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regime change
Venezuela’s Oil, US-led Regime Change, and America’s Gangster Politics
The flimsy moral pretext today is the fight against narcotics, yet the real objective is to overthrow a sovereign government, and the collateral damage is the suffering of the Venezuelan people. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is.
Nov 04, 2025
The United States is dusting off its old regime-change playbook in Venezuela. Although the slogan has shifted from “restoring democracy” to “fighting narco-terrorists,” the objective remains the same, which is control of Venezuela’s oil. The methods followed by the US are familiar: sanctions that strangle the economy, threats of force, and a $50 million bounty on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as if this were the Wild West.
The US is addicted to war. With the renaming of the Department of War, a proposed Pentagon budget of $1.01 trillion, and more than 750 military bases across some 80 countries, this is not a nation pursuing peace. For the past two decades, Venezuela has been a persistent target of US regime change. The motive, which is clearly laid out by President Donald Trump, is the roughly 300 billion barrels of oil reserves beneath the Orinoco belt, the largest petroleum reserves on the planet.
In 2023, Trump openly stated: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil… but now we're buying oil from Venezuela, so we're making a dictator very rich.” His words reveal the underlying logic of US foreign policy that has an utter disregard for sovereignty and instead favors the grabbing of other country’s resources. .
What’s underway today is a typical US-led regime-change operation dressed up in the language of anti-drug interdiction. The US has amassed thousands of troops, warships, and aircraft in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. The president has boastfully authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations inside Venezuela.
The calls by the US government for escalation reflect a reckless disregard for Venezuela’s sovereignty, international law, and human life.
On October 26, 2025, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) went on national television to defend recent US military strikes on Venezuelan vessels and to say land strikes inside Venezuela and Colombia are a “real possibility.” Florida Sen. Rick Scott, in the same news cycle, mused that if he were Nicolás Maduro he’d “head to Russia or China right now.” These senators aim to normalize the idea that Washington decides who governs Venezuela and what happens to its oil. Remember that Graham similarly champions the US fighting Russia in Ukraine to secure the $10 trillion of mineral wealth that Graham fatuously claims are available for the US to grab.
Nor are Trump’s moves a new story vis-à-vis Venezuela. For more than 20 years, successive US administrations have tried to submit Venezuela’s internal politics to Washington’s will. In April 2002, a short-lived military coup briefly ousted then-President Hugo Chávez. The CIA knew the details of the coup in advance, and the US immediately recognized the new government. In the end, Chávez retook power. Yet the US did not end its support for regime change.
In March 2015, Barack Obama codified a remarkable legal fiction. Obama signed Executive Order 13692, declaring Venezuela’s internal political situation an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security to trigger US economic sanctions. That move set the stage for escalating coercion by the US. The White House has maintained that claim of a US “national emergency” ever since. Trump added increasingly draconian economic sanctions during his first term. Astoundingly, in January 2019, Trump declared Juan Guaidó, then an opposition figure, to be Venezuela’s “interim president,” as if Trump could simply name a new Venezuelan president. This tragicomedy of the US eventually fell to pieces in 2023, when the US dropped this failed and ludicrous gambit.
The US is now starting a new chapter of resource grabbing. Trump has long been vocal about “keeping the oil.” In 2019, when discussing Syria, President Trump said “We are keeping the oil, we have the oil, the oil is secure, we left troops behind only for the oil.” To those in doubt, US troops are still in the northeast of Syria today, occupying the oil fields. Earlier in 2016, on Iraq’s oil, Trump said, “I was saying this constantly and consistently to whoever would listen, I said keep the oil, keep the oil, keep the oil, don’t let somebody else get it.”
Now, with fresh military strikes on Venezuela vessels and open talk of land attacks, the administration is invoking narcotics to justify regime change. Yet Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter expressly prohibits “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” No US theory of “cartel wars” remotely justifies coercive regime change.
Even before the military strikes, US coercive sanctions have functioned as a siege engine. Obama built the sanctions framework in 2015, and Trump further weaponized it to topple Maduro. The claim was that “maximum pressure” would empower Venezuelans. In practice, the sanctions have caused widespread suffering. As economist and renowned sanctions expert Francisco Rodríguez found in his study of the “Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions,” the result of the coercive US measures has been a catastrophic decline in Venezuelan living standards, starkly worsening health and nutrition, and dire harm to vulnerable populations.
The flimsy moral pretext today is the fight against narcotics, yet the real objective is to overthrow a sovereign government, and the collateral damage is the suffering of the Venezuelan people. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The US has repeatedly undertaken regime-change operations in pursuit of oil, uranium, banana plantations, pipeline routes, and other resources: Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Congo (1960), Chile (1973), Iraq (2003), Haiti (2004), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and Ukraine (2014), just to name a few such cases. Now Venezuela is on the block.
