A Criminal Empire

Edited by Sam Thielman

AFTER TWO FAILED U.S. COUPS in Venezuela over 25 years, the first under George W. Bush and the second during Donald Trump's first presidency, the U.S. military kidnapped Nicolas Maduro in the predawn hours of Saturday in an unambiguous act of aggression that the Trump administration made clear it considers a demonstration effect. 

I got a flu shot and a COVID booster yesterday, so I woke up around 4:30am feeling feverish. I looked at my phone and saw notifications of the Maduro kidnapping and related explosions in Caracas. As I awaited Trump's press conference in Mar-a-Lago, I suspected that he would announce a warning to the Venezuelan military to permit the allies of U.S.-aligned Maria Corina Machado to take power while the United States began a demobilization in the Caribbean. That would represent continuity with a longstanding impulse within right-wing foreign policy for U.S. military destabilization without the burdens of occupation, as Donald Rumsfeld had originally wanted for Iraq, thereby permitting Trump's longstanding charade as a man of peace to continue.

I was very wrong about that. Trump instead announced that the U.S. will govern Venezuela itself for the foreseeable future.

"We'll make sure it's run properly," Trump said, and by "properly," he has an extractive meaning in mind. "The oil companies will go in, spend billions of dollars [and] fix the badly broken oil infrastructure." The American "armada remains in position," he continued, and will remain "until all American demands are fully satisfied." Rarely in the era of mass media has U.S. imperialism been as unsubtle or as blatant, defying the impulses of foreign-policy experts to overcomplicate what is unfolding before our eyes. 

When asked if Trump was heralding a sustained U.S. military presence in Venezuela, he shrugged: "We're not afraid of boots on the ground. We don't mind saying it… We're gonna run the country right." At one point, he spoke of "the next period of a year" as a vague timeframe, but it could have been extemporization rather than policy. 

Asked who will run Venezuela, Trump gestured to his cabinet officials behind him—Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, CIA Director John Radcliffe and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. Welcome back to the Coalition Provisional Authority. 

I was surprised to hear Trump speak of Machado dismissively, saying he hadn't spoken to her—enjoy that consent-manufacturing Nobel as a consolation prize, ma'am—but not to hear him tell Maduro's vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, that she "doesn't really have a choice" in doing the bidding of what appears to be a Rubio-led and oil company-manned American authority. 

This is a fluid situation of destabilization and I don't want to pretend otherwise. But it is anything but "unprecedented," a word I heard the Trump team and CNN pundits use repeatedly. The War on Terror is not the only history guiding this criminal act—Greg Grandin and others can articulate the history of U.S. imperialism in Latin and South America—but its fingerprints are undeniable. Trump and Rubio, as they have for months, kept calling socialist Venezuela a "terrorist" state, recognizing the habituation of American political culture to defer to operations draped in the costume of counterterrorism. Caine, briefing the press on the operational elements of the kidnapping, referred to the experience of U.S. capture operations in the War on Terror in preparing the Delta Force and FBI team that seized Maduro. Trump repeatedly promised that the occupation of Venezuela would pay for itself via oil revenue. That was exactly what the Bush administration said about Iraq. 

We are in a period of shock before the Venezuelan military decides on a response. That is a vacuum that will be filled by American triumphalism. I listened to CNN talking heads praise the spectacular tactical success of the kidnapping, as if the U.S.' military capability was the relevant issue. They spoke of a restoration of democracy, by which they meant capitalism, if they knew what they meant at all. Then Trump said the U.S. would run the country directly. Once again, journalists attempt to clothe an emperor who's fine with letting it flop around for everyone to see. 

But to put it mildly, a lot of relevant history from U.S. military fiascoes over the past 25 years (to say nothing of local and regional history) suggests that resistance will coalesce. Machado and her allies over the past four months have had to walk a line distancing themselves from foreign sponsorship. Now that Trump has announced without euphemism a conquest of Venezuela predicated on extracting its oil wealth for the benefit of the United States, resistance to it is to be expected. The U.S. has, once again, entered the Fuck Around phase and, once again, expects it to be eternal. 

Trump whistled past the graveyard when he said that the U.S. military was prepared for "a second wave, a much bigger wave" of attacks should Venezuela not meekly submit. While Trump has decapitated the regime and declared its replacement, he has not destroyed the regime, and instead warned that "what happened to Maduro can happen to them," should they not cooperate. He might as well have told the Venezuelans to bring 'em on. Marco Rubio has gotten what he and the Cuban exile reactionary community has long wanted, and now what comes next is on them. After a very long period of pretense, there is clearly no distinction between America First and neoconservatism. REIGN OF TERROR, frankly, has been vindicated yet again. 

We have entered an even more dangerous period of American imperialism than many suspected. While most National Security Strategies end up bearing little resemblance to the contingencies that hegemony exposes itself to, the recent one's promise to reinforce Latin and South America as a U.S. sphere of extractive influence has been borne out. But its effects are unlikely to remain in one place. Trump, Rubio and Hegseth spoke about the warnings the kidnapping of Maduro represents to other U.S. adversaries. "Maduro had his chance," Hegseth said, "just like Iran had its chance."

RECENTLY I READ a 1975 book about the oil industry called The Seven Sisters: The Great Oil Companies And The World They Shaped, by British journalist Anthony Sampson. It's a valuable history for, among other reasons, the way Sampson presents the history of American companies claiming, as Trump did today, that they built foreign oil infrastructure and accordingly own it. It's nothing but another way to normalize resource theft.