Last week, the Trump administration launched an attack on Venezuela to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.
Venezuelan officials say at least 40 people were killed in the airstrikes, which resulted in Maduro and Flores being transported to a Manhattan federal court to face drug trafficking charges.
The abduction came amid escalating acts of war against Venezuela. In recent weeks, the U.S. has seized ships, bombed ports, and stolen oil from the country.
“The oil companies are going to go in,” President Trump told reporters after the attack. “They’re going to spend money. They’re going to — we’re going to take back the oil that, frankly, we should have taken back a long time ago.”
Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke with the educator and writer Geo Maher about the kidnapping, Trump’s wider foreign policy vision, and the administration’s potential designs for the region.
Geo Maher is the author of five books, including We Created Chávez (2013) and Building the Commune (2016). He has taught previously at the University of Pennsylvania, Vassar College, Drexel University, San Quentin State Prison, and the Venezuelan School of Planning in Caracas.
Mondoweiss: Trump has publicly admitted that his motivation in Venezuela is oil, but there are seemingly other factors at work too, as Venezuela represents a potentially threatening model of independence in the region.
Do you think this is mainly about oil, or are there other major factors, and how would you rank those motivations?
Maher: It’s a great question. It’s not simply oil, but it is closely related to the question of oil and the broader issue of natural resources. You can’t separate oil from rare earths, from gold, and from the broader geopolitical situation that these reflect and represent.
First things first: this attack, this incursion, this kidnapping of the leadership of a sovereign nation was not carried out either for democracy or because of some sort of bogus claims about drug trafficking. Those two claims made by the Trump administration are the most clearly laughable and false.
However, it is surprising that Trump has been so open about the oil question, to the point where people are second-guessing whether that’s actually the motivation. The questions of oil and resources exist within a broader framework, which is the decline of U.S. hegemony on a global scale.
Trump is someone who is honest and straightforward about that decline, whereas the Democrats try the ostrich approach of acting like it’s not happening. Trump and Rubio’s strategy is one of projecting political and military power as a foundation to prop up that hegemony and stabilize it. By which I mean, putting the political and the military cart before the horse to say, if we either invade and seize resources, or if we simply strengthen the position of the U.S. government through sanctions and tariffs, then we can create a negotiating situation that allows us to improve our position on the world scale, vis-à-vis, particularly China.
What does that mean for Venezuela? It means, yes, it’s about oil.
It’s about the actual oil, which remains crucial for U.S. and global industry, and it’s about removing that oil from the hands of Russia and China. It’s futile to attempt to distinguish between natural resources and the broader political context. It’s very clearly about access to rare earth minerals, and it’s about strategic control over the Caribbean Basin and a broader project of breaking the left across Latin America, which is, to be clear, a project of Trump. It’s a bipartisan project, but one that Trump has been pursuing in a strategic battle for years.
Very early on, we saw him supporting a quasi-coup government in Brazil. We saw him backing the far-right in Argentina, and now in Chile and elsewhere. These moves have been made to create a disintegration of the Bolivarian and broader “Pink Tide” alliance, which would then enable Venezuela to be taken out.
The abduction of Maduro occurred days after Trump threatened to attack Iran on social media, and shortly after he told reporters he’d back an Israeli strike on the country. These moves in Latin America are also happening amid the continued destruction of Gaza, which the United States backs.
Are all these things connected? Does Trump represent a specific kind of foreign policy, or do you see him as a continuation of previous administrations and he’s just being more honest about everything in his rhetoric?
I think it’s difficult to say. I think the question is as much about liberalism and the Democratic Party as it is about the individual. Of course, the Democrats have supported the same kind of imperialist policies, and they ground themselves in the same language of U.S. interests and U.S. interventionism abroad. However, in their case, it’s prevaricated around, say, for example, human rights in China, which all of a sudden became very important to the Democratic Party at a certain moment in history.
I don’t think these things are super clear, but the way Trump leveraged this claim of being the anti-war candidate is interesting. He positioned himself as being against foreign intervention and leveraged a language of protectionism or withdrawal from the global stage, in this comically misleading way.
