
In a victory-lap cabinet meeting four days after enacting the OBBBA, Trump told Kristi Noem, then still his DHS secretary, “You’re loaded up on the border.” He essentially admitted that the bill’s munificence demonstrated power, not budgetary acumen, simultaneously adding, “We had zero [migrants] come in last month, so I am not sure how much of it we want to spend. You may actually think about saving a lot of money because the wall is largely built.” The president then continued with fact-free claims that the migrant population abounded with murderers and mental defectives.
Notwithstanding Trump’s comments, DHS administrators and the contractors who are their most immediate constituents show no sign of leaving money on the table. At the border, their blank-check funding meets a matching regulatory void—the most extensive waiver of laws and regulations in American history. In addition to suspending laws intended to protect the environment, wildlife, national parks, national wildlife refuges, lands sacred to Native Americans, and historic and cultural sites, the Trump administration has also waived more than 60 contracting and procurement regulations. In the name of a national emergency, which is no emergency at all—illegal border crossings (as measured by apprehensions) have indeed plunged—the president has stripped the playing field of all boundaries and opened the door to cronyism and corruption.
Under showers of money and in the absence of restraint, a single border wall is no longer viewed as adequate. Double-walling has become the norm and certain select areas now boast triple walls. With no cap on costs, whole mountaintops, rugged and unvisited, have been sheared apart to make way for the standard 30-foot-tall, steel-bollard wall, even at costs exceeding $41 million per mile, or almost $8,000 per foot. Meanwhile, the Border Patrol’s terminally bored agents (giving new meaning to bored-er) sit behind the wall in white trucks, looking at their phones and incubating their hemorrhoids.
The Non-Monetary Costs Are No Less Astronomical
It’s easy to think of the mostly arid US-Mexico border zone as empty, but biologically it’s a busy place. The grasslands of the San Rafael Valley in Arizona, for instance, are home to 17 threatened and endangered species. For years, existing vehicle barriers, bolstered by remote detection technology, have allowed jaguars, ocelots, mountain lions, mule deer, and other wildlife to move back and forth across the valley’s 30 miles of border and disperse according to their ancient ways. A network of 60 remote cameras along that stretch, monitored by the Sky Island Alliance, recorded just one possible migrant per camera every 20 months. Besides being easily patrolled, the valley is also heart-stoppingly beautiful. Nonetheless, DHS intends to double wall all of it. In addition to bifurcating the wildlife habitat and scarring a gemlike landscape, the wall builders will extract large amounts of groundwater to make concrete for the wall’s foundation, almost certainly desiccating wetlands that are hotspots of biodiversity. And for nothing, save symbolism, bragging rights, and contractor profits.
No detail illuminates the mentality behind border enforcement better than this: In cooperation with US Customs and Border Protection, military elements at Fort Huachuca, Arizona are now engaged in “the largest Concertina wire (C-wire) emplacement in US territorial history.” “C-wire,” or “razor wire,” is designed to lacerate any flesh, human or animal, that comes in contact with it. Fort Huachuca soldiers are deploying 43,000 rolls of it, the largest single purchase ever.
Usually C-wire is used atop a wall or fence to prevent people from climbing over. Ominously, it’s now being spread on the ground, sometimes in areas where there is no wall, but also in front of the wall and between double walls—a policy of pure viciousness, not necessity. Someone should explain this deployment to the bighorn sheep of California’s Jacumba Mountains, which are now separated from their key Mexican waterhole by thickets of the nasty stuff, which will become ever more camouflaged and treacherous as grass and brush grow through it.
Buoy, Oh, Buoy, What a Wall!
For treachery, however, it’s hard to top CBP’s plans to “secure” 536 miles of the border in Texas by mooring a chain of cylindrical buoys, linked end to end, down the middle of the Rio Grande. Once in place, the array will look like an orange sausage, five feet in diameter, floating on the river. The anchors and mooring lines, of course, will be invisible. What could possibly go wrong?
This ill-conceived plan offers a retro-snapshot of American life before the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) became law in 1970, back when strip mines and other land-wrecking ventures could be launched with no evaluation of their impact, no public involvement, and no second opinions as to their necessity. The waiver of NEPA and every other environmental constraint means that no modeling of the “Buoy Wall’s” hydrodynamics (that is, its reaction to flooding), if any exists, has been made public.
The Rio Grande International Study Center in Laredo, Texas, however, commissioned its own study. The results are unequivocal. The Buoy Wall will be a debris trap during floods, as when a hurricane lodges over the region. It will redirect flows of water and raise water levels, especially in places where it’s paired with river-crowding segments of the wall. And if a section of buoys should break loose from the sandy, unstable riverbed, the likelihood of disaster will soar.
