The slogan has shifted from “restoring democracy” to “fighting narco-terrorists,” write Jeffrey D. Sachs and Sybil Fares. But the objective remains the same.
President Donald Trump boarding Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Wednesday en route to Miami to deliver remarks at the America Business Forum. (White House/Flickr/ Molly Riley)
By Jeffrey D. Sachs and Sybil Fares
Common Dreams
The United States is dusting off its old regime-change playbook in Venezuela. Although the slogan has shifted from “restoring democracy” to “fighting narco-terrorists,” the objective remains the same, which is control of Venezuela’s oil.
The methods followed by the U.S. are familiar: sanctions that strangle the economy, threats of force and a $50 million bounty on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as if this were the Wild West.
Today, @TheJusticeDept and @StateDept are announcing a $50 MILLION REWARD for information leading to the arrest of Nicolás Maduro. pic.twitter.com/D8LNqjS9yk
— Attorney General Pamela Bondi (@AGPamBondi) August 7, 2025
The U.S. is addicted to war. With the renaming of the Department of War, a proposed Pentagon budget of $1.01 trillion, and more than 750 military bases across some 80 countries, this is not a nation pursuing peace. For the past two decades, Venezuela has been a persistent target of U.S. regime change. The motive, which is clearly laid out by President Donald Trump, is the roughly 300 billion barrels of oil reserves beneath the Orinoco belt, the largest petroleum reserves on the planet.
Map of Orinoco tar sands assessment unit by USGS, 2009. (USGS/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
In 2023, Trump openly stated:
“When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil… but now we’re buying oil from Venezuela, so we’re making a dictator very rich.”
His words reveal the underlying logic of U.S. foreign policy that has an utter disregard for sovereignty and instead favors the grabbing of other country’s resources.
What’s underway today is a typical U.S.-led regime-change operation dressed up in the language of anti-drug interdiction. The U.S. has amassed thousands of troops, warships and aircraft in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. The president has boastfully authorized the C.I.A. to conduct covert operations inside Venezuela.
The calls by the U.S. government for escalation reflect a reckless disregard for Venezuela’s sovereignty, international law and human life.
On Oct. 26, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) went on national television to defend recent U.S. military strikes on Venezuelan vessels and to say land strikes inside Venezuela and Colombia are a “real possibility.”
Florida Sen. Rick Scott, in the same news cycle, mused that if he were Nicolás Maduro he’d “head to Russia or China right now.” These senators aim to normalize the idea that Washington decides who governs Venezuela and what happens to its oil. Remember that Graham similarly champions the U.S. fighting Russia in Ukraine to secure the $10 trillion of mineral wealth that Graham fatuously claims are available for the U.S. to grab.
[In an address to the Republican Jewish Coalition on Nov. 1, Graham said “Trump is my favorite president. We’ve run out of bombs. We didn’t run out of bombs in World War II.”]
Lindsey Graham tells Republican Jewish Coalition not to worry about Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes: “I feel good about the Republican Party. I feel good about where we’re going as a nation. We’re killing all the right people and we’re cutting your taxes.”
“Trump is my favorite… pic.twitter.com/dTJPy2Uvs0
— Chris Menahan ?? (@infolibnews) November 2, 2025
Nor are Trump’s moves a new story vis-à-vis Venezuela. For more than 20 years, successive U.S. administrations have tried to submit Venezuela’s internal politics to Washington’s will. In April 2002, a short-lived military coup briefly ousted then-President Hugo Chávez. The C.I.A. knew the details of the coup in advance, and the U.S. immediately recognized the new government. In the end, Chávez retook power. Yet the U.S. did not end its support for regime change.
Chávez visiting the USS Yorktown, a U.S. Navy ship docked at Curaçao in the Netherlands Antilles, north of Venezuela in March 2002, a month before the brief coup, during UNITAS, a multi-national naval exercise conducted by U.S., Caribbean, Central, and South American naval forces. (Martin Maddock/U.S. Navy/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
In March 2015, President Barack Obama codified a remarkable legal fiction. Obama signed Executive Order 13692, declaring Venezuela’s internal political situation an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security to trigger US economic sanctions. That move set the stage for escalating coercion by the U.S.