Frankly, it’s embarrassing that some sectors of the left fell for this kind of “red-brown alliance”, which suggested that Trump might actually be anti-war. It’s equally laughable to see people on the left upholding [Georgia GOP Representative] Marjorie Taylor Greene today as some kind of anti-war or anti-imperialist voice. These are the kinds of confusion that Trump is hoping to sow.
What’s interesting about this Venezuela incursion is that he is trying to make these two pieces fit together. He’s actually worried about what this might mean for his base. Again, he’s never been an anti-imperialist or strict protectionist, but there have been moments where he needs to play both these roles.
In this case, the language has shifted from being anti-intervention abroad to a Trump corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, which suggests that bad wars occur far away. Good military intervention happens close to home because it’s more directly associated with our domestic interests.
That’s going to be a very difficult needle for him to thread, but it’s not so essential to his base aside from some fringe elements.
When we talk about what the mainstream media has gotten wrong about this story or has misled the public on, I know the list is long. However, I am wondering if there’s one thing that has really stood out as especially glaring when you look at the coverage thus far.
Yes, I won’t do just one, sadly.
The thing that’s been the most galling is, honestly, the overarching framing of the liberal media, which is even to the right of the Democratic Party. It’s not even calling this a military strike an act of war, which is refusing to actually understand it as blatantly illegal.
They’re treating the illegality of kidnapping the Venezuelan president and First Lady as one position within a balance of voices. That’s absolutely absurd. The most galling part is the media’s refusal to actually say what’s happening on the ground.
When it comes to misinformation, there are important things that need to be said. I believe many people are aware that this is an illegal act. I think they know perfectly well that it’s not about democracy, that it’s not about drugs and that these pretexts were the thinnest possible pretexts.
However, there are things that people need to be aware of. For example, the U.S. has been brutally punishing Venezuela with sanctions, particularly since 2017 and 2019, but they go back to [former President Barack] Obama. I don’t think people really understand how these sanctions work. First and foremost, they’re brutal. They absolutely strangulate the Venezuelan economy and make it impossible for people to even get what they need to survive. Things are also much less stable in the oil industry as a result, so all this language about the oil industry and decay has everything to do with the sanctions.
People also don’t understand that the explicit goal and stated objective of sanctions is to force people to no longer support the government. That is the goal of the sanctions. The fact that some people in this moment of crisis no longer support their government should not be surprising. When people can’t eat, and they can’t see the U.S. government causing these things because it’s not transparent, the tendency is to blame the people that you see.
That’s not to say the Venezuelan government is somehow blameless, but it’s absolutely natural that a government will lose support under the brutality of sanctions. This was also the goal of the brutal Contra war that was unleashed on the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, leading to an electoral defeat for Sandinismo. That was the objective, and it worked.
We shouldn’t fall into this framing that ignores what the U.S. has done to the country.
Finally, just because some people withdraw their support from the government during a moment of crisis does not mean they support the opposition. That’s always been true in Venezuela. A large sector swings back and forth, depending on how well the economy is performing and how convincing the narratives on both sides are.
This is particularly important in this moment because we’re talking about people like María Corina Machado, the so-called Peace Prize winner, who is one of the most violent and aggressive members of the fascist Venezuelan right. This is someone who will never have majority support within Venezuela because she is openly calling for and supporting U.S. intervention.
There will never be a majority in Venezuela that supports a foreign intervention and occupation in the country outside of these small and vocal pockets, such as Florida, where people are now claiming the U.S. can occupy the oil fields and pay private companies, and the benefits will somehow trickle down to Venezuelans. We know they won’t.
Mondoweiss: Trump openly says the U.S. is currently running Venezuela, in contrast to some of the things said by members of his cabinet. I know it’s probably too early to say what happens next, but what’s your sense of what’s currently happening in the country and how this might play out in the coming weeks?
Part of what is so confusing and strange to onlookers is that Trump carried out this blatantly illegal attack, this strike, this kidnapping, and then the administration is saying, “Okay, we’re going to work with the government now.”
That confused many people, but it’s not very confusing when you understand that there’s absolutely no way the U.S. could accomplish what it claims it will do.