Geomorphologist Mark Tompkins, who authored the report, concludes, “Failures will cause catastrophic flooding, damage, and destruction to property, and risks to the health and safety of people near the river corridor.” Thousands of people living adjacent to the river in Laredo and other communities in both Mexico and the US will be put at risk.
Conflicts Brewed and Brewing
Walls have their place. They can be effective in urban areas. But DHS startled more than a few onlookers with plans to build a wall among the cliffs and arid wildlands of Big Bend National Park. Even the sheriffs of West Texas, one of the reddest regions in the country, got riled up. Although DHS may yet fall back to a more sensible “detection technology” alternative for the national park, it has failed to communicate a clear decision, while nearby private lands and Big Bend Ranch State Park remain at risk.
Even worse uncertainty may be brewing in Arizona, where the lands of the Tohono O’odham people, whose presence predates the border by many centuries, are spread on either side of the line. The tribe’s exemplary cooperation with border authorities includes tribal enforcement teams that have helped keep illegal crossings at a historic low. But the rigid minds and hungry contractors of the “CBP industrial complex” remain unsatisfied. The agency’s “smart wall map” indicates that it aims to build a double wall across the Tohono O’odham reservation, splitting apart families, clans, and longstanding webs of relationship.
And then there’s the unhappy Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces, which serves Sunland Park, New Mexico. Walls have long separated El Paso and Sunland Park from the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez. However, there is an unwalled gap at Monte Cristo Rey, a steep-sided peak long considered impractical for barrier construction. Not now, though. Blasting for the Border Wall began on Cristo Rey in March, in time to appall the thousands of Holy Week pilgrims who visit the statue of Christ the King on the mountain’s summit.
The land available to CBP, however, is not sufficient to finish the job on Cristo Rey, and the adjacent landowner, the Catholic Church, refuses to sell. CBP claims it may assert the right of eminent domain, while the church has said it will fight, although its best tool for resistance, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, has predictably been among the many laws waived by DHS.
Orgasms for Birders
On a recent trip to the border, I visited one of the most exquisite places in the entire Southwest. To get to it, I drove 40 miles on dirt roads across broken, arroyo-carved desert. The Border Wall was almost always in sight.
Apart from the roadway itself, the commonest evidence of a human presence were signs at the approach to each arroyo: DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED, which is good advice in an area where flash floods from local thunderstorms can sweep away a heavy truck. All the arroyos that the road crosses are also crossed by the Border Wall. Floods pile tons of debris against the wall, and sometimes the accumulated weight is enough to push the structure down. CBP continues to experiment with designs for swinging water gates, but a durable solution remains unproven.
Between a pair of “lay-bys”—bulldozed flats where the wall contractor has assembled fleets of eighteen-wheelers, excavators, scrapers, dumpers, pickups, bulldozers, loaders, and cement trucks—I veered down a rough track to a steel gate and let myself in. A little way beyond that, I stopped my car beside a lazy creek at the bottom of a canyon. White-barked sycamores and cottonwoods, just coming into leaf, towered overhead. Amid their shadows, the air smelled of duff and wet sand. The birds were not just singing, they were yelling. When I opened a birding app on my phone, the bird-call IDs scrolled by like movie credits.
From concertina wire to counter-functional buoys, from mountain blasting to free-wheeling billion-dollar contracts, the mindset behind the wall is the same as that which spawned the Iran war. Both are exercises in unchecked power.
The canyon has a perfectly good name, but I’ll call it Paradox Canyon in recognition of the contrast between the vigorous life it contains and the brutalist-walled horizon looming above it. During the first Trump administration, the nearest mountain peak was cleaved open like a watermelon, leaving the landscape not just scarred but grotesquely amputated.
The current contractor, Fisher Industries, is no stranger to disassembling and rearranging mountains. Besides installing the standard bollard wall, Fisher is pouring a concrete patrol road at the foot of the wall, portions of which, rising above Paradox Canyon, are so steep that, absent the paving, no wheeled vehicle can climb it.
The next mountain, however, is too steep even for a patrol road. The previous contractor’s employees dubbed the peak “Widow Maker,” and the zigzag scars of switchbacks and ledges by which they gained access to the path of the wall make it easy to understand why.
