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**JANUARY 6, 2026**

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Donald Trump has apparently validated the most cynical critiques of American imperialism by outright saying he kidnapped Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro so American oil companies could get their hands on the country’s oil. There’s just one problem: that idea does not make any business sense [link removed] whatsoever. Trump is oafishly attempting to imitate the imperialists of the 19th century more than a hundred years after the economics stopped penciling out.

**–Ryan Cooper, senior editor**

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PHAndrii Zorii/iStock

Trump’s Cargo Cult Imperialism in Venezuela [link removed]

When the Bush administration was planning and selling its war of aggression against Iraq in 2002, a common argument made by anti-war activists was that the whole thing was about oil. By toppling Saddam Hussein’s government, American oil companies could swoop in and make a profit selling cheap oil to Americans so they could keep driving huge SUVs to their suburban McMansions.

This didn’t make all that much sense—for one thing, the war and occupation ended up costing on the order of $3 trillion [link removed], and Hussein would have been more than willing to just sell us the oil for a lot less than that—but for an administration whose two top leaders were both former oilmen, it had a surface plausibility. [link removed]

[link removed] Trump has done Bush one better: He simply said outright that his military attack on Venezuela, in which commandos kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and transported him to Manhattan to be put on trial [link removed], was about oil. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies … start making money for the country,” Trump said [link removed]. Later, he added [link removed], “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela … it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused by that country.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the administration’s architect [link removed] of Venezuelan regime change, boasted that American refineries were perfectly ready to process the plunder [link removed].

There’s just one problem: Stealing Venezuela’s oil makes no sense, even—indeed, especially—from the standpoint of American oil companies.

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