The U.S. cannot run Venezuela, physically, materially, or militarily. It can’t even occupy the oil fields without being ensnared in guerrilla warfare because you have a Venezuelan population that is highly politicized and has developed an understanding of socialism and left-wing struggle, but also, on a very basic level, national solidarity and nationalist struggle. That population will not permit the foreign occupation of oil fields.
Also, on the flip side, you have a U.S. government that cannot handle or accept military losses. They’re talking about how “clean” this operation was, that no U.S. troops were killed. The U.S. brought massive logistical superiority to carry out a situation in which they could not afford to lose aircraft, and they could not afford to lose troops.
That tells you something about the calculus at play in the Trump administration. They cannot do what they claim they’re going to do, so they’re working with the government. They’re forced to work with the government.
Now that creates a very interesting strategic question for the Venezuelan government. The main leaders of the government, the Rodriguez siblings [acting president Delcy Rodríguez and President of the National Assembly Jorge Rodríguez], [Minister of Interior, Justice and Peace] Diosdado Cabello, and [Minister of People’s Power for Defense Vladimir Padrino López] are all being directly targeted and threatened by the Trump administration. So even on a personal level, they have an interest in saving their own skin.
Then there’s also the question of to what degree they are committed to a truly revolutionary process and committed to the survival of that process. One of the questions that will be playing out is, first and foremost, on what level the Venezuelan leadership is willing to collaborate with the Trump administration.
That’s an open question because Chavismo is a complicated phenomenon. There are revolutionary, hardline, communist, and socialist sectors, but there are also more reformist and nationalist sectors. Those sectors are going to be more willing to collaborate with foreign capital. This is all part of the mix, but those currently in power tend to be more on the latter side.
Then there’s a related question. To what degree will such collaboration be acceptable to everyday Venezuelans, and organized revolutionary sectors in particular? There are already suspicions. There are profound suspicions, and it seems clear the Trump administration is stoking them. However, it’s not clear why they’re stoking those because what they’re doing when they stoke the idea that they’re collaborating with Delcy Rodríguez is raising suspicions that could lead to a direct conflict within the government that would not be favorable to the Trump administration.
So, many people are trying to read the tea leaves and figure out what’s happening on the grassroots level, but one of the main questions that will play out is whether or not people will accept whatever it is that the Trump administration is trying to impose or whether we’re simply buying time to wait for Trump to be deposed or voted out of office and see what comes next.
Trump told a reporter that a military operation in Colombia sounds like a good idea. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Cuban government should be scared. We often see these kinds of threats against Latin American countries, but does it go beyond rhetoric in these cases? How do you assess these comments, and how do you think these countries might respond?
When we discuss the projection of power, we’re referring to performance. What I mean by that is that the image comes before the reality on a material level.
So, of course, Trump is full of bluster. He’s always performing, and we’re aware of that. The goal of that performance is to convince others that he needs to be taken seriously in the threats that he’s making. That’s what Rubio was trying to do. Of course, Rubio fails. To intimidate on a very basic level, but we should take these things deadly seriously because we don’t know what will happen.
Rubio has been salivating over a familial settling of scores in Cuba for a long time and it would not be impossible for the United States to remove Cuban leadership, but Cuba, much like Venezuela, is a society that’s organized from top to bottom.
Similar threats against Mexico probably won’t come to anything, they’re used as a negotiating tactic.
It’s the threats against Colombia that I’m actually the most worried about. On the one hand, because they dovetail with all of the sort of fake claims about narco trafficking. In the American mind, Colombia is synonymous with narco trafficking, but just as importantly, because [Colombian President] Gustavo Petro’s government is precarious.
It was a historic victory for Petro to win in Colombia. This country was regarded as the Israel of Latin America. It was a territorial base for U.S. operations. It was where operations against Venezuela would have been launched from if Petro were not in power.
Petro’s victory was shocking, but it hasn’t been long enough for Petro to develop and establish a powerful counter-hegemonic structure. Yes, progressive forces have a lot of support, but you know what? So do fascist forces. Colombia is a deeply fascist country. My worry is that Petro will be the target of an assassination attempt or something like that. There won’t be a structure in place to replace him on an organized level.