In her brilliant book Covert Regime Change (2017), Professor Lindsay O’Rourke details the machinations, blowbacks, and disasters of no fewer than 64 US covert regime-change operations during the years 1947-1989! She focused on this earlier period because many key documents for that era have by now been declassified. Tragically, the pattern of a US foreign policy based on covert (and not-so-covert) regime-change operations continues to this day.
The calls by the US government for escalation reflect a reckless disregard for Venezuela’s sovereignty, international law, and human life. A war against Venezuela would be a war that Americans do not want, against a country that has not threatened or attacked the US, and on legal grounds that would fail a first-year law student. Bombing vessels, ports, refineries, or soldiers is not a show of strength. It is the epitome of gangsterism.
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Trump's Escalation Against Venezuela Continues as Hegseth Deploys Aircraft Carrier Strike Group to Latin American Waters
An aide to Brazil's president warned that a US regime change operation in Venezuela "could inflame South America and lead to radicalization of politics on the whole continent."
Oct 24, 2025
The Trump administration said Friday that it has ordered the Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group, which contains the largest warship in the world, to waters off the coast of Venezuela, marking another major military escalation after a new surge of extrajudicial boat bombings in the region this week.
"In support of the president’s directive to dismantle transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) and counter narco-terrorism in defense of the homeland, [Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth] has directed the Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group and embarked carrier air wing to the US Southern Command."
The announcement came shortly after the administration announced its 10th strike on what Hegseth claimed to be a drug-running boat, killing six people and bringing the death toll from the operations up to 43. As usual, the claim came with scant evidence.
The narrative that these boats have been transporting drugs to the US has been critically undermined in recent days after two of the alleged "narco-traffickers" who survived one of the Trump administration's strikes were released back to their home countries: One of the survivors, an Ecuadoran man, was set free shortly after returning to his country as officials stated there was no evidence to charge him.
In several other cases, the relatives or home governments of those killed in these bombings have contested that they were not drug smugglers but fishermen.
The strikes have been met with increasing criticism in recent days, not just from Democrats, but from Republican lawmakers—including Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska)—who co-introduced a war powers resolution last week to require congressional input before carrying out acts of war against Venezuela.
A group of former national security officials—including Rear Adm. Bill Baumgartner of the Coast Guard and Retired Navy Rear Adm. Michael Smith—meanwhile issued a statement on Thursday condemning the strikes as "illegal" and "ineffective."
The International Crisis Group, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to preventing armed conflict, warned Thursday that "what began purportedly as a campaign to stop illicit drugs from getting to US shores looks increasingly like an attempt to force Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his allies from power."
According to several reports, Caracas has allegedly floated proposals that would allow the US to take a dominant stake in Venezuela's oil and mineral wealth.
President Donald Trump's deployment of the Ford strike group, which is currently en route from the Mediterranean Sea, notably comes shortly after the president threatened to begin carrying out strikes on the Venezuelan mainland without seeking authorization from Congress, which led dozens of elected officials throughout Latin America to issue a letter denouncing military aggression in the region.
"The Trump administration is planning to lead a new 'War on Drugs,'" the leaders warned. "That war may start with regime change in Venezuela, but we know that it will not end there. Already, the US is threatening illegal drone strikes on Mexican soil in the name of its 'national security.' If we do not stand for peace now, we risk a new wave of armed interventions across the region, unleashing a humanitarian crisis of unimaginable scale in all of our home countries."
Celso Amorim, an aide to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, said on Friday, following the announcement of the ship's deployment, that "we cannot accept an outside intervention because it will trigger immense resentment," adding that it "could inflame South America and lead to radicalization of politics on the whole continent."
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Trump's Venezuela Boat Strikes Are War Crimes, So Where’s The Media?
Why hasn’t the mainstream media pressed the administration on these strikes being illegal and dangerous (and unpopular)?
Sep 16, 2025
On September 2, the Trump administration shared footage purporting to show a US strike on a Venezuelan fishing boat. Even if we take the incident entirely at face value (and there are a lot of reasons to question the video itself)—the US Navy attacked a fishing boat off Venezuela, killing 11 people. On Monday, another strike was allegedly conducted on a boat, killing three people. The way the media has handled these strikes is an indictment of the state of American neoliberal reporting in a neofascist age.
Why hasn’t the mainstream media pressed the administration on these strikes being illegal and dangerous (and unpopular)? Why has no one in Washington considered the implications of calling a fishing boat carrying civilians a legitimate military target? Why isn’t the media calling the Venezuelan boat strike an abhorrent war crime at every turn?
It’s simple; they don’t care about defending the truth or holding the powerful accountable–they have no principles to stand on besides profit and access.
