Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves on Earth — roughly 300 billion barrels, more than Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Russia. It also sits just over two thousand miles from the Gulf of Mexico, close enough for Houston refineries to smell the profits.
When Trump officials say the operations are about “narcotics” or “human rights,” it’s theater for the cameras. You don’t send B-52s—each capable of carrying 70,000 pounds of ordnance—to sink drug boats. You send them to show ownership, to remind the hemisphere that the oil under Venezuela’s soil still glows like a beacon for American energy interests.
From Reagan’s Contra escapades to Bush’s Iraq invasion, the justification always mutates—freedom, democracy, anti-terrorism, anti-drugs—but the extraction pipeline remains the spinal cord.
Venezuela’s Orinoco Belt contains heavy crude, perfectly suited for U.S. Gulf refineries that once thrived on similar blends. When sanctions cut off imports, it wasn’t morality that hurt—it was Chevron’s quarterly reports.
Now, with Trump openly authorizing CIA operations and drawing up strike options, this looks like Iraq with palm trees, a regime-change fantasy wrapped in anti-Maduro rhetoric. It’s not that Maduro isn’t a tyrant—he is—but tyrants with oil always seem to get the extra attention.
Trump’s political calculus is just as oily. Facing economic stagnation and the stench of corruption scandals, nothing refuels a flagging presidency like the sight of bombers on the horizon. Venezuela becomes both a distraction and a drill—a test of how far he can go before someone says “enough.”
Every Pentagon denial of “operational matters” just confirms what’s really operational:
Power projection for resource control.
It isn’t about democracy, or cocaine routes, or even Nicolás Maduro’s mustache.
It’s about the black bloodstream of capitalism, pulsing under
Venezuelan soil, and a president who’s never seen a barrel of oil he didn’t want to slap his name on.
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Trump is every bit as much of a lowlife piece of shit as Maduro. The US might want to cool it with the “dictator” shit until something is done to rectify that situation.
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/10/16/venezuela-maria-corina-machado-privatize-oil-us-corporations/