( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – Iraq and Venezuela share an obvious trait: they are oil-rich states whose resource nationalism puts them at odds with U.S. geopolitical ambitions. For George W. Bush, Iraqi oil was framed within the “peak oil” panic and U.S. dependence on foreign supplies. For Donald Trump, meanwhile, fossil fuel dominance—control over global oil supply—has been elevated into an instrument of American power. In both cases, the strategic logic is similar: whoever controls hydrocarbons controls hegemony.
The problem is that this worldview is now anachronistic. In 2024, U.S. clean energy production from wind and solar power exceeded energy produced by burning coal. Globally, the amount of installed renewable power is forecast to more than double by 2030, with China leading the way. Dick Cheney’s National Energy Report assumed that this would never happen.
As Nils Gilman and others argue, geopolitical alignments are increasingly structured by underlying energy systems. Trump’s wager on a hydrocarbon future reflects not inevitability but willful materialism—a political alignment between fossil fuel corporations and the backlash politics of the West.
Within both Iraq and Venezuela, oil also shaped internal political orders. Venezuela nationalized PDVSA in 1976. Under Hugo Chávez, oil became the backbone of a redistributive, politicized development model. In Iraq, the Baathist regime likewise used state oil revenues to consolidate power. In each case, resource nationalism obstructed U.S. and multinational corporate access, generating recurring calls for “regime change.”
The Personalist State as Enemy
In both Iraq and Venezuela, socialist or revolutionary movements ossified into personalist structures. Iraq had Saddam Hussein; Venezuela had Chávez and now Nicolas Maduro. In both contexts, opposition movements aligned with the United States in hopes of engineering regime change. Ahmad Chalabi played this role for Iraq; in Venezuela, exile communities—especially affluent, lighter-skinned populations in Florida—perform a similar function, working closely with figures such as Marco Rubio.
But the Venezuelan opposition is far more complex and internally divided than the Iraqi opposition ever was. As Steve Ellner notes, poorer and darker-skinned Venezuelan migrants with precarious legal status in the United States may fear an invasion, while wealthier, whiter Venezuelans support it. These fractures are reproduced inside Venezuela itself. And as in Iraq, threats of invasion trigger nationalist reactions that ironically strengthen the incumbent regime.
In this sense, the U.S. may be creating its own obstacle: Maduro survives because Washington threatens him.
Sanctions, Humanitarian Crises, and Manufactured Necessity
Both Iraq and Venezuela were subjected to punishing sanctions regimes that generated humanitarian catastrophes, which later served as justifications for further intervention. Iraq’s UN sanctions after the Gulf War devastated civilian life, with ambiguous but undeniably horrific consequences. Venezuela’s sanctions, targeting its oil sector, combined with domestic mismanagement to produce mass migration, hunger, and political repression.
Sanctions create the pretext they purport to remedy. Whether framed as protecting children in Iraq or “saving” Venezuelans from socialism, the logic is circular. Suffering becomes both the means and the rationale for intervention.
From Neocon Idealism to MAGA Punishment
While Bush-era neoconservatives couched intervention in the language of spreading freedom, Trump’s narrative is darker and more visceral. Bush officials warned that adversary states might obtain weapons of mass destruction and collaborate with terrorists. Trump’s administration claims that the United States is already under invasion—from criminals, drug dealers, and migrants—emanating in part from the Maduro regime. The drug war has been rhetorically elevated to counterterrorism, with cartels framed as terrorist organizations and Maduro as their state sponsor.
Although there is continuity in the effort to pair state adversaries with nonstate demons, the two cases differ in important ways. Bush promised redemption through war. MAGA promises punishment.
MAGA’s worldview requires a constant stream of enemies to discipline and degrade. Venezuela fits the script perfectly: a villainous socialist regime poisoning white Americans with drugs, aligning itself with China, and defying the Monroe Doctrine.
In this worldview, there is no contradiction between denouncing the Iraq War and escalating toward war with Venezuela. MAGA does not need coherence—only spectacle.
The Drug Pretext and Its Absurdity
The Trump administration’s purported rationale—stopping drugs “pouring in”—evaporates under scrutiny. It decries the influx of fentanyl into the United States—and, indeed, overdose deaths in the United States are overwhelming fentanyl-related, but no South American country produces or transships it. Meanwhile, the United States cut fentanyl deaths by 23 percent through treatment access and naloxone—yet Republicans cut Medicaid, the largest funder of addiction treatment.
Interdiction does not reduce supply. Killing traffickers or blowing up boats only raises prices and attracts new entrants.
Moreover, the narrative of foreign drug dealers poisoning Americans misses the deeply embedded demand for narcotic drugs in the United States. Narcotic drug consumption has long been stigmatized as an “inner city” problem, but whites have long had access to white drug markets, from cocaine and morphine in the nineteenth century to valium, quaaludes, and amphetamine in the twentieth century to opioids in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.
Thus, successful interdiction temporarily reduces the supply of targeted drugs, raises the price, and attracts new entrants into the market to meet the demand, thereby undoing the initial effects of interdiction. The development of synthetic opioids demonstrates the capacity of drug markets to restructure themselves. And it does not end with fentanyl. There is immense pharmaceutical capacity distributed around the world. Suppress fentanyl and some other substance will emerge.
Photo of Santa Fe, Caracas 1080, Miranda, Venezuela by Edgardo Ibarra on Unsplash
What Comes After Maduro?
Iraq’s invasion shattered the Baathist state, ignited sectarian conflict, and empowered Iran—outcomes directly contrary to U.S. goals. Venezuela is equally vulnerable. Maduro is the guarantor of equilibrium among competing civilian and military factions, criminal networks, and insurgent spillover from Colombia. Remove him, and Venezuela risks fragmentation, civil war, or the rise of armed factions, none of which the United States can control.
A successor government might not even command the loyalty of the armed forces.
As with Iraq, destroying the state is easy. Rebuilding is nearly impossible.
Why MAGA Might Still Choose War
Despite MAGA’s anti-interventionist rhetoric, war with Venezuela fits its deeper political logic. It distracts from domestic crises (affordability, recession, the Epstein scandal). It reasserts white innocence against racialized threats. It revives the Monroe Doctrine in competition with China. It punishes an enemy that symbolizes socialism, foreign defiance, and brown criminality. And it delivers a spectacle of power reaffirming Trump’s dominance.
This would be a war waged not for “freedom” but for punitive enjoyment—a revanchist spectacle meant to renew MAGA’s sense of grievance and entitlement. The human costs would fall overwhelmingly on Venezuelans.
For MAGA, that is not a problem. It is the point.
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