Oil blockades, ‘narcoterrorism’, and missile strikes on gunboats in the Caribbean. You might ask what’s really going on with the US’s unprecedented actions against Venezuela?

President Trump has taken aim at the regime of Nicolas Maduro – who’s been President of the oil-rich South American country since 2013, and is widely considered to be a dictator – calling it a ‘FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION’ in a Truth Social post. Having enacted a full blockade on all sanctioned oil tankers in the region, Trump claims Maduro’s regime is illegitimate, and that it’s ‘using Oil from these stolen Oil Fields to finance themselves, Drug Terrorism, Human Trafficking, Murder, and Kidnapping’.

The Whitehouse appears to be using drug crime as a pretext for strikes on unconfirmed vessels in the Caribbean – carrying what it calls ‘narcoterrorists’ – and the largest military build up in the region since the Cold War. Perhaps they think an appeal to the Puritan morality of the Fentanyl-fearing Republican voter base might justify attempts to topple the regime of a foreign dictator. US interventionism without a casus belli has historically been the subject of scorn after all.

But the references to oil in Trump’s latest social media posts hint at a much greater cause for intervention, namely that Venezuela has the largest proven untapped reserves of any country in the world, totalling 300 billion barrels. Bigger than Saudi Arabia’s. And bigger than the largest oil producer in the world – the US itself.

Further hints abound. The updated US National Security Strategy says America ‘will assert and enforce a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine’. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 was a landmark moment in US foreign policy, in which it openly endeavoured to resist further European colonisation in South America, which was then predominantly divided between the empires of Spain, Portugal, and France, and controlled many of the continent’s natural resources.

So for the US, reasserting the Monroe Doctrine is code for 1. asserting hegemony in its backyard and 2. looking to regain control of what it sees as lost resources. This is particularly apt in the era of Maduro’s Venezuela, itself a continuation of the socialist government of Hugo Chavez who took power in 1999, removing the US-backed rightwing democratic government of the time and implementing a programme of nationalisation – bringing industry back into state control.

This meant taking back ownership of Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA and forcing out US oil giants ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips as part of efforts to make the state oil company gain a majority stake in all new oil projects. So when Trump talks about oil fields that have been ‘stolen’ from the US, he’s talking in a commercial sense about the pre-Chavez dominance of American oil companies in Venezuela up to the end of the last millenium.

America’s lust for oil is crystallised and validated by the stance of recent Nobel Prize Winner Maria Machado, the US-friendly, free-market loving opposition candidate to Nicolas Maduro. She said that regime change in Venezuela would unlock $1.7 trillion in private business opportunities. A staggering sum. When coupled with her promise of major opportunities in oil for US companies in the event of successful regime change, it becomes clear that this is not a conflict about drugs, kidnapping, or narcoterrorism – but instead one that hinges on a desire for that most precious commodity – good ol’ Black Gold.