Trump’s Venezuelan Gambit and the Reordering of Global Oil Geopolitics
In the pre-dawn hours of January 3rd 2026, US special forces executed an audacious raid on Venezuelan military installations, capturing President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and whisking them aboard the USS Iwo Jima for trial in New York on narcotics-terrorism charges. This swift operation, detailed in President Trump’s subsequent press conference, was no mere act of retribution against a narco-state regime. It marked the bold application of what the administration calls the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, a policy pivot outlined in the November 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS).
Trump’s removal and capture of Nicolás Maduro and the de facto US takeover of Venezuela’s oil future mark a decisive reordering of the global petroleum chessboard, tilting power toward non‑OPEC producers in the Americas and sharply curbing the room China and Russia once had to use Venezuela as a strategic beachhead in the Western Hemisphere. This is not only a regime change; it is an energy‑security doctrine in action, with the Monroe Doctrine now explicitly applied to pipelines, refineries and heavy‑oil upgraders as much as to naval squadrons and missile bases.
To read the rest of this article, you need to donate at least £5/month or £50/year to the Daily Sceptic, then create an account on this website. The easiest way to create an account after you’ve made a donation is to click on the ‘Log In’ button on the main menu bar, click ‘Register’ underneath the sign-in box, then create an account, making sure you enter the same email address as the one you used when making a donation. Once you’re logged in, you can then read all our paywalled content, including this article. Being a Donor will also entitle you to comment below the line and access the premium content in the Sceptic, our weekly podcast. A one-off donation of at least £5 will also entitle you to the same benefits for one month. You can donate here.
There are more details about how to create an account, and a number of things you can try if you’re already a donor – and have an account – but cannot access the above perks on our Premium page.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Good article. It’s a complicated subject, that’s for sure although with the deputy stepping up, what is there to genuinely effect change?
Maduro’s “capture” was a negotiated deal.
The people replacing him have agreed to follow US orders. Whether they will do so or not remains to be seen. If they don’t, it will get ugly for them. Time will tell how it plays out.
Thanks. I have been out of the loop on this and it makes sense that access to the country was facilitated.
Thank you for this analysis.
The whole thing seems to be a masterstroke.
Let’s hope it goes roughly according to plan.
This article presents an excellent analysis which you will never see in the fake news. It was indeed a masterful operation with 2 fingers to the fiction of international law, whatever that might mean (besides nothing). Oil realignment, end OPEC.
You have to hand it to Trump he has made an utter fool of the NATO European poodle political class. . First Biden successfully encourages Europe to engage in their Russian regime change project and place huge sanctions on Russia. Then Baltic energy pipelines mysteriously blowup and German and European industry is crippled with the result of having to buy expensive US LNG. German industry is moving to the US and China. Then Trump gets elected and wants peace in Ukraine with the result that Europe takes ownership of Uncle Sam’s proxy war because they can’t see a way out without looking foolish. They and have sent all their spare armaments to Ukraine and they now have to buy armaments from Uncle Sam to keep the war going.
Thanks Dr Doshi for this helpful analysis. So many commentators on the subject of Venezuela and Trump’s interventions are ill-informed or take a shallow view of what is a very complex question. There are a few good ones apart from this author and I would urge anyone interested to listen to the latest “Conflicted” podcast with Aimen Dean. It’s titled the crisis in Iran but has very good discussion about Venezuela (sorry but I don’t seem able to copy and paste the link!).
Also add in the 2020 Election fraud, an important node was Caracas and Ven was money laundering and supporting the US Demon party and various communist terrorist groups in the EUrinal and UK
Venezuela interferring in American voter fraud. I thought it was supposed to be Russia that was involved in that – suppose it depends who tells the story. Are there not American people/organisations quite capable of doing that themselves on their own soil.
I suppose oil prices will fall further and make renewables and therefore manufacturing relatively more expensive, another competitive disadvantage.
“Renewables” are cheap, in fact so cheap and getting cheaper that soon they will be paying us to use them.
