The Trump Administration Has Successfully Bullied Venezuela into Compliance

On January 3, 2026, we woke up to the news that President Donald Trump had bombed Caracas and captured Venezuelan President (Dictator) Nicolas Maduro (and his wife, Cilia Flores) and dragged him to Stewart Air Base in Newburgh, New York (Orange County) before he was escorted by helicopter to New York City for detention and trial. Although the mission, which was executed with 200 American troops on the ground in the capital city, was impressive and the United States military was able to cripple and destroy the Venezuelan regime in a matter of hours, as I have been saying for the last few months, this war (and, yes, it is a war, despite what some may claim) had nothing to do with drugs and was actually about securing oil rights in the South American nation.

Of course, there will be a show trial on display for Americans to watch live on television or through internet applications, but the drug case against Maduro will almost certainly be staged with fake evidence in order to rally the American public around the flag in favor of this regime change action. This will be similar to public hangings in the streets, Roman Colosseum gladiator battles, or 1984’s “Hate Week” military parades that got Oceania citizens to despise Eurasian or Eastasian prisoners, and this will all be for propaganda purposes. The corrupted court system will almost certainly give the Trump administration a victory that will then be used as justification for these violent actions, and the conditioned public will cheer this on and eat it up as a great military accomplishment (like the national pride that swept through during the “Shock and Awe” campaign against Baghdad, Iraq in 2003).

However, President Trump made it clear that “We’re going to get back our oil.” Furthermore the president said, “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, going to spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country…It’s not going to cost us anything because the money coming out of the ground is substantial.” In other words, this was a deep state and military-industrial complex operation (back to the neoconservatism of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama eras) to secure Venezuelan oil for American corporations (a military-oil complex, if you will). Essentially, the United States is plundering the oil and allowing corporations to steal the resources away from Venezuela, while claiming that the people of Venezuela are free and can keep a little bit of their own oil for themselves. The president’s statement was pretty blunt, “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 and people from outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela, and it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country.” To start, he ordered 30-50 million barrels of oil directly to be moved to the United States through a plan executed by the Department of Energy (under Director Chris Wright), and he (and he alone) would control the profits from this, while the new interim government would be forced to comply (Congress did not authorize this, and it is a dictatorial directive).

The Trump administration moved on rather quickly from the argument of drugs and how American lives would be saved from the lack of narcotics flowing into the United States, which, of course, very few drugs that get smuggled into the United States actually come from Venezuela (as I wrote previously, most drugs come from Mexico, Central America, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, and not Venezuela). Anyone who is not brainwashed by their pro-Trump biases knows that Operation Southern Spear was about oil and not drugs. Yet, some people will still blindly follow the president and parrot the anti-drug propaganda as justification.

Immediately following the assault on a sovereign nation, President Trump said, “We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition…We can’t take a chance that somebody else takes over Venezuela that doesn’t have the good of the Venezuelan people in mind.” Essentially, Venezuela is becoming an oil colony of the American Empire, and the people that he claims to have liberated will have no say in the matter. When an election does come around, the Trump administration will ensure that the winning candidate is a good puppet who does the bidding for American interests. Currently, Maduro’s vice president (and oil minister), Delcy Rodriguez, is being sworn in as the interim president, and she will have the choice to do what the Trump administration says or be at the receiving end of another set of airstrikes (she criticized Trump’s move as an imperialistic grab for power, but after the threat of more military action, she watered down her message and seems willing to work with the United States to have the resources exploited). In short, she is being threatened to hand over her oil to American corporations, and she knows that she will be deposed if she does not submit.

If the United States can bully weaker nations into compliance for resources (I have written much about this concept over the years) without any form of checks and balances on the executive branch, we are no better than any of the dictatorships that we condemn or the empires of the past that have a strong leader who can take any military action of his or her choice. Overthrowing the Venezuelan government is imperialism, whether you want to acknowledge it as such or not. Many people like to think that the United States is the hero in the world story, but in reality, nothing is ever that simple, and taking a country by force (and “running” it for oil production) does make you a good candidate for villain status. When in history do we ever look at an invading army as the “good guy?”

Plus, even if you do believe that what Trump did was right, the tactics were wrong. Congress was not notified, and this entire war has been conducted without any form of authorization, as Article I Section 8 of the Constitution requires (Article II solely gives the president the power to be commander-in-chief after a war has been declared, and any interpretation outside of that is lacking historical context). If you claim to be a constitutionalist and still advocate for what the president is doing, you are lying to yourself and believe, like liberals and progressives, that the Constitution can be altered when it is convenient for a specific agenda. In fact, Secretary of State Marco Rubio blatantly revealed that the administration never intended to follow constitutional procedure when he stated, “We called members of Congress immediately after. This was not the kind of mission that you can do congressional notification on…It’s just not the kind of mission you can prenotify because it endangers the mission.” President Trump said, “Congress has a tendency to leak. This would not have been good.” So, basically, because they did not feel like it, they did not notify Congress or get permission for the operation. President Trump is nothing short of a dictator who does what he wants, and Congress will sit by and do nothing in response.

