"Despite early appearances, the Trump administration’s abduction of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela doesn’t seem to be a regime change operation. After all, America is leaving the regime, now headed by Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, in power. As of Monday, all of Venezuela’s ruling officials aside from Maduro appear to have remained in their posts, including Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, who controls the police and was known as one of Maduro’s most fearsome enforcers.

“That’s very odd, historically, to see something like this,” said Javier Corrales, a professor at Amherst and the author of “Autocracy Rising: How Venezuela Transitioned to Authoritarianism.” “To see that you get rid of the leader, but the regime stays in place.”

But for Donald Trump, the preservation of something close to the status quo makes sense, given that his goal is extortion, not political transformation. Rather than the moralistic imperialism of George W. Bush, Trump’s foreign policy is imperialistic gangsterism. As one administration official put it to me, there’s “something refreshing about Trump just saying, ‘Yeah, we are taking the oil.’”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/opinion/trump-venezuela-regime-change.html

#USA #Trump #Venezuela #Imperialism #ExtractiveCapitalism #Maduro #Oil #FossilFuels

"This is not to dismiss the ideological or geopolitical dimensions of U.S. intervention—reviving the Monroe Doctrine, reasserting imperial spheres of influence.

But oil is the core motive behind this power play: control over the world’s largest petroleum reserves, long exploited with extraordinary returns by U.S. multinationals and their shareholders.

Maduro was a brutal and corrupt autocrat. But Trump has never had any trouble working with brutal and corrupt autocrats; such traits rarely trouble him.

The real goal of the Trump operation lies elsewhere: reclaiming Venezuela’s oil rents for the benefit of America’s economic elite—an arrangement that peaked in the 1950s, during the mythic “golden age” endlessly invoked by the MAGA movement

To understand what the White House is aiming for, one must revisit this largely forgotten history: a period of cross-border extractive capitalism pushed to its extreme, which Trump now seeks to resurrect—and possibly surpass."

https://gzucman.substack.com/p/understanding-us-intervention-in

#USA #Trump #Venezuela #Oil #FossilFuels #ExtractiveCapitalism

"Political Scientist #LalehKhalili joins us to discuss her new book, #ExtractiveCapitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy, out now from Verso."

https://thisishell.com/interviews/1861-laleh-khalili

#capitalism #extractivism #inequality #polycrisis #books #bookstodon @bookstodon

Learn about how the crisis in Iran and many of the tensions in the middle east are the result of the #ExtractiveCapitalism which has led to nearly unabated #ClimateChange.

#Iran
#ClimateCatastrophe
#war

https://mastodon.world/@paninid/114682928787916491