Regime change for oil? The real motivations behind the US military intervention in Venezuela

By Malfred Gerig
Published date
Regime change graphic CEDES

First published in Spanish at CEDES and Viento Sur. Translation by LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

In the early hours of January 3, the United States carried out a military intervention in Venezuela, “Operation Absolute Resolution”, which culminated in the head of state, Nicolás Maduro, being taken to a New York prison. Hours later, US President Donald Trump declared: “We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.”1 Why did the US decide to “insert” itself so deeply into the Venezuelan state as to claim it was now “running the country”? In the first instance, we could say, in line with Antonio Gramsci’s realistic and factual observation, that “the great Powers have been great precisely because they were at all times prepared to intervene effectively in favourable international conjunctures”2 The answer, therefore, to what motivated the US military intervention would simply be that a favourable situation opened up for it to insert itself effectively and take advantage off.

However, in “real history,” as Gramsci called it, the dialectic between international and national forces is more complex and thorny. How favourable a situation is for a Great Power to intervene is determined by the extent to which the dialectic within civil society (horizontal power relations) gives way to the penetration of a foreign sentinel (vertical power relations). The crux of the matter is that integral state crises create fertile grounds for forceful solutions. Such crises can be resolved internally through “organised economic and political expressions” rooted in national life but also create favourable circumstances for the “activities of unknown forces” (Gramsci dixit), generally represented by the actions — first technical-military and then political-military — of a foreign sentinel. According to Gramsci, the “charismatic ‘men of destiny’” who tend to emerge when integral state crises can not be organically resolved — that is, when a static equilibrium means no side can definitively prevail — do not necessarily come from within the competing national forces, but may express an international force penetrating into national life.3 A Great Power international Caesarism?

Returning to the focus of this essay: what was the ultima ratio for US military intervention in Venezuela? Was it just an inexcusable regime change for oil? Did the fate of two states — Venezuela and the US — intertwine simply because it is “all about oil” (David Harvey dixit)? When answering these questions, the words of Thomas Friedman come to mind: 

There is nothing illegitimate or immoral about the U.S. being concerned that an evil, megalomaniacal dictator might acquire excessive influence over the natural resource that powers the world’s industrial base.4

Yet can this imperial moralising be sustained when Trump 2.0 is clearly seeking to reformat the naïve “rules-based international order”? Is the claim that the Trump 2.0 administration’s intervention in Venezuela was simply “about oil” as simplistic, naïve and insufficient as the argument that it seeks to “restore democracy” and stabilise the country?

The problem with the it’s “all about oil” thesis is that this is an excellent explanandum but helps little in terms of explanans. In other words, this thesis tells us what is crucial, the ultima ratio of imperial intervention: they are there for the oil. But it fails to explain why this is crucial: that is, how they intend to benefit from the oil. Furthermore, it simplifies the situation by obscuring some of Washington’s other economic and geopolitical objectives. My argument is that the explanans for US military intervention is both the US civil society dynamics and the catastrophic outcome for Venezuelan society of the country’s integral state crisis and Long Depression. It also finds its reason in the current state of the modern inter-state system and the US hegemonic cycle.

The catastrophic outcome of a state crisis

Nation-states coexist in a hierarchical, unequal and polarised inter-state system, within which relative strength determines who imposes their will and who suffers as a consequence. Strong states — namely, those that have been successful in building state capacity, organising warfare and accumulating capital — impose their will and entrench themselves at the top of the hierarchy, while weak states suffer and are relegated to the bottom. It is no coincidence that, as Immanuel Wallerstein argued, national economic development is a priority collective task for political communities grouped into nation-states. In a world economy governed by the relentless accumulation and centralisation of capital and power among classes, countries and regions, the weakening of a state will always provide a great opportunity for a foreign sentinel to act. States can therefore not afford, under any circumstances, to live through prolonged periods of organic crisis of authority and hegemony, much less a “reciprocal destruction of the conflicting forces” that undermines the sources of social power on which the nation-state is built. In sum, nation-states in the modern inter-state system cannot afford processes such as the Long Venezuelan Depression.

