I appreciate that you focus on the precedent it sets for America rather than for other nations. I'm not worried about this embolding Putin - they don't come much bolder. I do worry, constantly, that Trump's bullying instinct will overcome more of his proclaimed anti-interventionist policy. Which does remind me: his complaint about intervention was always that we weren't getting ours, not that we were unduly dishing it out.
I think it's an interesting counterfactual to debate whether a different American stance in the 1990s might have forestalled the emergence of the Putin regime in the first place. It's impossible to know for sure, but it's an important question. But that's water that flowed under the bridge a long time ago at this point.
And you are entirely correct about Trump. He was never an anti-interventionist.
I think there are some genuine anti-interventionist types hanging around The American Conservative, which has been very pro-Trump generally, and they have been very critical of the bombing of Iran and the abduction of Maduro. Outside of that group, I don't think there's very many.
I was gonna say "Vance's faction" but aside from his personal lack of principle, that would be a misunderstanding of what "America First" means to the President and VP.
It's not that America doesn't interact with outsiders. It's that those interactions must produce the type of tangible and immediate benefit to America that Trump recognizes as valid. Spending money and lives on bringing back spoils for the benefit of America is completely in line with their America First. It was only packaged as anti-intervention because recent interventions hadn't had the benefits they recognize.
One line of analysis I’ve been seeing a lot in Latin American commentary goes roughly like this: even if redeveloping Venezuela’s oil sector would require massive investment and time, the strategic value isn’t short-term profits but long-term control. As Middle Eastern supply becomes more politically exposed (Red Sea, Hormuz, BRICS alignment), having Venezuelan heavy crude available gives the U.S. greater leverage over prices and supply, and reduces dependence on chokepoints controlled by rivals. In that frame, this isn’t about immediate gains but about positioning for a future conflict environment.
I’m curious how you think about that argument — not as rhetoric, but as a proposed strategic logic.
Saudi Arabia's oil is the cheapest to extract in the world. So, from a pricing perspective, if they want to drive the price down, they pretty much always can. In a world where Saudi oil is not accessible -- let's take an extreme scenario: someone nuked the oil fields -- the price of oil goes way, way up. In that world, it would be extremely profitable to develop Venezuela's oil infrastructure. Not sure why we'd need to do that in advance, though.
Meanwhile, if we're worried about literally being cut off from the supply of oil -- chaos in the Middle East, Russia refuses to sell to us, etc. -- we shouldn't be, because we have plenty of proven reserves and Canada has way more; between us our proven reserves are about 2/3 of Venezuela's, and the infrastructure is all in place and there should be no concerns about political stability.
Again, I want to stress, I can believe that the administration launched this war on the theory that "we need Venezuela's oil." But, in fact, we don't, not with any urgency; plus I doubt that kidnapping Maduro materially changes things such that Venezuela will become a stable and friendly country; plus with oil prices low, I don't think there's going to be enthusiasm to deploy the massive investment necessary to truly develop Venezuela's oil infrastructure; and finally, if the priority was making sure Venezuelan oil is available, we could have just ended the embargo and removed sanctions.
A bit more remote but still within living memory: Guatemala 1954. A lot of parallels there as well. It was horrible for Guatemala and hardly registered here in the US.
If you wish your country's good you may want this operation to turn out horribly. The operation is a crime under both domestic and international law. Maybe it is best that criminals pay a price, better for all and even better for the criminal.
Paul Krugman was brutal but clear-eyed: "Two days after the abduction, it’s clear that Trump wasn’t seeking regime change, at least not in any fundamental way. He’s more like a mob boss trying to expand his territory, believing that if he knocks off a rival boss he can bully the guy’s former capos into giving him a cut of their take."
How can such an operation "succeeding" be good for us in the long run? It teaches all the wrong lessons.
On the one hand, I want to live in a world where authoritarian dictators are removed from power rather than being allowed to pillage their countries until they die. So I'm hesitant to reflectively criticize, especially since there is no sign that any international bodies are willing to step up and act in these situations if military force is needed.