For the last several months, the administration has been blowing up boats without any form of due process or confirmation that drugs were onboard any of the vessels. We also found out just after Christmas that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), likely aided by intelligence from the United States Special Operations Forces, conducted an airstrike on a “port facility” on Venezuelan “land” that was supposedly used by Tren de Aragua to traffic drugs from the coast. Plus, there had been a huge military buildup throughout the Caribbean (including in Puerto Rico) in support of the invasion. None of these things were done with the permission of Congress, but as I have alluded to several times, the CIA runs rogue and will participate in regime change operations covertly without any form of accountability. The fact that the president’s agenda in Venezuela aligns perfectly with that of the CIA is proof that he is in fact compromised to the powers that be and the deep state.

What is worse is that President Trump invoked the Monroe Doctrine in order to capture Venezuela, even joking that the new policy should be called the “Donroe Doctrine” (after himself, of course). Yet, the Monroe Doctrine was actually a foreign policy assertion that highlighted the importance of keeping European powers out of the affairs of the Americas. It was not about bullying Latin America or intervening in their internal affairs, and in fact, coauthor John Quincy Adams (who was James Monroe’s secretary of state and later became president) said, “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Yet, this is exactly what President Trump did: go against the advice of the founding fathers (including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who both warned about the dangers of such involvements). Even when pirates were seizing American ships overtly, President Jefferson had permission from Congress to wage the Barbary War, and bullying a nation for its oil is not comparable to freeing American commerce from piracy.

What about the Roosevelt Corollary, you may ask? Well, Theodore Roosvelt was an imperialist who was interested in expanding the United States’ power into any country that did not comply with American interests. He tried to build upon the Monroe Doctrine but ended up creating his own interventionist foreign policy style that included the ability to “exercise international police power” against Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. This set the precedent for the CIA’s coup operations throughout the Cold War (I have written negatively about many of these). Despite what mainstream historians will try to tell you, the Roosevelt Corollary was not the same as the Monroe Doctrine, and what Trump is doing has absolutely nothing to do with the latter (it is more in line with the Roosevelt Corollary).

In fact, the president is now considering taking similar bullying actions in Cuba, Colombia, and Denmark (he wants to steal Greenland from the United States’ ally). He stated that “Cuba is ready to fall” and that Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who deployed troops to the Venezuelan border in anticipation of refugees flooding over, may need to be removed from power. Mexico may even be next, as he weighed the possibility of striking cartel positions and said that the country needs to “get their act together.” This President Trump is very different from the one on the campaign trail, where he promised that there would be no new wars or interventions. He has done the complete opposite, and he has taken coup operations to a new level that past presidents could not have imagined.

Yet, as this turns into a new front of Cold War II that could easily escalate into World War III (something that Trump rightly criticized President Joe Biden for accelerating us toward, and yet, he is making it far worse), people still cheer this on as if barreling toward a hot war with Russia and China is a good thing. Russia and China may have sharply criticized the ouster of their ally in Venezuela, but neither has the guts to actually do anything in response or to challenge the United States on the battlefield (it is ironic that a Chinese diplomatic team met in Venezuela hours before the United States’ invasion to ensure Maduro’s support, and then, suddenly, the regime fell, and China sat and watched). China can appeal to the United Nations (UN) all that it wants and claim that this was a violation of international law (which it was), but at the end of the day, nobody will challenge the United States military. The Trump administration can keep bullying the world with impunity, and there is currently nothing to stop it (until an international force rises up that is strong enough).

However, what this does do is give false justification for China to invade Taiwan, and since the United States can just overtly overthrow any foreign government without accountability, there really is no moral high ground for the United States to stop or condemn a Chinese invasion of its neighboring island. If the invasion does happen, Trump will likely be prompted by the global elites to intervene, which will lead directly to a hot war with China (the powers that be have wanted this for a long time, and will this be the year that it finally occurs?). World War III would be almost inevitable at that point.

These are dark times, and President Trump has betrayed the American people by bypassing Congress to start new wars and continuing to put fuel on the fire set by past presidents to lead us into a large global conflict. This will also have domestic consequences (besides the obvious of potential Russian and Chinese bombs throughout American cities), and we will almost certainly see an increase in surveillance of American citizens and censorship of speech, as those are normal during times of war. Only we the people can stop this madness, as Congress is not doing anything to defend us against unconstitutional acts, and it is up to us whether we want to retake our republic or leave the United States as an empire that dominates the world without any form of accountability.

Thank you for reading, and please check out my book, The Global Bully, and website.