Trump’s Venezuela raid revives the old logic of oil, empire and the Monroe Doctrine in the 21st century
By Doug Specht
In an operation that has been widely criticised as a state-sponsored kidnapping rather than a lawful arrest, US forces seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on highly contested narcotics charges, clearing the way for Donald Trump’s declaration that Washington will now ‘run’ the country and its oil. Far from being an unprecedented law-enforcement action, this ‘military operation’, to quote Trump’s own press conference, fits a long pattern of US gunboat diplomacy in Latin America, updated for an era of oil geopolitics, great-power rivalry and the revived language of the Monroe Doctrine. The script is familiar: criminalise a government, delegitimise its sovereignty, deploy overwhelming force, and then fold the country’s economy into a US-managed order in the name of ‘stability’ and ‘freedom’.
A stunning raid, an old logic
In the early hours of 3 January 2026, US special forces and law-enforcement agents stormed Caracas in ‘Operation Absolute Resolve’, dismantled Venezuela’s air defences, and seized Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores from the Fuerte Tiuna military complex before transferring them to the amphibious warship USS Iwo Jima and then by plane to New York. Trump later hailed the assault as ‘one of the most stunning, effective and powerful displays of American military might and confidence in American history’, comparing the scale of air, land and sea power to Second World War–style operations. At a press conference hosted at Trump’s private members’ club, Mar-a-Lago, he announced that the United States would ‘run the country’ until it could oversee what he called a ‘safe, proper and judicious transition’, explicitly rejecting any immediate handover to Venezuelan institutions or multilateral supervision.
Rubio, now Secretary of State, framed the raid as a lawful arrest of an indicted fugitive, insisting that Maduro ‘is not the legitimate president of Venezuela’ and that the mission was essentially a law-enforcement action that did not require prior congressional authorisation. Yet the operational facts – the disabling of national air defences, a massive armada in Caribbean waters, and contingency plans for a ‘second and much larger attack’ – are those of a full-spectrum military intervention, not a cross-border police sting. UN Secretary-General António Guterres, among others, has warned that the strike sets a ‘dangerous precedent’ and signals a serious breach of international legal norms governing the use of force against sovereign states.
‘We’re going to run the country’
Trump’s justification for seizing de facto control of Venezuela rests on a glaringly economic logic: ‘We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country’. In another remark, he made the arrangement even plainer: the US is ‘in the oil business’, will sell Venezuelan crude to global buyers in ‘much larger’ quantities, and both Venezuela and the US will benefit, though he left unexplained how revenue flows, and control would actually be shared. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth bluntly cast the intervention as a strategic inversion of Iraq: rather than ‘spend decades and decades and purchase in blood’ and ‘get nothing economically in return’, he said, Trump has ‘flipped the script’ so that projecting force also secures ‘additional wealth and resources’.
However, the operation might be better read as an attempt to overturn Venezuela’s long project of asserting national control over its oil and to restore a model in which foreign, particularly US, companies set the terms of extraction and profit. Venezuela began nationalising its oil industry in the 1970s, culminating in the creation of the state company PDVSA in 1976, which formally ended the concessions of the old foreign majors. Later, under Hugo Chávez, a new wave of resource nationalism, beginning roughly in 2001, tightened state control, forced the renegotiation of contracts, and expanded majority public ownership in the Orinoco Belt projects. By removing the sitting president and signalling that US firms will ‘fix’ and run the oil sector, Washington appears to be using military power to unwind those decades of nationalisation in practice, even if it is not formally repealed in law, effectively removing Venezuela’s capability of trading its nationalised oil on the free market.
This is where the revived Monroe Doctrine becomes explicit policy rather than historical analogy. The 2025 National Security Strategy has been described by analysts as articulating a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the doctrine, asserting a special US right to prevent ‘foreign competitors’ such as China and Russia from entrenching themselves in the Western Hemisphere’s energy and logistics corridors. Venezuela’s vast proven reserves, long courted by Chinese and Russian firms, are thus recast as a strategic asset that Washington not only wants access to, but intends to manage – with Trump promising that US-run oil production will both ‘protect’ American energy security and discipline adversaries.
The deeper continuity with the Washington Consensus lies in the enforced restructuring of a peripheral economy under external authority. Where the 1990s version used debt, structural adjustment and privatisation conditionalities to open markets, the 2026 version begins with missile strikes, the detention of a sitting president, and an open promise that foreign companies, not domestic publics, will control the commanding heights of the economy for the foreseeable future. In both cases, sovereignty is treated as conditional: it is respected when governments liberalise and align with US strategic priorities, and overridden when they insist on national control of key resources. In economic terms, this echoes the Washington Consensus playbook of liberalisation and privatisation – except that this time the “reform” of state-owned PDVSA is backed not by IMF conditionality but by carrier groups and special forces.