On the other hand, the Middle East has given us plenty of example in recent decades of countries where removing the dictator has arguably made the country worse rather than better off; and while I think whether that is true or not is more arguable than some people would claim, it clearly is a possibility. And there is probably no world leader, and certainly no American President ever, who is less trustworthy than Donald Trump in terms of guarding anyone's interests but his own (least of which the people of Venezuela or any other foreign country).
So I'm stuck hoping for the best but fearing the worst. And this piece at least offered some insight about why this might have happened.
Hi Noah — just noting a bit of cognitive dissonance I’m seeing. In much of Hispanic-world media, this is understood almost entirely as a play for control of Venezuela’s vast resources (not just oil), and it’s treated as laughable to think otherwise. Trump has even said this explicitly. That’s what I find interesting, given that you treat the resource-extraction explanation itself as laughable. Curious how you think about that gap.
I didn't say that the idea that this was a war for oil was laughable; I said that the idea that this was a war to help American refiners was laughable. I suppose it's possible that Trump was swayed by complaints from Gulf refiners that they'd fallen on hard times, but that wouldn't make the idea any less laughable.
The larger point, though, is that "war for oil" doesn't make any sense. The oil-based rationale for the Persian Gulf War was that it was a threat to national security to let Saddam Hussein control such a large percentage of the world's oil. In the case of Venezuela, the "war for oil" scenario is that by removing Maduro we make it possible to redevelop Venezuela's decrepit oil industry to the point where it is once again highly productive, which will require at least $100 billion in investment, probably more. If that actually happened, it would be great for Venezuela, and great for American oil companies. Whether it would be great for America is less clear, because the world is not running out of oil, we're an oil exporter, and the proximate energy challenge we face has nothing to do with oil; it's building out adequate electricity generation, storage and transmission. But is it actually going to happen, given the scale of the challenge and the state of the oil market? I'm quite skeptical.
Does that mean we didn't invade because of oil? I wouldn't say that. It's entirely possible that Trump really liked the idea of going in there to take the oil. He thought we should have taken the oil in Iraq too. (What does that even mean, "take the oil" -- the oil isn't sitting in a vault waiting to be shipped to America as spoils of war.) But that doesn't make the idea any less ridiculous; it just makes the intervention even more so.
Look, if you want an oil-related scenario that's plausible, maybe we took out Maduro so that we could make up with his successor on terms that were largely available to us all along, and remove sanctions without looking like we had backed down. Without sanctions, the private market would develop Venezuela's oil fields to the degree that oil prices dictate. And both American refiners and Chevron, the only major oil company that stayed in Venezuela, have long advocated relaxing or ending the sanctions regime. Maybe we needed to take out Maduro so that we could subsequently get out of our own way.
As I understand it, many refineries in south Texas and along the Gulf Coast were historically configured to process very heavy crude like Venezuela’s, which can be used for products (asphalt, certain chemicals, etc.) that aren’t as easily derived from lighter shale oil. That doesn’t amount to a coherent “war for oil” story, but it does seem to create a narrower, infrastructure-level reason why the oil angle keeps resurfacing.
More broadly, I also wonder whether part of what’s going on with Trump is a kind of blunt, common-sense pragmatism rather than a coherent strategy: Maduro is a bad actor, Venezuela is unstable, drugs are flowing, the country is open to Russia, China, and Iran, and oil revenues are part of that ecosystem — so in that frame, taking him out simply “makes sense,” and taking advantage of the oil is almost incidental rather than the primary driver. How that gets sold or propagandized afterward then becomes a separate dynamic.
That said, your point about sanctions, market mechanisms, and the incoherence of “taking the oil” as an actual strategy makes a lot of sense to me, and helps explain why the dominant Latin American framing often feels too reductive, even if it’s understandable given history. In any case, thanks — your response genuinely helped me think this through more clearly, even if I’m still digesting parts of it.
I appreciate that you focus on the precedent it sets for America rather than for other nations. I'm not worried about this embolding Putin - they don't come much bolder. I do worry, constantly, that Trump's bullying instinct will overcome more of his proclaimed anti-interventionist policy. Which does remind me: his complaint about intervention was always that we weren't getting ours, not that we were unduly dishing it out.
