While you were sleeping off your residual New Year’s hangovers the first wee Saturday hours of 2026, President Donald Trump started his military decapitation of Venezuela’s communist dictatorship. And while you were still sleeping, the president ended it, seizing and arresting accused criminal drug trafficker Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia in fewer than 2 1/2 hours. Without a single American life lost.
If the Venezuela raid counts as a regime change war, it’s the shortest not just in American history, but in that of the entire world.
The legal basis for Operation Absolute Resolve — that the Justice Department was executing an arrest warrant for narco terrorism as it would anywhere and against any other offender — was belied as a mere pretext by the White House’s initial assertion that the United States would run Venezuela. There were indeed high-minded reasons that the neoconservatives of past generations would have used to justify the attack: that Maduro was an illegitimate leader who rigged both of his most recent elections, and that the Venezuelan people deserve to liberate themselves from the poverty created by communist incompetence democratically.
The real reason to sack Maduro was to take control of Venezuela’s oil. Not strictly so the U.S. can have it, but rather so Russia, China, and the contemporary Evil Axis cannot.
Unlike past eras of oil imbroglios, the U.S. has become a net exporter thanks to the fracking boom during Trump’s first term. If anything, under Trump’s mercantilist instincts to protect producer interests rather than consumer costs, an influx of oil supply would arguably hamper American profit margins. But the administration’s logic seems to be more oriented toward realpolitik than retail sales.
At press time, American oil futures have dipped from $60 per barrel to around $56 in the past month. The relief that domestic consumers have felt at the gas pump predates any talk of invading Venezuela. The national average for a gallon of gas has fallen below $2.80, the lowest point in almost four years. Although Trump boasted that Venezuela would hand over between 30 million and 50 million barrels of oil to American markets, that’s only equivalent to about three days of our domestic production.
Yet, America’s relatively minor gain is China’s possibly catastrophic loss. Venezuela, which received upwards of $100 billion in Chinese investment in the first 23 years of the century, gave China 80% of its total oil output. Officially, Venezuelan oil comprised fewer than 5% of China’s total oil imports. Yet, oil from Venezuela, along with the fellow anti-American axis powers of Iran and Russia, has historically supplied China with oil at bargain barrel discounts thanks to their globally sanctioned status. China’s strategy to diversify its oil supply chains was supposed to insulate it from the eventual Western uproar that would result when the Chinese Communist Party inevitably launches an illegal invasion of Taiwan.
None of that looks so sure anymore.
With the Iranian regime on the brink and Trump pledging to intervene if its dictatorship assaults the protesters taking over the streets, it’s possible that Venezuela, now ruled by communist dogmatists-turned-Trump puppet Delcy Rodriguez, is followed in its exile from Beijing’s control by Iran. J. Michael Waller of the Center for Security Policy estimates that when accounting for secretly shipped oil, Venezuela and Iran currently supply about a third of China’s imports. If Venezuela remains under de facto American control and the ayatollah falls, more than two-thirds of China’s oil imports will come from countries either aligned with the West or forcibly cajoled into complying with U.S. orders.
That leaves China with Russia, which supplies China with 20% of its imports. The problem with Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” doctrine is that, because Russia already must sell at a double-digit discount (the only buyers willing to purchase from an internationally recognized war criminal know they can stiff the source), Russia’s break-even point of profitability for oil is around $45 per barrel. Should oil futures fall just a dozen dollars further, and whatever remains of Russia’s entire economy collapses.
Considering Russia already suffers from near-double-digit inflation, 16% interest rates that said inflation indicates are already too low, and a quarter of government coffers dependent on oil revenue, the country may very well lose its war against Ukraine at the bottom of an oil rig rather than on the battlefield.
DEMOCRATS WALK VENEZUELA TIGHTROPE AS SOME PRAISE MADURO’S OUSTER
Though high-minded defenses of democracy and the dignity of the Venezuelan people sound nice, Trump is too much of a pragmatist to put the muscle of the American military behind an unprecedented operation for neocon nation-building. Rather, Trump understands that to avoid a World War III of China feeling empowered to invade Taiwan, the U.S. must start smaller wars that it has the control to end.
The Venezuela operation was about oil as much as American interests, though not in the way that even Trump will publicly pretend it to be.