Gunboat diplomacy reborn
Historically, gunboat diplomacy referred to the use or threat of naval power to compel weaker states to accept political or economic demands – a practice repeatedly deployed by the US in Latin America from the late 19th century through the Banana Wars. In 1899, the US sent the cruiser USS Wilmington up Venezuela’s Orinoco River to signal its readiness to defend American commercial interests, while in 1905 Theodore Roosevelt established a customs receivership in the Dominican Republic, effectively taking control of customs revenues to ensure repayment to foreign creditors. These operations were justified as civilising missions or stabilisation efforts, but their core function was straightforward: secure trade routes, protect investments, and keep European powers at bay under the banner of the Monroe Doctrine.
The January 2026 intervention follows the same pattern with updated rhetoric and technology. Instead of a single cruiser, the US deployed the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group and associated warships, conducted precision strikes on dozens of targets, and then publicly displayed a shackled head of state being ‘perp-walked’ under DEA insignia. Instead of openly declaring a customs receivership, the Trump administration has announced a de facto resource receivership, with Washington controlling the terms. The language is new – ‘running Venezuela’ as a benevolent caretaker – but the underlying logic of coercive control over territory and revenue streams is recognisable to anyone who has studied the Orinoco gunboat expeditions or the Dominican customs takeover.
Long arc of destabilisation
What is unfolding in Caracas sits atop a long history of US interference across Latin America, where the language of saving democracy or fighting subversion has repeatedly masked efforts to discipline governments that challenge US economic and strategic priorities. In 1954, the CIA helped overthrow Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, after his land reform threatened the interests of United Fruit, inaugurating decades of military rule justified as a bulwark against communism. In 1965, US Marines landed in the Dominican Republic to crush an uprising seeking the return of ousted reformist president Juan Bosch – again framed as pre-empting a ‘communist threat’. The same Cold War logic underpinned covert intervention against Salvador Allende in Chile, where US pressure and CIA operations helped pave the way for the 1973 coup and the Pinochet dictatorship.
Central America has been treated as a laboratory for these tactics. In the 1980s, Honduras and Nicaragua became staging grounds for US-backed counterinsurgency and proxy wars, embedding militarised elites and securitised economies that outlived the Cold War. The 2009 Honduran coup against President Manuel Zelaya, who had raised the minimum wage and aligned cautiously with Caracas, recycled the template: the army kidnapped Zelaya, flew him out of the country and installed an interim regime, while Washington refused to call it a coup and quietly worked to legitimise post-coup elections rather than restore the democratically elected president. The result was a dramatic escalation of violence, corruption and emigration, with Honduras recast as a frontline in the US “war on drugs” even as its security forces and political class became ever more entangled with trafficking networks.
The career of Juan Orlando Hernández, president from 2014 to 2022, crystallises these contradictions. For years, he was praised by US officials as a key ally in combating narcotics and managing migration, even as prosecutors were quietly building a case that he had turned Honduras into a ‘narco-state’, protecting cocaine flows to the United States in exchange for millions in bribes. In 2024, a New York jury convicted him on multiple drug-trafficking counts, and he received a 45-year sentence, making him one of the highest-ranking Latin American leaders ever jailed for such crimes. Yet in 2025, Trump issued a controversial pardon that wiped away the sentence, allowing a man once described by US authorities as having “paved a cocaine superhighway” to walk free.
Placed against this backdrop, the sudden decision to abduct Nicolás Maduro on narcotics charges and place Venezuela under de facto US administration looks less like a principled stand against drugs than a selective deployment of law to punish governments that resist Washington’s economic and geopolitical designs. Friendly leaders who facilitate US agendas, even when deeply implicated in trafficking, are indulged or forgiven; those who nationalise resources, defy Washington or court rival powers are branded criminals and removed in the name of order.
Not new, just less hidden
Reactions inside and outside the United States suggest that the danger many see is not only in what was done, but in what was admitted. Senator Mark Warner asked whether this precedent now legitimises any ‘large country’ abducting the leader of a smaller neighbour under the banner of criminal justice, warning that ‘once this line is crossed, the rules that restrain global chaos begin to collapse’. Senator Tim Kaine has labelled the operation an ‘llegal war’ and vowed to push new war-powers limits, arguing that there is “no legal justification… to depose President Maduro and seize its oil and run the country of Venezuela without coming to Congress.” Even some Republicans have baulked, insisting that “the only country that the United States should be ‘running’ is the United States of America,” and that Venezuela’s future should be determined through internationally monitored elections rather than a trusteeship run from Mar-a-Lago.
For many in Latin America, however, the sense is less one of shock than of déjà vu. From the occupation of Caribbean ports to the orchestration of coups against elected governments, US power has long been enforced at the end of a gun barrel or the bow of a warship, with democracy invoked or ignored as circumstances required. What is distinctive about January 2026 is not that force has been used to remove a leader and secure a major energy prize, but that the US president has dispensed with much of the old euphemism: he has said plainly that ‘we’re going to run the country’, that Venezuelan oil will be sold under US management, and that this is what an ‘America First’ hemisphere looks like. The gunboats, in other words, never really left Latin American waters; they simply waited for the order to return – this time with legal indictments in one hand and drilling contracts in the other.