Building on my argument in La Larga Depresión Venezolana (The Long Venezuelan Depression) and drawing on Gramsci’s conceptual arsenal, I argued in “The Venezuelan transition to patrimonialism” that the integral state crisis in which Venezuelan society had been mired since 2016 had escalated eight years on to a point where the ruling elite was denied “breathing-space”, foreshadowing the “peace of the graveyards” that follows the “reciprocal destruction of the conflicting forces” at a domestic level, and worse still, the intervention of a “foreign sentinel.”5 The crux of my argument was that the Trump 1.0 administration (2017–21), with its strategy of collapse, had not failed to bring about regime change in Venezuela, if one considers the transformations in the country’s political economy and mutations in the ruling elite. In La Larga Depresión Venezolana, I pointed out that 

comprehensive sanctions on the public sector set the stage and prepared the legitimacy for the passive counter-revolution that embraced orthodox monetarist macroeconomic stabilisation, neoliberalism with patrimonialist characteristics, and crony capitalism.6

If we take a realistic view of interstate system dynamics, then why would this regime change from below not then lead to an outward regime change or geopolitical realignment via subjugation, if the sources of national power were completely undermined? In other words, if national political life was determined by the catastrophic stalemate between A and B, then what factors could prevent the intervention of force C from outside?

This was the point at which the fate of the “patrimonialist party” shaped by Nicolás Maduro’s leadership (2013/2016–2025) was sealed: its strategy of power for power’s sake, patrimonialism, and crony capitalism undermined both popular and national sovereignty, and the sources of social power (ideological, economic, military and political) on which Venezuela’s Westphalian sovereignty rested on — namely, other states’ respect for a national authority. This reduced the political, social and military costs of foreign military intervention, which, of course, is contrary to international law and the Westphalian framework.

In summary, thanks to the ruling elite’s decision to appropriate the state for itself, disregard the will of the people and undermine all sources of social power that sustain the nation-state, along with the counter-elite’s inability to resolve the catastrophic stalemate without the help of international Caesarism, the price that Venezuelan society paid was the intervention of a foreign sentinel, the attempt to install a protectorate, the plundering of our natural resources via tribute and, ultimately, the jeopardising of the sovereign existence of the Venezuelan nation-state. The resolution of the catastrophic stalemate that characterised the integral state crisis came in the form of a Jacksonian-Hamiltonian, mercantilist, territorialist, ethnocentric foreign sentinel that had internalised Ulpian’s maxim: quod principi placuit vigorem legem habet (what pleases the prince has the force of law).

The dialectic of US civil society and the Venezuelan opposition

David Harvey suggestively argued in his classic book, The New Imperialism, that we must take very seriously the hypothesis that US interventions abroad are motivated by a desire to distract attention from internal difficulties. In Harvey’s words, 

There is indeed a long history of governments in trouble domestically seeking to solve their problems either by foreign adventures or by manufacturing foreign threats to consolidate solidarities at home.7

To support this thesis, Harvey referenced a passage from Hannah Arendt, where she exposes the inherent instability of a civil society based solely on the accumulation of wealth and power. For Arendt, such a society can only remain stable 

by constantly extending its authority and only through process of power accumulation ... [The] ever-present possibility of [civil] war guarantees the Commonwealth a prospect of permanence because it makes it possible for the state to increase its power at the expense of other states.8

Let us ignore here Trump’s reasons for using Venezuela as a domestic scapegoat and focus instead on the actions of the decadent Venezuelan opposition political elite, which converted Venezuela into an ideal scapegoat amid the internal turmoil of US civil society under Trump.

