{"id":306936,"date":"2025-11-10T12:01:35","date_gmt":"2025-11-10T12:01:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=306936"},"modified":"2025-11-07T06:27:57","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T06:27:57","slug":"venezuelas-oil-us-led-regime-change-and-washingtons-gangster-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/11\/venezuelas-oil-us-led-regime-change-and-washingtons-gangster-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"Venezuela\u2019s Oil, US-led Regime Change, and Washington\u2019s Gangster Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Pics from US military video shows a purported Tren de Aragua \u201cdrug-carrying\u201d boat being tracked and hit by a US missile.\u00a0 Pressenza<\/p><\/div>\n

4 Nov 2025 – <\/em>The\u00a0United States<\/a>\u00a0is dusting off its old regime-change playbook in\u00a0Venezuela<\/a>. Although the slogan has shifted from \u201crestoring democracy\u201d to \u201cfighting narco-terrorists,\u201d the objective remains the same, which is control of Venezuela\u2019s\u00a0oil<\/a>. The methods followed by the US are familiar:\u00a0sanctions<\/a>\u00a0that strangle the economy, threats of force, and a $50 million bounty on Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro as if this were the Wild West.<\/p>\n

The US is addicted to war. With the renaming of the Department of War, a proposed\u00a0Pentagon<\/a>\u00a0budget<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0$1.01 trillion<\/a>, 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\u00a0Donald Trump<\/a>, is the roughly 300 billion barrels of oil reserves beneath the Orinoco belt, the largest petroleum reserves on the planet.<\/p>\n

In 2023, Trump\u00a0openly stated<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cWhen I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil\u2026 but now we\u2019re buying oil from Venezuela, so we\u2019re making a dictator very rich.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0His words reveal the underlying logic of US foreign policy that has an utter disregard for sovereignty and instead favors the grabbing of other country\u2019s resources.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s underway today is a typical US-led regime-change operation dressed up in the language of anti-drug interdiction. The US has amassed\u00a0thousands of troops<\/a>, warships, and aircraft in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. The president has boastfully\u00a0authorized the CIA<\/a>\u00a0to conduct covert operations inside Venezuela.<\/p>\n

On October 26, 2025,\u00a0Sen. Lindsey Graham<\/a>\u00a0(R-S.C.) went on national television to defend recent\u00a0US military<\/a>\u00a0strikes on Venezuelan vessels and to say land strikes inside Venezuela and\u00a0Colombia<\/a>\u00a0are a \u201creal possibility.\u201d\u00a0Florida<\/a>\u00a0Sen. Rick Scott<\/a>, in the same news cycle, mused that if he were Nicol\u00e1s Maduro he\u2019d \u201chead to\u00a0Russia<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0China<\/a>\u00a0right now.\u201d These senators aim to normalize the idea that\u00a0Washington<\/a>\u00a0decides who governs Venezuela and what happens to its oil. Remember that Graham similarly champions the US fighting Russia in\u00a0Ukraine<\/a>\u00a0to secure the $10 trillion of mineral wealth that Graham fatuously claims are available for the US to grab.<\/p>\n

Nor are Trump\u2019s moves a new story vis-\u00e0-vis Venezuela. For more than 20 years, successive US administrations have tried to submit Venezuela\u2019s internal politics to Washington\u2019s will. In April 2002, a short-lived military coup briefly ousted then-President Hugo Ch\u00e1vez. The\u00a0CIA<\/a>\u00a0knew the details of the coup in advance, and the US immediately recognized the new government. In the end, Ch\u00e1vez retook power. Yet the US did not end its support for regime change.<\/p>\n