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The White House has maintained that claim of a U.S. “national emergency” ever since. Trump added increasingly draconian economic sanctions during his first term. Astoundingly, in January 2019, Trump declared Juan Guaidó, then an opposition figure, to be Venezuela’s “interim president,” as if Trump could simply name a new Venezuelan president.
This tragicomedy of the U.S. eventually fell to pieces in 2023, when the U.S. dropped this failed and ludicrous gambit.
Guiadó and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo addressing the press in Bogotá, Colombia, in January 2020. (U.S. State Department/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
The U.S. is now starting a new chapter of resource grabbing. Trump has long been vocal about “keeping the oil.” In 2019, when discussing Syria, President Trump said
“We are keeping the oil, we have the oil, the oil is secure, we left troops behind only for the oil.”
To those in doubt, U.S. troops are still in the northeast of Syria today, occupying the oil fields. Earlier in 2016, on Iraq’s oil, Trump said,
“I was saying this constantly and consistently to whoever would listen, I said keep the oil, keep the oil, keep the oil, don’t let somebody else get it.”
Now, with fresh military strikes on Venezuela vessels and open talk of land attacks, the administration is invoking narcotics to justify regime change. Yet Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter expressly prohibits
“the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”
No U.S. theory of “cartel wars” remotely justifies coercive regime change.
Even before the military strikes, U.S. coercive sanctions have functioned as a siege engine. Obama built the sanctions framework in 2015, and Trump further weaponized it to topple Maduro. The claim was that “maximum pressure” would empower Venezuelans.
The Trump administration’s U.S. National Security Advisor John R. Bolton, left, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announce sanctions of the Venezuela oil company PDVSA, Jan. 28, 2019. (The White House, Wikimedia Commons)
In practice, the sanctions have caused widespread suffering. As economist and renowned sanctions expert Francisco Rodríguez found in his study of the “Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions,” the result of the coercive U.S. measures has been a catastrophic decline in Venezuelan living standards, starkly worsening health and nutrition, and dire harm to vulnerable populations.
The flimsy moral pretext today is the fight against narcotics, yet the real objective is to overthrow a sovereign government, and the collateral damage is the suffering of the Venezuelan people. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is.
The U.S. has repeatedly undertaken regime-change operations in pursuit of oil, uranium, banana plantations, pipeline routes and other resources: Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Congo (1960), Chile(1973), Iraq (2003), Haiti (2004), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and Ukraine (2014), just to name a few such cases. Now Venezuela is on the block.
In her brilliant book Covert Regime Change (2017), Professor Lindsay O’Rourke details the machinations, blowbacks and disasters of no fewer than 64 U.S. covert regime-change operations during the years 1947-1989! She focused on this earlier period because many key documents for that era have by now been declassified. Tragically, the pattern of a U.S. foreign policy based on covert (and not-so-covert) regime-change operations continues to this day.
The calls by the U.S. government for escalation reflect a reckless disregard for Venezuela’s sovereignty, international law and human life. A war against Venezuela would be a war that Americans do not want, against a country that has not threatened or attacked the U.S. and on legal grounds that would fail a first-year law student. Bombing vessels, ports, refineries, or soldiers is not a show of strength. It is the epitome of gangsterism.
Jeffrey D. Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the U.N. Broadband Commission for Development.
Sybil Fares is a specialist and adviser in Middle East policy and sustainable development at SDSN.
This article is from Common Dreams
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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There is an old saying, “The head always rots first on fish and large organizations, corporations, bureaucracies and other large entities.”
We can see this is true. Y’all can make make your own lists, because in this country currently their are thousands of rotting fish heads. IMO.
It is not about the oil. The USA can get all the Venezuelan oil it needs via simple trade. No hassles, no wars, no enmities. If it was about the oil, why is the USA being aggressive right/just now? There are three basic reasons why Venezuela is being target by the neocon/zionist empire.
1) Venezuela has been a staunch voice against the genocidal regime of israel. It has joined South Africa at the ICJ. It has broken diplomatic relations with the murderous regime of israel and it has spoken openly against the genocidal regime in suppott of Palestinians. Colombia is doing the same and look how Columbia is being targeted.