During 2024, a window of opportunity opened up as Venezuela’s organic crisis entered a plebiscitary moment. After the resounding failure of Juan Guaidó’s dual power strategy, María Corina Machado opportunistically changed her perspective, momentarily abandoning insurrectionary strategies, believing she could lead the traditional opposition to take advantage of this plebiscitary moment, given the evident support of the vast majority of Venezuelans for an electoral and peaceful solution to the crisis. However, this plebiscitary moment “from below” ran counter to the political will of the “patrimonialist party” and the “foreign party” of the opposition “from above.” This was a first warning sign that Venezuelan society was very likely heading toward the “reciprocal destruction of the conflicting forces,” the “peace of the graveyards,” and the intervention of a “foreign sentinel.” Consequently, between July 28, 2024, and January 10, 2025, this window of opportunity opened by this plebiscitary moment was closed off, the catastrophic stalemate became irresolvable, and corruption, violence and fraud were consolidated as the source of social power. From January 2025 onwards, the Machado-led opposition was left with no room for manoeuvre at the national level, instead hoping that a foreign sentinel would resolve the catastrophic stalemate in its favour.

Machado’s wager on a foreign sentinel must therefore be considered an integral part of the Venezuelan political class’s shift towards corruption, violence and fraud as a source of domination without authority. Is there anything more violent, corrupt and fraudulent than contributing to and promoting a military intervention against your own nation? Since January 2025, Machado’s only political asset, apart from sentimental exploitation of the Venezuelan diaspora, has been her adherence to, support for and promotion of the Trump administration’s theories about Venezuela and Venezuelans, motivated by his desire to push forward with his domestic immigration policy and his “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. 

While Maduro persecuted and imprisoned militants from her political party, Vente, Machado’s political activity focused not on protecting her militants from repression, national resistance or forming a broad political front, but rather on helping — often in ways that bordered on the pathetic — to build Washington’s case against Venezuela, against Venezuelans and against Maduro.9 For his part, Trump, ignoring reports from his own intelligence services, found in Machado’s narrative and actions the ideal scapegoat to: 1) justify an immigration policy that has led to heightened conflict within US civil society; and 2) intervene militarily against a weakened and discredited enemy and initiate the US Grand Strategy pivot towards Latin America amid the current Great Power rivalry by realigning Caracas with Washington. All this while appropriating manu militari an oil tribute for “favours rendered” as the sentinel and Caesar of the catastrophic stalemate. Rather than bringing her to political power, Machado’s Faustian pact with Trumpism served to declare Venezuelans hostis humani generis and contributed to the MAGA offensive against the popular and national sovereignty of several Latin American states.

The crisis/contest phase of the US hegemonic cycle and the “Donroe doctrine”

The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, published in November 2025, states:

After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere. This “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine is a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests.10

Much ink has been spilled in Latin America over the past two centuries regarding the Monroe Doctrine. In most cases, it has been to support, in a victimising and essentialist tone, the denunciation that US imperialism has a providential motivation in Latin America. Here, on the contrary, I want to put forward a situational interpretation of the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

The US hegemonic cycle has entered its third phase, the crisis/contest phase, following the geopolitical failure of the Project for a New American Century in the Middle East and, above all, the Great Recession that began in 2007. As Immanuel Wallerstein has argued, the balance-of-power or crisis/contest phases of hegemonic cycles are “a period of slow but steady disintegration of world order, the previous order.”11 The modern inter-state system is today not heading towards any kind of “world order”, but rather towards systemic chaos, in one of the two senses given to the concept by Giovanni Arrighi: a conflict that arises “because a new set of rules and norms of behaviour is imposed on, or grows from within, an older set of rules and norms without displacing it.”12 Alluding to the classic phrase of the master Thucydides, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently pointed out in Davos that at such moments within the modern interstate system, it is not just the weak but also middle powers who suffer. How do they suffer? They suffer both as a result of the logic of territorialist power and from the segmentation of the world market among Great Powers. Arrighi’s conceptual distinction between the logic of capitalist power and the mode of territorialist domination is essential to interpreting the situation:

Territorialist rulers tend to increase their power by expanding the size of the container. Capitalist rulers, in contrast, tend to increase their power by piling up wealth within a smaller container only if it is justified by the requirements of the accumulation of capital.13