In March 2015,\u00a0Barack Obama<\/a>\u00a0codified a remarkable legal fiction. Obama signed\u00a0Executive Order 13692<\/a>, declaring Venezuela\u2019s internal political situation an \u201cunusual and extraordinary threat\u201d to US national security to trigger US economic sanctions. That move set the stage for escalating coercion by the US. The\u00a0White House<\/a>\u00a0has maintained that claim of a US \u201cnational emergency\u201d ever since. Trump added increasingly draconian economic sanctions during his first term. Astoundingly, in January 2019, Trump declared Juan Guaid\u00f3, then an opposition figure, to be Venezuela\u2019s \u201cinterim president,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The US is now starting a new chapter of resource grabbing. Trump has long been vocal about \u201ckeeping the oil.\u201d In 2019, when\u00a0discussing Syria<\/a>, President Trump said \u201cWe are keeping the oil, we have the oil, the oil is secure, we left troops behind only for the oil.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0To those in doubt, US troops are still in the northeast of\u00a0Syria<\/a>\u00a0today, occupying the oil fields. Earlier in 2016, on\u00a0Iraq\u2019s oil<\/a>, Trump said, \u201cI was saying this constantly and consistently to whoever would listen, I said keep the oil, keep the oil, keep the oil, don\u2019t let somebody else get it<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, with fresh military strikes on Venezuela vessels and open talk of land attacks, the administration is invoking narcotics to justify regime change. Yet\u00a0Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter<\/a>\u00a0expressly prohibits \u201cthe threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state<\/em>.\u201d No US theory of \u201ccartel wars\u201d remotely justifies coercive regime change.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cmaximum pressure\u201d would empower Venezuelans. In practice, the sanctions have caused widespread suffering. As economist and renowned sanctions expert\u00a0Francisco Rodr\u00edguez<\/a>\u00a0found in his study of the \u201cHuman Consequences of Economic Sanctions,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s because it is. The US has repeatedly undertaken regime-change operations in pursuit of oil, uranium, banana plantations, pipeline routes, and other resources:\u00a0Iran<\/a>\u00a0(1953),\u00a0Guatemala<\/a>\u00a0(1954), Congo (1960),\u00a0Chile<\/a>\u00a0(1973),\u00a0Iraq<\/a>\u00a0(2003),\u00a0Haiti<\/a>\u00a0(2004), Syria (2011),\u00a0Libya<\/a>\u00a0(2011), and Ukraine (2014), just to name a few such cases. Now Venezuela is on the block.<\/p>\n

In her brilliant book\u00a0Covert Regime Change<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(2017), Professor Lindsay O\u2019Rourke 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.<\/p>\n

The calls by the US government for escalation reflect a reckless disregard for Venezuela\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is Director of Columbia\u2019s Center for Sustainable Development and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has served as Special Adviser to three UN Secretaries-General [Kofi Annan (2001-7), Ban Ki-moon (2008-16), and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Ant\u00f3nio Guterres. His books include <\/em>The End of Poverty<\/a>, Common Wealth<\/a>, The Age of Sustainable Development<\/a>, Building the New American Economy<\/a>, and most recently,<\/em> A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism<\/a>. Sachs was also an advisor to the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as to the first president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \u00a0Sybil Fares is a specialist and advisor in Middle East policy and sustainable development at SDSN.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

4 Nov 2025 – The\u00a0US\u00a0is dusting off its old regime-change playbook in\u00a0Venezuela. The slogan shifted from \u201crestoring democracy\u201d to \u201cfighting narco-terrorists,\u201d but the objective is the same: control of Venezuela\u2019s\u00a0oil. The methods are familiar:\u00a0sanctions, threats of force–and a $50 million bounty on Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro as if this were the Wild West, the epitome of gangsterism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":229079,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,3143,2642,1441,417,1065,541,559,1624,1190,880,249,70,557],"class_list":["post-306936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-anti-hegemony","tag-anti-imperialism","tag-big-oil","tag-bullying","tag-chavismo","tag-latin-america-caribbean","tag-maduro","tag-mafia","tag-regime-change","tag-state-terrorism","tag-trump","tag-usa","tag-venezuela"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306936"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":306941,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306936\/revisions\/306941"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/229079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}