The Fossil Fuel Empire Strikes Back

Today on TAP: Not all our foreign adventures have been crudely about material gain. But this one sure is.

https://prospect.org/2026/01/06/fossil-fuel-empire-strikes-back-trump-venezuela-oil/


A protester holds a banner with a caricature of Donald Trump drinking Venezuelan oil during a rally in front of the U.S. embassy in Madrid, January 5, 2026. Credit: David Canales/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images

In the late 1960s, as the Vietnam War bloodily dragged on with no prospect of ending, the actions and theories of a small number of longtime war protesters grew desperate and rather apocalyptic. It was not until the end of the ’60s that I began to hear some of my comrades conclude that the reason for the government’s irrational persistence had to be the basest of material concerns. Specifically, that we were in Vietnam for the oil.

Vietnam remains a huge blot on our nation’s shield, but that said, we weren’t there for the oil, for the rather basic reason that Vietnam doesn’t really have any appreciable amount of oil. Our gunboat diplomacy—more accurately, our B-52 diplomacy, which played a large role in the violent deaths of several million Vietnamese, most of them civilians—was the result of the worst possible application of our anti-communism, but no one except arms contractors expected to get rich from our holding on to that beleaguered nation.

Our first Gulf War—in which Bush the Father kept Saddam Hussein’s forces from taking over oil-rich Kuwait—fundamentally was about oil, but his son’s Gulf War, which was much longer and costlier, was more about a son’s pique at Hussein threatening his pop, and neocon fantasies of creating regular capitalist allies, with at least a Potemkin Village’s version of democracy, in the Arab world. To ensure that conversion, Bush deployed a number of Republican operatives to Baghdad once it was captured, whose ineptitude was so cosmic that the nation quickly became a semi-vassal of Iran.

Donald Trump’s anointed viceroys watching over Venezuela appear no less inept and even less oriented to democracy than Bush’s Baghdad brigade: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and all-around consigliere Stephen Miller (Trump’s very own Himmler). More strikingly still, by keeping the Maduro regime in place and refusing to support the actual winner of the nation’s 2024 presidential election, Trump is making clear that democratization has nothing to do with our seizing control. None of Maduro’s political prisoners have been released as a result of our ousting him, but the doors have been opened to our oil companies. Say what you will of Trump, he completely justifies the crude semi-Marxist interpretations of our foreign policy that began to circulate around 1969. Actually, we have to go back a lot further than that to find the appropriate analogy for Trump’s foreign relations. I haven’t yet decided if he’s the heir of the Romans who violently dominated the Western world two millennia ago, or the barbarians who pulled Rome down. I’ll let you know when I figure it out.

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