On January 3, Trump said that the U.S. is “going to run” Venezuela indefinitely: “We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.” He continued, even more directly, that he considers himself “in charge of Venezuela.”
No wonder Trump ignores the demands of the pro-U.S. Venezuelan opposition to play a key role in the new situation. The United States wants to “run” the country outside any international legal claim (is it an occupation or…?). It is deeply significant that the Trump administration seems to prefer to collaborate with Rodríguez (if she is able to enforce the U.S. demands) than with the key leaders of the opposition.
Why such a strange behavior? The answer is simple: The United States doesn’t care about democracy or any interest in the will of the people. Trump talks about indefinitely running the country—which means running it long enough to totally colonize it, controlling and profiting from its natural resources. The United States is going to be “very strongly involved” in Venezuela’s oil industry, according to Trump: “We have the greatest oil companies in the world, the biggest, the greatest, and we’re going to be very much involved in it.” He said he would be recruiting American companies to invest billions of dollars in the gutted industry, and that U.S. troops will have a presence in Venezuela “as it pertains to oil.”
On January 7, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the United States will sell Venezuelan oil “indefinitely,” after first selling the country’s stockpiled crude. The plan, according to Wright, is to deposit sales “into accounts controlled by the U.S. government,” which would then “flow back into Venezuela.” In yet another crazy coincidence of the opposites, giving power back to the people in Venezuela equals a new colonial expropriation of Venezuela’s vast natural resources.
In 1976, the government of Venezuela assumed control of the country’s petroleum industry, nationalizing hundreds of private businesses and foreign-owned assets, including projects operated by the American giant ExxonMobil. In 2007, Hugo Chávez, the founder of Venezuela’s socialist state, assumed control of the last privately run oil operations in the Orinoco Belt, home to the country’s largest oil deposits.
On January 3, the White House said that the operation to capture Maduro—Chávez’s successor—and his wife and fly them out of the country was justified in part by Venezuela having stolen U.S. oil.
What does all this mean? How can a country steal its own oil?
Trump wants Venezuela to return to the United States the nationalized property of the U.S. oil companies, but Venezuela did the bulk of nationalizations back in 1976, well before the Chávez era—i.e., at a time when it was still considered a “normal” Western democratic country. What Venezuela did at that time was viewed as the natural process of a nation taking control over its own natural resources. Trump’s attack is thus directed not just against the “extreme Left” but against a global process of economic decolonization. Furthermore, Trump treats the oil that U.S. companies were not able to pump as a stolen U.S. property and explicitly talks about seizing “Venezuela’s massive oil reserves” as just compensation.
To imagine a similar obscenity, one has to reach back more than two centuries to 1804, when Haiti achieved independence through a successful slave rebellion. The price it paid for this was horrible. In 1825, after two decades of embargo, France, the previous colonial master, established trade and diplomatic relations, and Haiti had to agree to pay France 150 million francs as a “compensation” for the loss of its slaves. This sum, roughly equal to the French annual budget at the time, was later cut to 90 million, but it continued to be a heavy burden that prevented subsequent economic growth. At the end of the 19th century, Haiti’s payments to France consumed around 80% of the national budget, with the last installment paid in 1947.
When, in 2004, celebrating the bi-centenary of the independence, the Lavalas president Jean-Baptiste Aristide demanded France return this extorted sum, his claim was flatly rejected by a French commission (which included the Leftist journalist and philosopher Regis Debray as a leading member!). So, while U.S. liberals pondered the possibility of providing Black Americans reparations for slavery, Aristide’s demand was ignored by France’s liberal opinion leaders, even if the extortion in this case was double: The slaves were first exploited and then had to pay for the recognition of their hard-won freedom.
Does all this not sound familiar? Remember the scandalous Oval Office confrontation with Zelensky in February 2025, where Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance demanded Zelensky express his gratitude for the U.S. help to defend Ukraine from Russian attack, and to pay for it by opening Ukraine’s natural resources to U.S. companies? So, again, you liberate a country to enslave it economically—Russia claiming the eastern part of Ukraine, the United States claiming the western part.
This is why we should follow closely European reactions to the kidnapping of Maduro. As expected, those reactions all follow the same formula: Maduro was a criminal who deserved to be deposed, but one should follow international law—as if the U.S. did not already brutally violate international law. (The same pattern can be seen in the typical West European reaction to the Israeli genocide in Palestine, which reduced the situation to expressions of worry about Israeli excesses). In Spain Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party broke with his EU partners to do what New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani did: unequivocally condemn the U.S. act.
To avoid any misunderstanding: I have nothing against arresting a criminal foreign leader, but this arrest should be grounded in a clear international legal form. In an ideal world, we should begin by arresting Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu … and Trump himself. Together with Maduro, they should all share the same cell in the International Crime Tribunal in Hague.
So what about the second of Trump’s reasons, the drugs, i.e., Maduro as the boss of a narco-cartel? The supreme irony is how the relationship between drugs and colonialism has shifted in the last two centuries. When we think of drug trafficking today, our first associations are with the evil Colombian or Mexican cartels. But there will be cartels as long as there is a big demand for drugs in the United States and other developed countries. So before saving the world from drug traffickers, we should put our own house in order.