2) Venezuela has strong ties to Iran and has come out in support of Iran and condemned the heinous attack of Iran by the genocidal regime israel in cahoots with israel’s rottweiler the USA. Venezuela and Iran have robust economic, scientific, technological and political ties.
3) Venezuela is a key and active member of the Global Axis of Resistance against zionism.
I do not need to remind you that the foreign policy of the USA has been highjacked to serve zionist interests. Hence, the zionists are about to unleash their attack dog/rottweiler, the US of A on Venezuela.
LE PÉTROLE ? EN PREMIER LIEU.
DEPUIS 1880 LES AMÉRICAINS NEOCONSERVATEURS LES JUIFS DE L’ÉPOQUE, LORGNE SUR LA SIBÉRIE. LE SIONISME, UN TERME DES ANNÉES 1920 À NOS JOURS, QUE JE NE REPREND PAS, CAR ILS NE SONT PAS LES SEULS, A VOULOIR DOMINER LES RESSOURCES MINERAIS DANS LE MONDE ENTIER, (LES CHINOIS).
DONC LES GOUVERNEMENT AMÉRICAINS SONT SONT DES MAFIEUX, GANGSTER,S’APPUIANT SUR LES SERVICES XXX L’ARMÉS, HAÏTI EST EN SOUFFRANCE, PAS DE SECOURS, CAR PAS DE MATIÈRES PREMIÈRES.
While commentators such as Robert Vitalis (author of “Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security That Haunt U.S. Energy Policy,” published by Stanford University Press in 2020, who has been a prominent academic critic of common assumptions regarding both the US “special relationships” with Israel and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, and resource-based explanations for US foreign policy in general) might be more inclined to support your position than those of Jeffrey Sachs and Sybil Fares in this article, there is also previous reportage regarding, e.g., CITGO and Crystallex, to take into consideration:
“[I]n a series of exclusive interviews with The Grayzone, members of Venezuela’s opposition have accused Guaidó’s US-based officials of working behind the backs of their compatriots, including of Guaidó himself, in order to set the stage for Citgo’s dissolution. ‘The road we’re at right now says ‘Losing Citgo: 5 kilometers,’’ engineer and financial expert Jorge Alejandro Rodríguez cautioned in an interview with The Grayzone. ‘So if you don’t make a U-turn towards recovering Citgo, then we’re just five kilometers away. Five kilometers is close – walking distance.’ In recent years, Citgo has been the target of multiple US lawsuits, filed by debt collectors seeking to appropriate shares from the refinery, a PDVSA subsidiary, as payment for money owed by Venezuela’s government. This July 29, a US court ruled in favor of one such company, the Canadian mining firm Crystallex, sparking fears Citgo could soon be liquidated to pay back interested parties. In the months leading up to this decision, according to some members of Venezuela’s opposition, Guaidó’s most senior advisors allowed him to take several actions which, perhaps unbeknownst to the novice politician at the time, ultimately helped strengthen Crystallex’s legal case against Citgo. […] Rodríguez has emerged as the most vocal member of Venezuela’s opposition crying foul over decisions made by certain Guaidó officials. He accuses them of ‘criminal negligence’ for their handling of the Crystallex case. Most severely implicated is José Ignacio Hernández, the lawyer Guaidó has appointed as his attorney general. Following the US court’s decision, news reports surfaced revealing that Hernández had failed to disclose his prior testimony in the case, on Crystallex’s behalf, during his confirmation process earlier this year. […] Other players include Guaidó’s US envoy Carlos Vecchio and Ricardo Hausmann, the neoliberal Harvard economist serving as Venezuela’s ‘ambassador’ to the Inter-American Development Bank. Both rushed to defend Hernández as soon as his relationship with Crystallex was exposed.”