Trump 2.0’s territorialism — and, of course, the intervention in Venezuela with the intention of turning it into a “reliable partner,” economically and politically — must be interpreted in light of the demands of capital accumulation in the context of the balance-of-power phase. In other words, the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, with its respective territorialism, is the flip side of containment in East Asia; the commitment to the logic of capitalist power in Asia corresponds to the commitment to the logic of territorialist domination in the Western Hemisphere. Hence, the contrast between territorialist and harsh words dedicated to the Americas in the National Security Strategy quoted above and the tone of capitalist power logic dedicated towards Asia: “In the long term, maintaining American economic and technological preeminence is the surest way to deter and prevent a large-scale military conflict.”14 The demands of global capital accumulation and the US–China hegemonic conflict has led to territorialism and the expansion of power and resources in the Americas.

Trump’s regime change for oil in Venezuela, or geopolitical and geoeconomic realignment of Caracas, has geostrategic incentives if Venezuela’s integral state crisis is situated amid the crisis/contest phase of the US hegemonic cycle. The weakening of sources of social power in Caracas created a low-cost window of opportunity for the Trump administration to rebalance its withdrawal from Asia with a realignment in the Western Hemisphere, starting with an oil-producing state in crisis capable of offering an example to the entire continent of what the weak will suffer if they do not adapt to US interests in this phase of Great Power rivalry.

The transformation of inter-entreprise competition into inter-state competition on a global scale is a recurring pattern of the modern world-system in the crisis/contest phase.15 Prior to the Trump 2.0 administration, trends and countertrends could be used to debate whether a turning point had been reached, regarding when competition between capital accumulation agencies became competition between states, with their respective territorial, militaristic and industrialist escalation. However, the Trump 2.0 administration marks a point of no return from inter-company competition to Great Powers competition for territory, natural resources and supply chains. The segmentation of the world market, which for Arrighi was a key element in the transition from the previous phase of crisis/contest to collapse/transition, and from there to war pandemonium seems to now be an irreversible trend in the current crisis/contest phase.

Territorialism over a country with Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, regardless of their quality, is alluring for US oil corporations in a scenario of global market segmentation, as it guarantees the management and disposal of resources essential for the valorisation of downstream oil, where global inter-corporate competition in the oil industry and inter-state struggle for capital in search of investment and profits converge. Amid Great Power rivalry and global market segmentation, the benefits of controlling Venezuela’s oil fields for the US state include expelling geopolitical competitors from accessing it as, paradoxically, secondary sanctions reduced the cost of Venezuelan oil for China due to discounts. For US oil corporations, Caracas’s geopolitical realignment may offer them the everlasting possibility of competing for profits through accumulation by dispossession: profits from vibration rather than production. In other words, the possibility of generating substantial profits leveraged on the artificial reduction of costs and the manu militari conversion of the Venezuelan nation’s property rights into the private property rights of corporations. Political capitalism hand-in-hand with international Caesarism? Exploitative domination?

In an article dedicated to analysing the doctrinal bases of Trump 2.0’s foreign policy, I argued that to understand his actions, it is necessary to abandon the restricted and euphemistic use of the term “regime change” and adopt a broader one with three meanings: 1) a violent overthrow of a foreign government; 2) a structural transformation in the mode of regulation and regime of accumulation in a peripheral and semi-peripheral country to the benefit of a Great Power; or 3) the establishment of an international or regional order by a Great Power.16 The “regime change” taking place in Venezuela — accelerated by the January 3 military intervention — falls into the second category: Caracas’s realignment with Washington’s geopolitical and geoeconomic interests. Regime change for oil? Yes, but also for the sake of establishing a protectorate.

The success of international Caesarism and of the establishment of a protectorate as a way of resolving the catastrophic stalemate in Venezuela will be determined by the dialectic revolution/restoration and which element predominates. In Gramsci’s words, “it is revolution or restoration which predominates.”17 The US protectorate, as a form of resolving the catastrophic stalemate between passive and active restoration, does not escape the fact that “restorations in toto do not exist.” On the contrary, it might unleash the progressive power that until now had been overshadowed by the catastrophic dialectic of the struggle between two restorations.

Debating Venezuela Venezuela Donald Trump US imperialism latin america
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