Remember the horror of the two Opium Wars fought (not only) by the British empire against China? Statistics show that, until 1820, China was the strongest economy in the world. From the late 18th century, the British were exporting enormous amounts of opium into China, turning millions of people there into addicts and causing great damage. Chinese Emperors tried to prevent this by prohibiting import and production of opium, but in 1840 the British (together with some other Western forces), intervened militarily. The result was catastrophic: Soon after, China’s economy shrank by half.
What should interest us is the legitimization of this brutal military intervention: If free trade is the basis of civilization, then the Chinese prohibition of opium import is a barbarian threat to civilization. One cannot abstain from imagining a similar act today: Mexico and Colombia acting to defend their drug cartels and declaring war on the United States for behaving in a non-civilized way by preventing the free trade of meth, cocaine and fentanyl.
Russian reaction to Trump’s Venezuelan incursion deserves a special mention. Apropos the U.S. capture of Maduro and his wife, Russia says that such actions constitute an “unacceptable violation of the sovereignty of an independent state, respect for which is a key principle of international law.” At an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council on January 5, the Russian government put it this way:
In the current situation, it is important, first and foremost, to prevent further escalation and to focus on finding a way out of the situation through dialogue. Venezuela must be guaranteed the right to determine its own destiny without any destructive, let alone military, interference from outside.
Yes, but does not exactly the same also hold for Ukraine, which “must be guaranteed the right to determine its own destiny without any destructive, let alone military, interference from outside”? The most concise description of Trump’s action in Venezuela was written in a column by Julian Borger in The Guardian:
It accelerates the slide from a mostly rules-based world to one of competing spheres of influence, to be determined by armed might and the readiness to use it. David Rothkopf called it the ‘Putinization of U.S. foreign policy.’ Russian commentators have frequently suggested that Latin America lies in America’s domain just as Ukraine was under the Russian shadow. Vladimir Putin thinks the same of much of Eastern Europe. Xi Jinping will draw his own conclusions.
Conclusions about Taiwan, of course.
Another irony is that Trump exploded in fury on December 29 after he heard that Ukraine tried to destroy one of Putin’s residences (a piece of news later denied by the CIA itself). Hasn’t he now done the same thing to Venezuela in a much more aggressive manner? Did he not show his strength in this way? Was his act not a display of (or a reaction to) his own weakness—a weakness that has been clearly made visible in his reluctance to put strong pressure on Russia?
I have no love lost for Maduro’s regime: At least some accusations about participating in narco-traffic probably are true, and (much more importantly) Maduro personifies the utter economic and social failure of the “Bolivarian revolution,” which gave a bad name to contemporary socialist politics.
Maduro’s regime didn’t just oppress the liberal opposition: again, much more importantly, it squashed all its authentic Left critique. There is no “but” here, no addendum in the style of “Maduro’s Venezuela was nonetheless an attempt of Socialist revolution.”
The first task for those on the Left today is not to castigate Trump for his crime (which was totally expected) but to analyze the reasons why the “Bolivarian revolution” went so terribly wrong.
In spite of that, however, I think one should unconditionally condemn the kidnapping of Maduro and his wife along with the economic and social background that accompanies this act. It revives the darkest criminal past of Western colonialism, and, to add insult to injury, it does this under the guise of supporting democracy. So, to paraphrase Stalin for the nth time, one should avoid any relativization or comparison here: The answer to the question “Which is worse, Trump or Maduro?” is: both are worse.
Recall Golda Meir’s words addressed to the Arab neighbors of Israel: “We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.” Guardian columnist Owen Jones pointed out that these words of former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir are “daubed on the ruins of Lifta, a Palestinian village whose residents were murderously driven out by Zionist paramilitaries in the Nakba in 1948.” This “deep” sentence contains supreme hypocrisy: It puts the blame for our crimes on our victims.
Today’s political criminals move even a step lower: Netanyahu would never have said something similar about Gaza and West Bank Palestinians, and Trump will never say something similar about Venezuela: They both commit their crimes with direct pleasure and openly boast about them.
However, in the case of Trump and Maduro, I am nonetheless tempted to paraphrase Golda Meir: I will maybe forgive Trump the act of kidnapping Maduro, but I will never forgive him for being compelled to take a stance that may result in support for or sympathy with Maduro. The conflict between Trump’s United States and Maduro’s Venezuela is simply a false struggle, a struggle that obfuscates any authentic Left prospect.
Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher, author, cultural theorist and intellectual. He currently holds academic positions at New York University, the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London. He has authored or co-authored over 50 books on subjects from politics to philosophy. In his upcoming Liberal Fascisms (April, Bloomsbury) he explores the paradoxical nature of political populism. Foreign Policy magazine named Žižek one of its 2012 Top 100 Global Thinkers "for giving voice to an era of absurdity."
Have thoughts or reactions to this or any other piece that you’d like to share? Send us a note with the Letter to the Editor form.
Want to republish this story? Check out our guide.