I think it's an interesting counterfactual to debate whether a different American stance in the 1990s might have forestalled the emergence of the Putin regime in the first place. It's impossible to know for sure, but it's an important question. But that's water that flowed under the bridge a long time ago at this point.
And you are entirely correct about Trump. He was never an anti-interventionist.
A related question: are his America first followers truly non- interventionist, especially when it’s Trump that does the intervening?
I think there are some genuine anti-interventionist types hanging around The American Conservative, which has been very pro-Trump generally, and they have been very critical of the bombing of Iran and the abduction of Maduro. Outside of that group, I don't think there's very many.
I was gonna say "Vance's faction" but aside from his personal lack of principle, that would be a misunderstanding of what "America First" means to the President and VP.
It's not that America doesn't interact with outsiders. It's that those interactions must produce the type of tangible and immediate benefit to America that Trump recognizes as valid. Spending money and lives on bringing back spoils for the benefit of America is completely in line with their America First. It was only packaged as anti-intervention because recent interventions hadn't had the benefits they recognize.
One line of analysis I’ve been seeing a lot in Latin American commentary goes roughly like this: even if redeveloping Venezuela’s oil sector would require massive investment and time, the strategic value isn’t short-term profits but long-term control. As Middle Eastern supply becomes more politically exposed (Red Sea, Hormuz, BRICS alignment), having Venezuelan heavy crude available gives the U.S. greater leverage over prices and supply, and reduces dependence on chokepoints controlled by rivals. In that frame, this isn’t about immediate gains but about positioning for a future conflict environment.
I’m curious how you think about that argument — not as rhetoric, but as a proposed strategic logic.
Saudi Arabia's oil is the cheapest to extract in the world. So, from a pricing perspective, if they want to drive the price down, they pretty much always can. In a world where Saudi oil is not accessible -- let's take an extreme scenario: someone nuked the oil fields -- the price of oil goes way, way up. In that world, it would be extremely profitable to develop Venezuela's oil infrastructure. Not sure why we'd need to do that in advance, though.
Meanwhile, if we're worried about literally being cut off from the supply of oil -- chaos in the Middle East, Russia refuses to sell to us, etc. -- we shouldn't be, because we have plenty of proven reserves and Canada has way more; between us our proven reserves are about 2/3 of Venezuela's, and the infrastructure is all in place and there should be no concerns about political stability.
Again, I want to stress, I can believe that the administration launched this war on the theory that "we need Venezuela's oil." But, in fact, we don't, not with any urgency; plus I doubt that kidnapping Maduro materially changes things such that Venezuela will become a stable and friendly country; plus with oil prices low, I don't think there's going to be enthusiasm to deploy the massive investment necessary to truly develop Venezuela's oil infrastructure; and finally, if the priority was making sure Venezuelan oil is available, we could have just ended the embargo and removed sanctions.
A bit more remote but still within living memory: Guatemala 1954. A lot of parallels there as well. It was horrible for Guatemala and hardly registered here in the US.
If you wish your country's good you may want this operation to turn out horribly. The operation is a crime under both domestic and international law. Maybe it is best that criminals pay a price, better for all and even better for the criminal.
Paul Krugman was brutal but clear-eyed: "Two days after the abduction, it’s clear that Trump wasn’t seeking regime change, at least not in any fundamental way. He’s more like a mob boss trying to expand his territory, believing that if he knocks off a rival boss he can bully the guy’s former capos into giving him a cut of their take."
How can such an operation "succeeding" be good for us in the long run? It teaches all the wrong lessons.
That's a good line by Krugman, and a fair point.
This was helpful. I've felt torn about this news.
On the one hand, I want to live in a world where authoritarian dictators are removed from power rather than being allowed to pillage their countries until they die. So I'm hesitant to reflectively criticize, especially since there is no sign that any international bodies are willing to step up and act in these situations if military force is needed.
