Empire of Extortion
The abduction of Venezuela’s president and the plunder of its oil signal a new and dangerous phase in U.S. foreign policy.
Alberto Toscano
The high-tech kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores on January 3, under the pretext of their indictment for narco-terrorism in the Southern District of New York, was quickly revealed to be the opening gambit in President Donald Trump’s brazen bid to seize Venezuela’s oil and control the country for the foreseeable future. Trump and his cronies have long claimed that the nationalization of the Venezuelan oil industry in 1976, and the further expropriation of oil company assets in 2007 under Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, amounted to a theft of U.S. property. According to this narrative, Venezuela’s subsoil resources is “our oil” because U.S. corporations like Chevron initially built and managed the oil infrastructure.
As Vice President JD Vance put it, “Are we just supposed to allow a communist to steal our stuff in our hemisphere and do nothing?”
After his December 2025 declaration that “We want it back,” Trump is now devoting the power of the U.S. war machine and undetermined federal funds to achieve this reality. This resource imperialism is dressed-up as reparations — in Trump’s words, “reimbursement for the damages caused to us by that country.” Trump and his cabinet are celebrating this neocolonial venture with unalloyed glee, making no real effort to adorn it in the language of law or democracy. Instead of flinching from the Iraq War comparison, Trump proudly spelled out the crucial difference: “We’re going to keep the oil.” Interviewed by Fox News’ Jesse Watters, Vance warned Venezuelans that they would only be allowed to sell their oil “so long as you serve America’s national interests.”
As University of Chicago political science professor Robert Pape put it, this is “Imperialism 101,” a vision of “America as predator.”
The precise mechanisms for this revamping of gunboat diplomacy — remotely running a country through the constant threat of blockade and assault — remain sketchy. Given that getting the “money coming out of the ground” is his priority, Trump has opted to dump the sycophantic leader of the anti-Maduro opposition and pro-invasion Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado, and instead retain the decapitated Venezuelan state apparatus, treating its interim President Delcy Rodríguez as a hostage of sorts.
There has been much as yet inconclusive speculation about internal collusion in Maduro’s downfall, but this paradoxical arrangement — using an openly anti-imperialist government to maintain stability in a country being subjected to a crass experiment in resource imperialism — seems inherently unstable. Speaking to journalists after a briefing on Venezuela, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said Trump’s “insane plan” boils down to “stealing the Venezuelan oil at gun point for a period of time undefined as leverage to micromanage the country.”
In an unprecedented move, the revenue for Venezuelan oil sales will be held in offshore accounts under the control of Trump, rather than the Treasury or Congress — an arrangement Democrats describe as a “slush fund” the president can use at his discretion.
Less than a week after the raid, Trump hosted a White House roundtable with oil company executives. While more than happy to further their business interests through what Trump called “one of the most precise attacks on sovereignty,” some executives voiced skepticism about the takeover’s financial viability, with ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods arguing that Venezuela would remain “uninvestable” without a root-and-branch change to its “legal and commercial” frameworks — in other words, a neoliberal upending of the legacy of Chavismo.
However, it’s not just Venezuelan governance that troubles fossil capital, but also U.S. administrative power. As one anonymous executive told the Financial Times, “No one wants to go in there when a random fucking tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country.”
A perhaps even greater limit to Trump’s dreams of plunder lies in the current predicament of the political economy of oil. Given the relative global oversupply and the low cost of crude, the vast capital expenditures required to upgrade Venezuelan infrastructure aren’t necessarily a wise or urgent investment, especially in light of regional volatility. As political economist Adam Hanieh told me, the more immediate aim is likely getting the United States to strongarm Venezuela into paying the billions in compensation awarded to companies like ExxonMobil or ConocoPhillips by international arbitration courts, whether through direct payment or asset transfers. (For now, Trump seems to have put the kibosh on this desire through an executive order that stops any private claims on Venezuelan oil revenues, even referring to ConocoPhillips’ $12 billion claim as a “write-off.”)
In the end, Hanieh explains, what is more significant for the Trump administration is not extracting Venezuelan oil as such but preventing others — namely, China — from doing so, and “bringing a key supply node within an American sphere of influence.”
That’s the core of what the administration is now calling the “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine (or the “Donroe Document”) announced in the November 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) memorandum, for which the Maduro raid and seizure of Venezuelan oil serve as proof of concept. That document set out the principle that “non-Hemispheric competitors” will be denied control over “strategically vital assets,” and that the United States will enlist “regional champions” to advance its national security interests in issues ranging from migration and drugs to natural resources.
The Trump administration has no shortage of subservient governments to call upon in Latin America and has not been shy — as the recent Honduran and Argentinian elections show — to put its thumb on the scale by threatening financial penury should its preferred far-right candidates lose. The NSS argues that the United States should not just rely on existing partners but “expand” to recruit new ones as well. But what the memo means by “partnership” is compelling these sovereign nations to make the United States its “partner of first choice,” while discouraging them from collaboration with other states, “through various means.”
After Maduro’s abduction, we know what hides behind that mafioso euphemism, and how hollow the NSS’s claimed “predisposition to non-interventionism” is.
In its new quest for hemispheric dominance, the Trump administration has reached back to the Monroe Doctrine in its most unilateral and belligerent version, as a talismanic reference to the unabashedly white supremacist 19th-century imperialism that is an enduring object of nostalgia for not just Trump but also his top aides Stephen Miller and Pete Hegseth. It is a “doctrine” that is treated as the ultranationalist warrant for the complete and utter repudiation of international law, in a world where there are no allies or equals, only vassals and foes.
The possessive declaration that “this is our hemisphere” entails, as historian Greg Grandin explains, the carving out of “an area of the globe where the U.S. need not persuade, integrate or universalize — only command, by fiat.” In other words, an assertion of dominance without any reciprocity or responsibility. Several other countries in the region — including Mexico, Colombia and Cuba—have already been threatened: Trump told Colombian President Gustavo Petro to “watch his ass,” while warning Cubans to “make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”
In his press conference following the abduction of Maduro, Trump spoke of the “iron laws” of global power that link securing energy resources to national security interests. And, in a typically shrill interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Stephen Miller reprised the expression, declaring, “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
Barely able to contain his euphoria at the raid’s display of American might, Miller also took the opportunity to reiterate the administration’s intention to realize another long-advertised plank of the “Trump corollary,” through the annexation of Greenland.
Pathetically unwilling to put up any even rhetorical resistance to Trump’s flagrant breach of international law in Venezuela — just as they have long colluded with Israel’s genocide in Gaza — European NATO members, with the sole exception of Spain, are now scrambling to respond to a possible invasion of the Danish-controlled territory. With their empty invocations of an international legal order they do nothing to uphold, these governments are defenseless in the face of the cynical cult of raw power that is the Trump administration’s substitute for foreign policy.
And, contrary to claims that Trumpism is embracing multipolarity or enduring “spheres of influence,” the NSS memo stresses “military overmatch” against China in the Indo-Pacific, while making vague allusions to Europe’s “strategic stability with Russia.” Meanwhile, its recipe for “European greatness” is openly reactionary and racist, as it warns of NATO members becoming “majority non-European” (read: non-white).
Kidnapping, murder, looting, invasion: These are the building blocks of the “Donroe” Doctrine. In its wish to make state violence directly profitable, it is also testament to the ultimate weakness of a hemispheric empire that is not built on development, collaboration or peace — or even on ordinary exploitation — but on naked extortion and plunder.
ALBERTO TOSCANO is the author of Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (Verso) and Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum (Seagull). He lives in Vancouver.