Within hours of these strikes breaking, major outlets were repeating the Trump administration’s line that this was a strike on a “drug boat.” According to this framing, the attacks were justified, necessary, and part of a broader war on drug trafficking. Virtually none of these outlets even entertained the obvious legal and ethical questions. Instead, they served as stenographers for the administration. This is not what an objective (not neutral) press in an advanced democracy does.
Would the Marines be greeted as liberators in Caracas?
This is reminiscent of the Iraq War era, when corporate media parroted the Bush administration’s ludicrous arguments, paving the way for invasion and occupation that would kill at least 200,000, maim millions, and destroy American democracy further.
Legal experts across the spectrum have already stood up to say the killings were illegal. Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University’s conservative Antonin Scalia Law School, called the strike “unjust and illegal.” Jeremy Wildeman, an adjunct professor of international Affairs at Carleton University and fellow at the Human Rights Research and Education Centre in Ottawa, described it as “part of the dangerous and ongoing erosion of due process and the very basic principles of how we interact with each other in domestic and foreign affairs, regulated by accepted norms, rules, and laws, that the Trump administration has been pointedly hostile toward following and specifically undermining.”
Wildeman added that “this is definitely about regime change and domination.” Even the Atlantic Council hedged, acknowledging that the legality was at best murky and in some cases advancing arguments to justify it. Meanwhile, US Vice President JD Vance bluntly stated that he does not care if the strikes are war crimes at all.
The available evidence does suggest this was an outright criminal massacre. The first boat was, we now know thanks to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), turning back to shore, not threatening US forces when it was fired upon. Those killed would be civilians. Even if they were transporting drugs, drug couriers are not lawful combatants. They are criminals under domestic law, not combatants in an armed conflict.
Due process was ignored. There was no trial, no arrest, no attempt at interdiction—just summary execution. And the strikes occurred in Venezuelan territorial waters, not in an international conflict zone. If another country did this, say Russia bombing a fishing boat in the Baltic, or China attacking smugglers near Taiwan, the Western media would have declared it a war crime the same day. Add this to the list of Western double standards in the international arena—we are seeing the destruction of the “liberal order” in real time.
These strikes are not a one-off. They fit into decades of US policy toward Venezuela, including economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and repeated regime change attempts. For 25 years, Washington has tried to topple the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro through economic sabotage, coups, and support for far-right opposition. The humanitarian toll of those sanctions has been devastating. They have themselves emboldened the repression brought about by the Maduro government, which has used America as a scapegoat, with reason, for all its faults.
Now, with this attack, we see a dangerous escalation from economic to military means. If the precedent is set that the US can strike targets inside Venezuela (this was in Venezuela’s national waters) with impunity, it opens the door to a broader military campaign. That is exactly what think tanks like the Center for Strategic and International Studies have been preparing for. One CSIS report, now deleted, explicitly laid out “options for regime change” in Venezuela, against the “Maduro narco-terrorist regime.”
So why is the media so unwilling to call this what it is? Major outlets fear losing access to government sources if they challenge the official narrative. They also simply don’t want to admit that America is committing crimes, and may not be the moral actors in every major geopolitical event, as they were taught throughout their lives. Going back to Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent 101, corporate interests are also important, with companies like Exxon and Chevron having billions at stake in Venezuela’s oil fields (and a US-backed government running things in Caracas). US military action that destabilizes or topples Maduro could directly benefit those firms.
Many of the analysts quoted in media coverage are from think tanks funded by the defense industry or oil companies. They have an interest in exaggerating Venezuela’s threat and downplaying US abuses, to make the US intervention seem justified and good. And reporters too often repackage leaks from US intelligence agencies as fact, without independently verifying. A lot of the “analysis” on the strikes in mainstream news has been from the intelligence agencies, who have a direct incentive to lie and manipulate information in favor of regime change.
Even respected outlets have contributed to this dynamic. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal have both amplified the claim that Venezuela is a “narco-terrorist state.” That claim has been debunked by organizations like InSight Crime and the International Crisis Group, which show that while drugs transit Venezuela, it is hardly unique; Colombia and Mexico play a much larger role in global cocaine markets, yet they remain US allies.
Meanwhile, outlets like the Christian Science Monitor are pushing a narrative that “more Latin Americans welcome US intervention,” based on flimsy and cherry-picked anecdotes that, once again, helps the Trump administration lay the groundwork for more meddling and war. Would the Marines be greeted as liberators in Caracas? The hope is to expand the “War on Drugs” into the “War on Terror,” giving the US military more tools to intervene in Latin America, and then bringing repression to the home front (also called the Imperial Boomerang theory). In reality, the region is increasingly turning away from Washington’s militaristic and blusterous approach, seeking alternative frameworks to the failed War on Drugs.
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