Fisher is the largest player in the wall-building business. Based in North Dakota, it was the contractor for “We Build the Wall,” a crowd-funded enterprise that got its promoters, including Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump ally, convicted for fraud. “We Build the Wall” funded Fisher to build 3.5 miles of wall on private land beside the Rio Grande near Mission, Texas. The Department of Justice and the International Boundary Waters Commission subsequently sued Fisher for shoddy work and violation of the boundary treaty with Mexico. The suit has since been settled, with Fisher having agreed to make immediate repairs and carry out future repairs subject to the forfeit of a $3-million bond.
The Paradox Canyon rancher whom I came to visit is philosophical about the wall. The assault on his land began at the end of Trump I and, after a Biden-era pause, has resumed at full strength. The “shock and awe” accompanying Trump’s resumption of office, he says, left no room for negotiating a more sensible path forward. He believes that the symbolism of the wall is its real power, as it channels the fears of the MAGA faithful. The wall, he says, stands for more than shutting out migrants and narcos. It stands for shutting out other complex things, possibly complexity itself. It represents Trump’s promise to his base that their worldview will be fulfilled.
Making War at Home and Abroad
My rancher friend feels that his present task is to weather the storm of wall building and await a time when wiser heads prevail, when the rush to spend and build might yield to thoughtful redesign, when gaps for wildlife might be installed and properly monitored, and when the wall’s proponents and its enemies might find a “third path.”
Meanwhile, the excavators, scrapers, bulldozers, and haulers carry on. From concertina wire to counter-functional buoys, from mountain blasting to free-wheeling billion-dollar contracts, the mindset behind the wall is the same as that which spawned the Iran war. Both are exercises in unchecked power. Both were conceived with disdain for the complexities of the real world. Both serve rhetorical as much as tangible purposes.
The war with Iran has confounded Trump’s expectation of a quick victory. Thousands of gravestones will be its monument. The Border Wall, in its own slow way, will provide another sort of monument. It won’t be the graves of those who died crossing it or flanking it by sea, for they will rarely be marked at all. And it won’t be the local extinctions of plants or animals, for they will simply vanish. It will instead be a tottering, linear, soulless version of Stonehenge—think of it as America’s Steelhenge—built on sand and made of haste, fear, and avarice.
It will memorialize Trump’s success in making America less and less great.
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Venezuela Buys Time to Rebuild While Under Siege
The current fraught détente with Washington is a window of opportunity to recover an economy operating at roughly 30% of its pre-sanctions level.
May 03, 2026
Although progressives are rightly concerned about US-coerced compromises and concessions, it is equally important to understand the resilience and continuing successes of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. Focusing only on the half-empty aspect of the proverbial glass obscures the strength of the resistance and conceals the vulnerabilities of the imperial juggernaut.
On a delegation to Venezuela, the constant refrain from both high-ranking government officials and grassroots Chavistas—supporters of the movement led by former President Hugo Chávez—was that they were urgently “buying time.”
A quarter-century of US hybrid war on Venezuela, especially the unilateral coercive measures (sanctions), has had a corrosive effect. The current fraught détente with Washington is a window of opportunity to recover an economy operating at roughly 30% of its pre-sanctions level.
President Maduro’s kidnapping
The kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores by US special forces on January 3 was “the one scenario we didn’t expect,” according to former Venezuelan Deputy Foreign minister Carlos Ron.
The kidnapping was a military success for the US. But politically Washington had no viable alternative to the Chavistas retaining power.
Abducting a lawful head of state—an egregious violation of international law—is not, however, unprecedented. In 2004, the US flew Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the Central African Republic in what Washington claimed was a voluntary decision, but which Aristide called a kidnapping. In 1990, following a bloody invasion, the US extradited Panama’s Manuel Noriega.
Leading up to January 3, Washington had incrementally tightened its stranglehold over Venezuela. Initial sanctions imposed in 2015 evolved from targeted measures to broad sectoral restrictions, especially on oil and finance. “Secondary sanctions” followed, penalizing non-US actors engaged with Venezuela. By December an outright military “total and complete blockade” piratically seized oil tankers.
US President Donald Trump also designated the so-called Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization, allegedly headed by Maduro. A $25-million bounty on Maduro under former US President Joe Biden was doubled in August. The following month, the US commenced extrajudicial murders of alleged drug runners in small boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. By October, Trump suspended all communication with the Maduro government.
Resilience and Continuity
Despite post-kidnapping concessions, it is instructive to consider what hasn’t happened. The political leadership did not splinter, and the country did not descend into chaos. The US-directed fate of Libya in 2011 was not to be repeated in Venezuela.