Source:
Anya Parampil, “The Citgo Conspiracy: Opposition Figures Accuse Guaidó Officials of ‘Scam’ to Liquidate Venezuela’s Most Prized International Asset,” The Grayzone, Sep. 3, 2019
I might add that, though it is plausible to attribute Donald Trump’s recent military threats against Nigeria to primarily or even exclusively ideological motives (e.g., the influence of the evangelical lobby on his administration – see Jane Flanagan and George Grylls, “Why Trump’s Evangelical Base Wants Him to Send Troops to Nigeria,” The Sunday Times (UK), Nov. 2, 2025), and though economic- and resource-based considerations might actually restrain Trump from deploying extensive military force in that case (e.g., the influence of Massad Boulos, Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law and his diplomatic envoy for African affairs), it is interesting that Nigeria is also another petroleum-rich country that has recently been threatened with military force by Trump, as with other resource-rich countries such as Venezuela, Colombia, and Greenland (alongside commercially-important areas such as the Panama Canal and the Bab-el-Mandeb, as I have touched on in my own paper “A Conciliatory Kissinger?” presented at the 2025 James A. Barnes conference in Philadelphia, PA earlier this year and available via the TUScholarShare website).
Of course, as an aside, Trump would probably be much better-served by pressuring his NATO ally Turkey (Türkiye) to cease supplying both Boko Haram and Nigerian government-aligned forces with covert arms supplies via their partially state-owned airline were he actually interested in improving conditions there (Mustapha Bagudu, “We’re Investigating Alleged Turkish Support For Boko Haram – DHQ,” The Will (Nigeria), Nov. 26, 2019).
I sort of go along with your assessment that US interest in Venezuela is not just limited to oil. The US besides clearly having it’s eyes on natural resources like hydrocarbons and minerals also is keen on securing strategic and geo-strategic objectives besides geopolitical ones as well in Venezuela and it’s environs. In addition to the three non-oil interests you enumerated you could have also included the rising objective of keeping in check the PRC’s strategic forays across Latin America !
Do you also think bombing Iran was wrong?
Of course it was wrong , as is/was using false drug war against Venezuela.
Thanks for asking. Which is more than “defence dept” does against weak folk.
No. I think that bombing israel is always right.
There I fixed it for ya
WWll failed to stop the USSR that expanded and we had to rush to save one half of Germany and we didn’t save China and US business interests of the FDR family over the ages of Opium sales either, The two major theaters simultaneously failed.
We had to extricate our gas gunslinger B-52’s from Vietnam to the Middle East due to oil embargoes and auto gas lines.
Then came the Carter Doctrine demanding access to strategic resources. Now we don’t want access we want to control everyone else in the world’s access to all strategic resources by lies to use military force..
US foreign policy: What is our oil doing under your land?
And of course Rubio is salivating to bring down Cuba.
Venezuela has virtually no role in the South American drug trade that feeds the voracious U.S. appetite. It’s such an absurd pretext that a 12 year old would be able to see through if we had any semblance of an independent mass media.
As any progressive critic or isolationist advocate knows full well, it’s real simple why Washington invokes Manifest Destiny once again in the Western Hemisphere: Venezuela retains substantial sovereignty from the Yankee empire, it steadfastly supports Palestinian rights and levels consistently intelligent criticisms against the creepy Jewish supremacist state, and of course it sits on a gigantic amount of petroleum reserves.
People need to watch the excellent 1990 documentary film “The Panama Deception” as it’s a stunning parallel to what we’re witnessing today.