Thanks for this, Mr Doshi. The details I was needing.
Sadly for Trump, none of this treasure will become available during his presidency.
With another president in charge, arguably less belligerent than Trump, then the opportunity exists for the then president of Venezuela to nationalise the newly rebuilt oil industry, following the pattern already set.
I think that Trump takes the long view.
As in other countries it is up to the voters to continue electing competent patriotic politicians and avoid the others.
EU top dogs are not elected and in too many nations the rules make if almost impossible for new parties/people to get elected. If EU member states elect governments the unelected EU bureaucrats don’t like they keep them out so their friends can take over.
The biggest problem remains the political attachment to Net Zero. Without that we could all have prosperity.
Net Zero is the energy strategy of industrialised countries that don’t have oil and gas and don’t have the military might any longer to go and take it from others. (E.g. Germany, the UK).
It’s their last desperate attempt to be relevant at a global scale. Without a world that collectively embraces NetZero, the old European powers are destined to wilt away and become ordinary mid tier nations.
We have coal, oil and gas and could find lots more, and we can buy it, and we can develop nuclear if needed. We have excellent human capital, legal system, infrastructure. We have everything we need to prosper except for the political will and common sense, patriotism and desire of many voters. Our problems are of our own making and only we can solve them, and fantasy energy is not going to help.
As I see it there are two perspectives. One, the perspective of ordinary people. The other, the perspective of our ruling class who have also been the global ruling class for about 150-300 years.
From the perspective of ordinary people, what you say is true and makes perfect sense. We don’t care who produces our energy, who we buy it from, so long as it’s cheap and reliable.
From the perspective of our rulers though, who produces and sells energy is everything because it confers enormous wealth and power. And that is what ruling classes care most about. Accruing wealth and exercising the power it gives. They care about ordinary people only in so far as they are docile and pacified enough to not challenge them.
I see in almost every policy of our government either an effort to maintain their status as the global ruling elite or as an effort to pacify and control the general population. And through that prism, everything I see seems pretty coherent.
Yes, except I think this will backfire on them, or some of them, eventually. But I guess history shows that they tend not to worry about that stuff too much
I sure hope it does.
I think it’s almost inevitable but I may not live to see it. I console myself with the notion that I sleep better than they do and that I’m happier.
The EU was designed by its first Commission President, the former elite Nazi lawyer, Walther Hallstein, to be instrinsically undemocratic. His book, Die Europäische Gemeinschaft, 1973, Econ Verlag, ISBN 3 430 13898 1 explains this. The first version appeared in 1969 entitled, Der unvollendete Bundesstaat. I have a copy of the fourth edition in German. This is not a club to which I want to belong.
This a highly biased article by Doshi who obviously has no time for the welfare of the majority in Venezuela who voted for Chavez then Maduro to govern Venezuela for the benefit of its people and not for the benefit of US and multinational oil companies. The oil industry and the economy of Venezuela declined because of 25 years of deliberate US sanctions whereby the US refused to send any spare parts to maintain the oil industry. US sanctions were also designed so that “socialism” would not succeed in Cuba, Venezuela and anywhere else in the world. Doshi may know about the oil industry, but when it comes to “geopolitics” there are others who are more knowledgeable about Venezuela. Here are two examples. “Venezuela has been a target because it offers an alternative vision of how society should be organized. Under Hugo Chavez, Venezuela nationalized its vast oil industry and used the profits to fund massive social welfare programs, including free healthcare, education and housing. Under Chavez, poverty was reduced by half, and extreme poverty was reduced by three-quarters. Illiteracy was eradicated, and the student population grew to become the fourth largest in the world. Venezuela became an inspiration around… Read more »