Venezuela maintained constitutional continuity. Shortly after the strike, then Vice President Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as acting president. Other top leaders—National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez, Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López—remained in place and unified. The civic-military unity held fast.
Under intense US pressure, high-ranking militants have been replaced. Padrino, who was swapped for Gustavo González López, another committed Chavista, remains influential in his new cabinet position heading the critical agricultural ministry. In this whack-a-mole scenario, the major exception to the government’s strategy of yielding in form to US pressure but maintaining a Chavista essence is the new Vice Foreign Minister for North America and Europe, Oliver Blanco, who is from the opposition.
Another triumph is that a highly divided population did not erupt into civil conflict. Instead, the attack produced a rally-around-the-flag effect, with some moderate opposition figures showing a new openness to the ruling party.
Nor was Noble Prize winner and far-rightist María Corina Machado imposed as president. She had signaled that if she took power there would be a retaliatory bloodbath against Chavistas. Meanwhile, the US effectively abandoned the bogus claim that Maduro headed the Cartel de los Soles.
Diplomatic Thaw and Economic Openings
On March 7, Washington formally recognized the Venezuelan government led by Rodríguez, marking a reversal of its policy since 2019. Trump even informally referred to her as “president-elect,” though the return of Maduro from US imprisonment as the rightful chief remains Venezuela’s national priority. On April 27, the US modified sanctions to allow the Venezuelan government to pay Maduro’s defense lawyers.
Financial easing is proceeding. In the late 1990s-early 2000s, the US bought more than half of Venezuela’s oil exports. Oil sales have again resumed under a highly restructured and controlled system, while the US has also taken steps to shield Venezuelan state assets from creditor seizure. The Rodríguez government is in the process of regaining control of Citgo Petroleum, the “crown jewel” of Venezuela's foreign assets, which the US had seized.
What has been achieved is not a lifting of sanctions, but a controlled reentry into international finance under US licensing and oversight.
Washington has authorized transactions with Venezuela’s central bank and major state banks, reversing the 2019 measures that had effectively cut them off from the global financial system. This policy change allows dollar-denominated transactions and access to US financial channels.
For the first time in years, Venezuela’s core financial institutions can operate in international banking channels. What makes this significant is that it allows oil revenues from US transactions to enter the domestic economy. That in turn helps stabilize liquidity, reducing the need for monetary expansion that had fueled inflation.
On April 16, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) resumed engagement with Venezuela. Previously, the US-dominated IMF had cut Venezuela off from its $5-million “special drawing rights” (SDR). Rodríguez said she will only access its rightful SDR account to be used for social programs and not apply for loans.
Still, the core US sanctions framework remains in place, with most transactions subject to case-by-case authorization. Full unrestricted access to global capital markets has not been restored. What has been achieved is not a lifting of sanctions, but a controlled reentry into international finance under US licensing and oversight.
Prospects
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) continues its consecutive 20-quarter expansion. New and long-considered legislative reforms for hydrocarbons and minerals encourage needed foreign investment vital for economic recovery. Although the changes involved some bitter pills, the rationale is that it is better to compromise than to keep these resources in the ground where they generate no income.
Rodríguez lauded a new amnesty law, creating a “new historical moment… of national reunification.” The long-polarized Venezuelan people yearn for domestic tranquility, according to Jesús Rodríguez-Espinoza, editor of the Caracas-based Orinoco Tribune.
Venezuela has so far escaped the severity of the economic strangulation that Cuba is now suffering or the military pummeling on the scale of Iran. The US-Israeli war in the Middle East may even be creating a temporary opening for Venezuela, as Trump needs the prospect of freely available Venezuelan oil to help calm jittery oil markets.
Trump may have also calculated that engagement with the Chavistas offered greater strategic benefits than assassination or a large-scale invasion, while using the kidnapping to placate domestic hawks pushing for full regime change. Significantly for US imperial objectives, Venezuela’s connections with other counter-hegemonic countries were curtailed.
Washington’s strategy since January 3 has focused on Venezuela’s stabilization and economic recovery. Their deferred third phase, “political transition,” is another word for regime change. Rodríguez has made clear that “free and fair” elections can be held only if the blackmail of US sanctions is removed. Thousands marched in a national “Pilgrimage for a Venezuela Without Sanctions and Peace.”
The kidnapping was a military success for the US. But politically Washington had no viable alternative to the Chavistas retaining power, given their strength, according to former Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Areaza. The only other option for the invader was to face a Vietnam-style guerilla war. The Bolivarian Revolution has persisted and is still fighting. On balance, the glass is decisively more than half full.
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