I was wondering how early in 2026 — as I’d been warning — I was going to be writing about an invasion of Venezuela. Turns out it’s right out of the gate. In a lightning invasion, on the third night of the year, the U.S. military bombed and raided the South American country, capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, along with his wife, Cilia Flores. At 11:23 a.m. EST this morning, Trump staffers posted a picture of the deposed president — blindfolded, ear-muffed, and handcuffed like a Guantánamo detainee — in custody on the USS Iwo Jima¹:

Trump then announced that the United States will be running Venezuela indefinitely — “until such time that we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.” He acknowledged this could take years.

I spent most of the last decade decoding and contextualizing the history of U.S. coups and colonial occupations all over the world, and particularly in Latin America. (Sorry/not sorry for the plug, but if there was ever a time to read on Gangsters of Capitalism, it’s now.) This time I don’t have to. As is often his wont, Trump openly bragged about his motivations for embarking on a war of regime change in today’s press conference at Mar-a-Lago.²

That speech mostly took place in the realm of total fiction. Trump repeated his lies that Venezuela in general and Maduro in particular are among the world’s principal drug traffickers (not even close), that each alleged drug boat whose occupants Trump’s lieutenants have illegally murdered at sea saved “25,000 American lives,” and that Maduro had effectively staged an invasion of the U.S. with inhabitants of his prisons and “insane asylums,” in the form of the criminal gang Tren de Aragua. (Trump’s own intelligence agencies dispute his assertion that Maduro runs the gang.) He and his aides claimed to be reasserting allegedly dormant (when?) American power — with an eye toward China, Iran, and perhaps Russia — joyfully repeating the moniker “Don-roe Doctrine.”³ He also flung his own imperial boomerang, rhetorically tying in his ongoing domestic campaign of secret police violence and slow-motion ethnic cleansing against the nonwhite residents of American cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. — a campaign his lawyers have tried to justify using his war powers, which may now get a boost.⁴

But the one concrete thing he kept coming back to was oil. Venezuela has the world’s largest proven reserves, larger even than Saudi Arabia’s. Trump claimed Venezuela “stole our oil” — an incoherent claim that nonetheless points to a real bone of contention between Washington and Caracas. (Venezuela nationalized its oil in the 1970s, but U.S. corporations profited nonetheless. After Hugo Chávez took power in 1998—and survived a U.S.-backed coup in 2002—he ordered multinationals to accept 60% state control. ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips refused and left; their assets were seized. Chevron accepted and remains.)

So whereas it was once high social treason to make such claims about the Gulf or Iraq wars, Trump emphatically made it plain: this is in large part a war for oil. “We're going to have our very large United States oil companies go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure and start making money for the country,” he said. “And we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so.”

This is keeping in part and breaking in part with Trump’s rhetoric over the years. Though his supporters and centrist newspaper columnists long refused to hear it, Trump has never been shy about his fetish for military conquest. He supported the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003; his main complaint about that war, as repeated on the campaign trail in 2016, was that we “didn’t take the oil.” But he did maintain, and profit politically from, an opposition to “nation-building,” riding on the resentment caused principally by the collapse and blowback from the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.⁵

Trump insisted that, actually!, a foreign war and occupation will actually uphold the principles of “America First.” “We want to surround ourselves with good neighbors. We want to surround ourselves with stability. We want to surround ourselves with good energy,” he said. It’s an inversion of the “no more foreign wars” principle that only makes sense if you’ve been cooking your brain in right-wing conspiracy circles that posit that the last century and a quarter of America’s foreign wars were for foreigners’ benefit, and not principally those of American elites.

When a reporter asked about the “mixed results” of U.S. intervention and coups in Latin America, Trump responded: “Not with me.” (We’ll see, sir!) No one thought to follow up about war games conducted during Trump’s first term, which showed, unsurprisingly, that toppling the Maduro regime would result in “chaos for a sustained period of time with no possibility of ending it,” likely requiring the deployment of tens of thousands of U.S. troops.

Asked what a sustained U.S. occupation of Venezuela would cost, Trump replied, fancifully, nothing. "It won’t cost us anything,” he said, “because of the money coming out of the ground.” (We now get to see what Trump’s “keep the oil” strategy for Iraq would have looked like.) He further claimed that increased oil production thanks to U.S. investment will somehow help Venezuelans, and U.S. businesses, as well as the U.S., as “reimbursement for the damage caused to our country.” This is contradictory, and ignores the actual history—indeed, falling oil prices and U.S. sanctions, not new state controls, are most responsible for Venezuela's economic crisis and the international migration that followed. This argument can only work as a permission structure for Trump supporters squeamish about abandoning their former principles and rooting for the occupation of another country.

What does this mean for international politics? Trump and his acolytes, who lined up to lather him in autocrat style, claim they are putting the world on notice that America is “back.“ Trump tied the Venezuela strikes in with last year’s airstrikes on Iran, repeating his illusory claim that he has “nearly” achieved “peace in the Middle East.” (Israel has killed over 400 Palestinians during the “ceasefire” in Gaza; Trump is elsewhere threatening new strikes on Iran since — surprise! — the June war didn’t really end their nuclear program.)

Marco Rubio seized the moment to issue veiled threats to the country he really wants above all to bomb and invade, his parents’ native Cuba, saying “If I lived in Havana, I would be concerned, at least a little bit.” Trump, feeling emboldened, also talked about extending the regime change war to Colombia, claiming, without evidence, that President Gustavo Petro is “making cocaine … [and] sending it into the United States, so he does have to watch his ass.”