President Donald Trump triumphantly announced yesterday that the U.S. Coast Guard had seized a large oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, while failing to identify it by name or specify where it had been intercepted, typical omissions for the Ignoramus-in-Chief. This is but the latest news accompanying the massive U.S. military build-up in the Caribbean, which includes aircraft carriers, fighter jets, landing ships, and tens of thousands of U.S. troops. At the same time, Trump threatened Colombian President Gustavo Petro that he "could be next" in line for regime change, after Washington (presumably) overthrows the Venezuelan government.
The attack against Venezuela's principal revenue source is yet more evidence that Washington's military build-up around the South American nation has nothing to do with combating drug trafficking, but rather, is motivated by an imperial desire acted on by the last five U.S. administrations to expel the Bolivarian Revolution from power and install a puppet regime in Caracas that will hand over the largest oil reserves on the planet to Western corporations.
This lust for hydrocarbons, which should have been subdued some time ago in order to deal with growing climate break-down, has returned full force with the second coming of Trump and his determination to extract and burn off as much oil as possible while eliminating even the most modest efforts to ameliorate the climate crisis. In July, for example, the Trump administration eliminated a regulation limiting toxic emissions from cars and power plants, and a week ago rolled back automobile fuel efficiency standards. This will aggravate the ecological crisis by increasing fuel consumption and carbon-dioxide production.
Though suppressing the drug trade is clearly not motivating U.S. policy, one can reasonably wonder whether the ongoing attacks on Bogota and Colombia are part of a Washington plan to take possession of existing cocaine-trafficking routes and open up new ones, for example, through "liberated" Venezuela, which territory at the present time doesn't even accommodate five percent of the drug flow coming out of Colombia. It is worth keeping in mind that the White House and its intelligence agencies have a well-established record of working with governments that publicly take a hard rhetorical line against drug-trafficking in order to hide their own criminal involvement in it, as occurred with Felipe Calderon in Mexico and with the Colombian paramilitaries under Alvaro Uribe. In the Calderon case, even the U.S. concedes that strongman Genaro Garcia Luna (secretary of public security under Calderon) was directing narco-trafficking while heading the agencies tasked with combating it.
As noted by Luis Hernandez Navarro in the Mexican daily La Jornada, the rising prospects of Uribe governing Colombia again through a figure-head following next year's elections give the Trump administration an incentive to close the noose around Venezuela, the last unfallen domino Washington needs to achieve complete control of the narcotics trade in Central and South America.
At the same time, Hernandez notes, the open contempt for Latin American and Caribbean sovereignty reflects Trumpian confidence in being able to perpetrate whatever atrocities Washington needs to with impunity, which appears to be an accurate assessment given the lack of consequences to more than two years of wholesale slaughter in Palestine by the U.S. and Israel.
Furthermore, Hernandez goes on to point out, the presence of right-wing and extremely right-wing governments allied with Washington in Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Trinidad, and Tobago smooths the probable path to power of a Pinochet-aligned group in Chile, as well as the threat of Uribe-ism in Colombia, all of which emboldens Trump to indulge calculated imperial abuse of a divided region unable to overtly resist it, whether it takes the form of illegal sanctions, acts of piracy like the recent seizure of the oil tanker, or bombardments and massacres.
Such policies are hardly the recent invention of an aberrant Trump regime, but rather, trace back to the unsuccessful 2002 U.S.-sponsored coup d'etat against Hugo Chavez, an effort that was aborted (but never completely abandoned) when masses of poor people (the Bolivarian base) surrounded the presidential palace and successfully demanded Chavez's release from captivity. Since then, and always in the name of freedom, democracy and human rights, the U.S. has unleashed sanctions, media slander campaigns, color revolutions, oil embargoes, assassination attempts (against president Maduro), robbery of currency reserves and infrastructure, threats of invasion, armed clashes between Colombian and Venezuelan forces, and attempted military coups against Bolivarian rule, once even recognizing a puppet government of its own choosing (Juan Guaido).
These actions have caused great damage to Venezuela and immense suffering to its people, taking the form of millions of dollars in lost oil income and a large displacement of Venezuelans, who have migrated to other countries in order to survive. Meanwhile, the oligarchs of old live the high life in great palaces in Miami and Madrid waiting for Washington to restore its lost privileges.
All prior efforts to effect regime change in Caracas have run up against what appears to be an immovable object: the unity of the National Bolivarian Armed Forces, which has emerged from twenty-seven years of revolutionary effort designed to make Venezuelan sovereignty invulnerable to compromise, whether by conquest or manipulation. To date there isn't the slightest indication of an internal fissure anywhere in its considerable armor.
An important part of this unity has been the development of a new military doctrine known as Comprehensive National Defense, which confronts the U.S. military threat with three unyielding components: (1) strengthened military power; (2) deepened civilian-military union (people and army); and (3) fuller popular participation in national defense tasks.
The pre-revolutionary Venezuelan armed forces were fragmented in divisions and brigades. Hugo Chavez organized the country in regions, and insured that in each region there was a military structure with all the necessary components: Army, Navy, National Guard, popular militias, and the people. If one region comes under attack, it has the capacity to defend itself alone. Caracas has no need to move in units from somewhere else.
President Maduro takes a hands-on approach to national defense, visiting all the barracks and showing up at dawn. He freely shares with the troops, runs with them, and does military exercises with them. There is complete unity of purpose and frequent contact between the government and the troops. Many have been Chavistas since childhood, forming unbreakable bonds of loyalty to each other and the Bolivarian Revolution. They will not be easily dealt with. As Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello observes: "For the friends of Chavismo the popular militias are a diamond; for the enemies they're the worst possible news."
Foreign military intervention in Venezuela is enormously complicated, and not just because of civilian-military unity. Venezuela has weapons, manpower, determination, and land capable of sustaining prolonged popular resistance. It has modernized its weaponry, buying from China, Russia, and Iran, while also forging an alliance with those countries. In addition, it is blessed with geographical diversity measuring almost a million square kilometers, including extensive mountain ranges, dense jungles, and the long Orinoco River basin. It has 4208 kilometers of coastline, a 2341 kilometer border with Colombia, and a 2199 kilometer border with Brazil. And the popular barrios of Caracas are ratholes.
None of Venezuela's neighbors will lend themselves to being platforms for imperial war exploding on their borders.
Obviously, U.S. firepower can inflict enormous damage, but power without legitimacy is just another name for impotence.
Sources:
Luis Hernandez Navarro, "Venezuela, the Day After," La Jornada (Spanish), December 9, 2025
Luis Hernandez Navarro, "Trump: the Context of the Aggressions," La Jornada (Spanish), December 11, 2025