The Mises Wire had just barely published my article criticizing the National Security Strategy when hours later the news broke that the Pentagon had escalated Trump’s undeclared war against Venezuela by attacking the Fuerte Tiuna military base and various air defense installations in and around Caracas, killing 40 Venezuelans and abducting President Nicolás Maduro and his wife to put them on trial in the United States.
In the press conference shortly after his blatant crimes against peace and fresh violations of the US Constitution, Trump proclaimed “We will run Venezuela” (“we” referring to his fellow war criminals standing on the stage behind him) while helping himself to Venezuelan oil, ostensibly to boost its production and make Venezuelans richer, but also to make certain American oil companies richer too. The latter are the real beneficiaries of this action because nobody with an ounce of common sense believes that abducting Maduro will have the slightest impact on the availability of illegal narcotics in America. This war is about extorting oil revenues.
In spite of Trump’s bluster, he and his team of war-mongers (who managed to bomb 7 countries in 2025 without constitutionally-required declarations of war from Congress) are not actually running Venezuela yet. As I write this, unrepentant Maduro regimists, led by Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, are still in power. As I explained in my previous article, legacy military methods of blitzkrieg and “shock-and-awe” air strikes have given way to “boots on the ground” slugfests featuring missiles, drones, rocket-propelled grenades, roadside bombs, minefields, automatic rifles, etc. If one wants to really control a foreign country against determined opponents armed by hostile powers like Russia or China, it would take a lot more than just brief hit-and-run Delta Force raids to get the job done. The Pentagon would have to deploy large occupation forces and wage the sort of “forever wars” that most Americans detest and that the American economy can no longer sustain.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared the next day on NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’s Face the Nation, and ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos to argue that the Venezuelan government may be more compliant now that Maduro is out of the way. Rubio insisted that the ongoing quarantine on Venezuelan oil would achieve this outcome, while chiding critics for allegedly conflating Latin American conditions with those encountered in Libya, Iraq, or Afghanistan, where prior regime-change operations famously didn’t lead to the outcomes desired by the foreign policy establishment.
Rubio offered no evidence that Vice President Rodríguez or her Interior and Defense Ministers (both hard-core Chavismo stalwarts) are any more eager to do Trump favors than Maduro was. However, there are a couple of senses in which Rubio is correct about Latin America differing from the Middle East. First, with its jungles and mountains, and its long borders with neutral to mildly Trump-unfriendly states, Venezuela more closely resembles the former South Vietnam than any place in the Middle East.
Second, Latin America has a long history of military dictatorships being installed to act as junior partners of American imperialism, which created problems quite apart from the risks of “forever wars” breaking out. Over a century ago when the imperialistic Roosevelt and Lodge Corollaries were added to the Monroe Doctrine and America was actively grabbing and exploiting overseas colonies of its own, Smedley Darlington Butler served in the US Marine Corps for 34 years at the cutting edge of numerous Latin American and East Asian interventions. He received two Medals of Honor and three other medals for his heroism, and rose to the rank of Major General.
A few years after his retirement in 1933, Butler gave a speech denouncing his own military career, characterizing himself as having been “a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers.” Major General Butler made these observations about the wars he had fought in:
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
Note that Butler wasn’t complaining about these interventions failing to achieve their intended objectives and instead descending into “forever wars”; rather, he was complaining about the intended objectives themselves. The United States government was systematically plundering other countries within its sphere of influence for the benefit of a narrow set of business interests, all paid for by the blood of American soldiers and money of American taxpayers, and all bound to stir up the undying enmity of Latin Americans against Yankee aggressors.
Sordid relations between the US and Venezuela of this type got their start in 1895 in connection with a centuries-old border dispute between Venezuela and the British colony to its east, British Guiana (now the independent state of Guyana). With several gold fields having been discovered in the disputed territory and British mining companies moving in to most of them, Venezuela’s dictator asked American President Grover Cleveland to enforce the Monroe Doctrine and kick the British out. Instead of doing that, Rubio’s predecessor, Richard Olney, declared that “the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law” and referred the dispute to a rigged arbitration tribunal that awarded most of the gold fields to Britain in 1899. When Venezuela was blockaded by several European powers in the winter of 1902 for not paying its debts and again appealed to the US for enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine, it got cold-shouldered again by President Theodore Roosevelt.
In 1908, Venezuela got a brutal dictator, General Juan Vicente Gómez, who managed to learn the fine art of being sufficiently “compliant” to Yankee imperialists well enough to stay in power for 27 years until he died of old age (an unusual cause of death among Latin American dictators). Gómez granted oil concessions to members of his family around Lake Maracaibo, which, in turn, were sold to foreign oil companies with suitable kick-backs to the general and hefty royalty payments to the general’s government. Such was the original nature of American oil “investments” in Venezuela and its leader.
The big winners in the Maracaibo basin were Standard Oil of New Jersey (the corporate successor of the original Standard Oil Trust, and later renamed Exxon), the Royal Dutch/Shell group, and Gulf Oil; three of the seven major oil companies (the “Seven Sisters”) that dominated international distribution and refining of crude oil from the early- to mid-20th century, and which used their control over refineries and over distribution networks as well as their political, military, and banking connections and their tie-ins with each other to squeeze oil exporting countries, thus keeping their crude input prices low and their concessionary royalty payments low.
Venezuela eventually got an oil minister, Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, who figured out how to turn the tables on the Seven Sisters. Under him, Venezuela got a bigger royalty share, got refineries built in Venezuela to capture more of the downstream revenues, and teamed up with Arab oil exporters to found the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
OPEC was the real game changer, not only to obtain better crude prices for its members, but also to end numerous exploitative concessions that had been extorted from its members decades earlier by rapacious Western governments for the benefit of the Seven Sisters and Wall Street. In Venezuela’s case, the legislature simply passed a law in 1971 prohibiting the renewal of concessions that were already due to expire in 1983, and the concessionaires almost immediately abandoned their investments, obliging the Venezuelans to take over ahead of schedule. Trump and his minions (like Stephen Miller) characterize this as theft of American investments. Perhaps, but who were the original thieves who used political means to dominate access to undeveloped resources in the first place, and who paid for these political means? Major General Butler’s analysis answers these questions.
