There is a certain eerie familiarity to the Trump administration’s slow roll to war with Venezuela. There is the ominous military buildup, the shifting rationales, and even a shaky claim of “weapons of mass destruction,” thanks to the administration’s recent reclassification of fentanyl, to help justify its attacks.
The conflict with Venezuela will probably play out differently than the Iraq War did—perhaps better, perhaps worse. But the moral basis upon which it is being waged is most certainly worse.
The administration initially justified its campaign, which has already involved 28 known U.S. attacks against boats that officials have claimed were carrying illegal drugs, as a defensive war to stop the flow of drugs. “This mission defends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on X last month.
Given Venezuela’s slight role in the supply chain of illicit drugs to the United States, and President Donald Trump’s otherwise fairly lax approach to the narcotics trade—he has pardoned or granted clemency to more than 90 drug criminals across both terms—whispers began circulating recently that the true motive was pecuniary, that Trump was really interested in Venezuela’s oil. “This is a shakedown—a financial shakedown, being done primarily for profit,” one official told my colleagues Vivian Salama and Sarah Fitzpatrick last week.
This secret motive didn’t stay secret very long. Last week the president told reporters that the U.S. had seized a “very large” oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela “for a very good reason.” Asked what would happen to the oil, he responded: “I assume we’re going to keep the oil.” Trump then demanded this week that Venezuela pay for the oil assets the country had apparently stolen from the U.S. Speaking to reporters, he framed the conflict as retribution: “They took our oil rights. We have a lot of oil there. As you know, they threw our companies out, and we want it back.” Trump has ordered a naval “blockade” aimed at Venezuela’s oil industry.
Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller has tried to blend Trump’s mob-like account with the supposed ideals and concerns that initially motivated this campaign, writing on X: “American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.”
More than 20 years ago, George W. Bush’s critics accused him of going to war in Iraq for the oil. But President Bush made it plain that this was not his objective. At the outset of the conflict, he called Iraq’s oil wells “a source of wealth that belongs to the Iraqi people,” and he never turned them over to American hands.
Trump did not oppose the Iraq War at the time, but he did present himself as a critic after it went south. His most consistent reason for his opposition was that America had failed to seize Iraq’s oil, despite the fact that doing so would have been a war crime.
In his first term in office, Trump repeatedly expressed his regret that the U.S. failed to use its interventions in Iraq and Libya to seize their oil reserves, and tried to use American troops in Iraq and Syria for this purpose. But like many of his first-term impulses, this one was dismissed and deterred by his subordinates for being impossibly unrealistic, immoral, or criminal. Trump’s second term has seen many of the president’s once-unimaginable demands transformed into official policy.
The fact that Trump wants to seize Venezuela’s oil wealth does not mean it will happen. Nor does it mean that this is the administration’s sole motive. The Washington Post reports that Miller’s support for the war evolved out of a desire to attack drug cartels in Mexico, and he seems to believe that war will make it easier for him to declare Venezuelan migrants enemy combatants and deport them.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose thinking aligns with more traditional Republican foreign-policy goals, wants to depose Venezuela’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro. It is true that Maduro has crushed what remains of the country’s democracy and installed a kleptocratic leadership. But Trump’s plan to use war to seize Venezuelan wealth is incompatible with democratizing the country. Any Venezuelan government committed to transferring its national wealth to foreign hands will lose legitimacy immediately, and will succeed in holding power only through raw force.
Trump has long benefited from his contrast with the second Bush administration’s failed experiments with nation building. He has dismissed his Republican critics as neoconservatives, and some left-wing populists credit him for moving his party away from Bush-style interventionism.
Yet Trump’s saber-rattling against Venezuela confirms that his argument with neoconservatism was never about the hubris of exporting democracy or a faith in pacifistic leadership. Trump’s main complaint about Bush was that he squandered an opportunity to enrich the U.S. by caring too much about international law and the dignity of the Iraqi people. For all their arrogant blundering, neoconservatives were at least motivated by ideals about promoting American values around the world. Trump seems eager to replace this doctrine with an old and naked form of imperialism.