On the other hand, the Middle East has given us plenty of example in recent decades of countries where removing the dictator has arguably made the country worse rather than better off; and while I think whether that is true or not is more arguable than some people would claim, it clearly is a possibility. And there is probably no world leader, and certainly no American President ever, who is less trustworthy than Donald Trump in terms of guarding anyone's interests but his own (least of which the people of Venezuela or any other foreign country).
So I'm stuck hoping for the best but fearing the worst. And this piece at least offered some insight about why this might have happened.
Hi Noah — just noting a bit of cognitive dissonance I’m seeing. In much of Hispanic-world media, this is understood almost entirely as a play for control of Venezuela’s vast resources (not just oil), and it’s treated as laughable to think otherwise. Trump has even said this explicitly. That’s what I find interesting, given that you treat the resource-extraction explanation itself as laughable. Curious how you think about that gap.
I didn't say that the idea that this was a war for oil was laughable; I said that the idea that this was a war to help American refiners was laughable. I suppose it's possible that Trump was swayed by complaints from Gulf refiners that they'd fallen on hard times, but that wouldn't make the idea any less laughable.
The larger point, though, is that "war for oil" doesn't make any sense. The oil-based rationale for the Persian Gulf War was that it was a threat to national security to let Saddam Hussein control such a large percentage of the world's oil. In the case of Venezuela, the "war for oil" scenario is that by removing Maduro we make it possible to redevelop Venezuela's decrepit oil industry to the point where it is once again highly productive, which will require at least $100 billion in investment, probably more. If that actually happened, it would be great for Venezuela, and great for American oil companies. Whether it would be great for America is less clear, because the world is not running out of oil, we're an oil exporter, and the proximate energy challenge we face has nothing to do with oil; it's building out adequate electricity generation, storage and transmission. But is it actually going to happen, given the scale of the challenge and the state of the oil market? I'm quite skeptical.
Does that mean we didn't invade because of oil? I wouldn't say that. It's entirely possible that Trump really liked the idea of going in there to take the oil. He thought we should have taken the oil in Iraq too. (What does that even mean, "take the oil" -- the oil isn't sitting in a vault waiting to be shipped to America as spoils of war.) But that doesn't make the idea any less ridiculous; it just makes the intervention even more so.
Look, if you want an oil-related scenario that's plausible, maybe we took out Maduro so that we could make up with his successor on terms that were largely available to us all along, and remove sanctions without looking like we had backed down. Without sanctions, the private market would develop Venezuela's oil fields to the degree that oil prices dictate. And both American refiners and Chevron, the only major oil company that stayed in Venezuela, have long advocated relaxing or ending the sanctions regime. Maybe we needed to take out Maduro so that we could subsequently get out of our own way.
Thanks for the clarification — I need to sit with it a bit more.
One thing that has kept me uncertain is a Sky News piece I saw about Venezuelan heavy crude and U.S. Gulf Coast refineries:
https://youtu.be/Pgwny1BiCYk?si=JPzifOfWO5OndygO
As I understand it, many refineries in south Texas and along the Gulf Coast were historically configured to process very heavy crude like Venezuela’s, which can be used for products (asphalt, certain chemicals, etc.) that aren’t as easily derived from lighter shale oil. That doesn’t amount to a coherent “war for oil” story, but it does seem to create a narrower, infrastructure-level reason why the oil angle keeps resurfacing.
More broadly, I also wonder whether part of what’s going on with Trump is a kind of blunt, common-sense pragmatism rather than a coherent strategy: Maduro is a bad actor, Venezuela is unstable, drugs are flowing, the country is open to Russia, China, and Iran, and oil revenues are part of that ecosystem — so in that frame, taking him out simply “makes sense,” and taking advantage of the oil is almost incidental rather than the primary driver. How that gets sold or propagandized afterward then becomes a separate dynamic.
That said, your point about sanctions, market mechanisms, and the incoherence of “taking the oil” as an actual strategy makes a lot of sense to me, and helps explain why the dominant Latin American framing often feels too reductive, even if it’s understandable given history. In any case, thanks — your response genuinely helped me think this through more clearly, even if I’m still digesting parts of it.
So Scheinbaum and Frederiksen should be worried. What about Carney?
Him too!