Here are another two extracts from articles which differ from Doshi. “The mainstream media covered Venezuela non-stop yesterday. They many times mentioned Delcy Rodríguez, Vice President, because Trump stated she is now in charge. They never mentioned that 2026 marks the 50th anniversary of the torture to death of her father, socialist activist Jorge Rodríguez, by the CIA-backed security services of the US-aligned Pérez regime in Venezuela. That would of course spoil the evil communists versus nice democrats narrative that is being forced down everybody’s throats. Nor did they mention that the elected governments of Hugo Chávez reduced extreme poverty by over 70%, reduced poverty by 50%, halved unemployment, quadrupled the number receiving a state pension and achieved 100% literacy. Chávez took Venezuela from the most unequal society for wealth distribution in Latin America to the most equal. Nor have they mentioned that María Corina Machado is from one of Venezuela’s wealthiest families, which dominated the electricity and steel industries before nationalisation, and that her backers are the very families that were behind those CIA-controlled murderous regimes. Economic sanctions imposed by the West – and another thing they have not mentioned is that the UK has confiscated over £2 billion… Read more »
And another extract from a timely article today….. “Washington’s goal is to make Venezuela once again a haven for private US capital. If the new acting president, Delcy Rodriguez, refuses, then Trump has made it clear Venezuela will be kept as an economic basket-case, through continuing sanctions and a US naval blockade, until someone else can be installed who will do US bidding. Venezuela’s crime – one for which it has been punished for decades – is trying to offer a different economic and social model to America’s rampant, planet-destroying, neoliberal capitalism. The deepest fear of the West’s political and media class is that western publics, subjected to permanent austerity as billionaires grow ever richer off the back of ordinary people’s immiseration, may rise up if they see a different system that looks after its citizens rather than its wealth elite. Venezuela, with its huge oil reserves, could be precisely such a model – had it not been long strangled by US-imposed sanctions. A quarter of a century ago, Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, launched a socialist-style “Bolivarian revolution” of popular democracy, economic independence, equitable distribution of revenues, and an end to political corruption. It reduced extreme poverty by more than… Read more »
Interesting counter info – thanks for sharing. It’s clearly a complex situation. Given the described vast improvements in society described, surely they would be able to manufacture the spares they needed to keep the oil flowing, or do you think this was pointless due to sanctions stopping the sales / shipping of oil outside of the country?
US clearly has its eye on the oil longer term, which from a US point of view makes sense vs the Chinese or Russians getting it…
US Sanctions have crippled their oil industry which has in turn created poverty.
Even if Venezuela made their own spare parts the poverty has seen piracy of equipment and cables etc. making the situation worse.
The US sanctions have included the chemicals needed to create diesel which has resulted in power blackouts and reduction in industrial capacity and farming.
The only thing that would help Venezuela is the lifting of sanctions that the US and its vassals would only do when the US has total control over Venezuela.
Good analysis. Too many take a rather simplistic view of Trump as some reckless, thoughtless, tyrant who crashes around like a bull in a china shop. They pay too much attention to what he says, and not enough to what he does and why. He is much smarter than his TDS afflicted detractors believe, and certainly smarter than they.
He correctly identified China as a big threat in the making. It is a plunderer of resources being a command economy, and that is not good for the World, nor is its evident ambition to dominate the World economically and militarily.
Dr Doshi: although of course you’re right to stress the huge potential advantage for the US, the West – and not least the Venezuelans – of the revival of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, I believe Doug Stokes piece in Monday’s Spectator makes an even more important point. Here’s a key extract: ‘Washington did not decapitate the Venezuelan state because it needs more oil; it did so because it is preparing itself for a possible war with China’. What he argued was that the US primary objective is to protect its currently vulnerable southern flank. He concluded: ‘The Trump administration has signalled that it may tolerate chaos in the Donbas or the Levant. Still, it will not tolerate a peer competitor establishing a forward operating base in the Americas.’ I would go further and suggest that the rumoured US plan to take control of Greenland arises from a similar intention to protect its equally important north-eastern flank. In this case, however it’s most unlikely to use force. What I think is likely to happen is some sort of ‘deal’ – e.g. one that could for example seriously enrich Greenland’s tiny population (about 50,000 people, mainly Inuits). If the US succeeds in… Read more »
Thank you for this excellent analysis-it’s certainly the best I’ve seen.
Very informative piece, thanks.