“On November 22, 1996, the US Justice Department indicted General Ramón Guillén Davila of Venezuela [originator of ‘Cartel de los Soles’ – see “Cartel of the Suns,” InSight Crime, May 14, 2022] on charges of importing cocaine into the United States. […] The CIA had hired Guillén in 1988 to help it find out something about the Colombian drug cartels. The Agency and Guillén set up a drug-smuggling operation using agents of Guillén’s in the Venezuelan National Guard to buy cocaine from the Calí cartel and ship it to Venezuela, where it was stored in warehouses maintained by the Narcotics Intelligence Center, Caracas, which was run by Guillén and entirely funded by the CIA. […] Over the next three years, more than 22 tons of cocaine made its way through this pipeline into the US, with the shipments coming into Miami either in hollowed-out shipping pallets or in boxes of blue jeans. In 1990 DEA agents in Caracas learned what was going on, but security was lax since one female DEA agent in Venezuela was sleeping with a CIA man there, and another, reportedly with General Guillén himself. The CIA and Guillén duly changed their modes of operation, and the cocaine shipments from Caracas to Miami continued for another two years. Eventually, the US Customs Service brought down the curtain on the operation, and in 1992 seized an 800-pound shipment of cocaine in Miami. […] The CIA conducted an internal review of this debacle and asserted that there was ‘no evidence of criminal wrongdoing.’ A DEA investigation reached a rather different conclusion, charging that the spy agency had engaged in ‘unauthorized controlled shipments’ of narcotics into the US and that the CIA withheld ‘vital information’ on the Calí cartel from the DEA and federal prosecutors [for some additional information on the comparable connections of later US-backed Venezuelan opposition elements to organized crime, see Tom Phillips and Joe Parkin Daniels, “Venezuela’s Guaidó Pictured with Members of Colombian Gang,” The Guardian (UK), Sep. 13, 2019].”
Source:
Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, “Meet the CIA: Guns, Drugs, and Money,” CounterPunch, Jan. 26, 2018
—
“Panama’s Gen. Manuel Noriega was a mediocre, self-serving CIA agent when George Bush approved large payments to him for his services as a spy. It was 1976, and Bush was director of the Central Intelligence Agency. At the same time, the CIA had developed separate intelligence indicating Noriega’s involvement in drug trafficking, torture of government critics and other heinous hobbies. Whether Bush ever read those reports is unclear. He says today he didn’t know Noriega was a bad boy. But the Drug Enforcement Administration knew it. As we reported in 1980, two DEA agents were investigated for allegedly proposing in 1973 that Noriega be assassinated. […] Noriega was practicing being all things to all people. He fed the CIA information about Cuba, he fed Castro information on the United States, and he dealt in drugs while assuring U.S. officials that Panama was doing everything it could to stop the trafficking. In a secret cable to Washington on April 12, 1976, U.S. Ambassador William Jorden hailed Noriega’s National Guard for playing an ‘excellent’ role in the drug war. Apparently, Jorden was as oblivious as George Bush to the fact that DEA agents had allegedly considered assassinating both [Omar] Torrijos and [his then-subordinate] Noriega because of their pervasive drug connections [for more details, see Douglas Valentine, “How the CIA Commandeered American Drug Enforcement,” AlterNet, Sep. 14, 2015; and for additional context, see Douglas Frantz and Robert L. Jackson, “The Spooks, The Kooks, and the Dictator,” Los Angeles Times, July 21, 1991, and Jane Sutton, “DEA Agents Trusted Noriega’s Men With Their Lives,” United Press International (UPI), Feb. 12, 1992]. […] Bush must have been pleased with the Noriega-CIA link because he visited Noriega and authorized payments to him. It was only last February, after a grand jury in Miami indicted Noriega on charges of accepting bribes from a Colombian drug ring, that Bush jumped on the bandwagon to denounce Noriega. Never mind that the Reagan-Bush administration tried to persuade federal officials in Miami not to charge Noriega. If Bush saw no evil and heard no evil about Noriega, the next CIA director, appointed by President Carter, deserves kudos for curiosity. Adm. Stansfield Turner said recently that he recognized Noriega as ‘an unscrupulous character’ who was ‘spying on us.’ Noriega came back into the good graces of the CIA when the Reagan-Bush administration came to Washington in 1981. Since then, he has reportedly collected $200,000 a year from the CIA — the same salary as President Reagan.”
Source:
Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, “Noriega’s Drug Links Known to CIA,” The Washington Post, Oct. 30, 1988
Cocaine Importing Agency
Investigative journalist Gary Webb did some spectacular work on this topic back in the late 1990s and the establishment press attempted to ruin his career and smeared him relentlessly. The fantastic book “Kill the Messenger” by Nick Schou explains it all.
Also, Alexander Cockburn and St. Clair’s work “Whiteout” does an excellent job detailing the insidious attacks on Webb.
Good column
Nothing new.
Geronimo