Deranged Trump Syndrome has gone to a dangerous new level.
Chris Lang, REDD Monitor || On 3 January 2026, the US President Donald Trump announced on social media that the US had invaded Venezuela and kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.
They were flown to New York where they were held at the Metropolitan Detention Centre on drug trafficking and weapons charges. On 5 January 2026, they pleaded not guilty in a Manhattan federal court.
“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Trump told journalists not long after the kidnapping.
“The US has launched an unprovoked and illegal attack on Venezuela,” Jeremy Corbyn commented. “This is a brazen attempt to secure control over Venezuelan natural resources.”
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At least 80 people were killed during the military operation to kidnap Venezuela’s president and his wife. Several civilians were injured and at least one was killed. They were asleep when a US fighter jet fired a missile into their apartment building.
Maduro’s dictatorship
Maduro was a dictator. More than 90% of the population of Venezuela lives in poverty. Nearly 8 million people have fled the country since 2014.
A 2019 New York Times article described Venezuela’s economy as “the single largest economic collapse outside of ware in at least 45 years”. Kenneth Rogoff, an economic professor at Harvard University and former chief economist at the IMF told the New York Times that, “It’s really hard to think of a human tragedy of this scale outside civil war.”
But this was not a failed socialist revolution. When Hugo Chavez won the Presidential election in 1998, the poverty rate was over 50% and infant mortality was over 20%. In 2013, when Chavez died and Maduro took over, poverty had been reduced to 30% and infant mortality to 13%. Extreme poverty had been reduced from 23.4% to 8.5%. However, violent crime and inflation had increased.
Oil exports increased under Chavez from US$14.4 billion in 1999 to US$60 billion in 2011.
Of course, the sanctions imposed by the US (which were imposed outside of the UN sanctions system) have have made the situation far worse.
After Maduro stole the election in July 2024, Global Witness accused US oil giant Chevron of “bankrolling Venezuela’s brutal dictator”. Oil exports formed 58% of the country’s budget. One-third of the regime’s total oil income came from Chevron’s operations. Global Witness concluded that,
Chevron’s role in propping up Maduro’s regime in pursuit of oil profits illustrates why we urgently need to leave fossil fuels in the ground: to stop putting money in the pockets of oil dictators, and to end climate breakdown.
Trump’s dictatorship
The kidnapping of Maduro and his wife was in breach of international law and the UN Charter. As Ziyad Motala, Professor of law at Howard University School of Law, points out,
The claim that alleged human rights violations or trafficking in narcotics justifies the removal of a foreign head of state is particularly corrosive. There is no such rule. Not in treaty law. Not in custom law. Not in any serious jurisprudence.
Trump did not consult Congress before the kidnapping, but he did talk to oil corporate executives before and after the attack on Venezuela.
Chris Hedges nails it when he writes that,
The ruling class of the United States, severed from a fact-based universe and blinded by idiocy, greed and hubris, has immolated the internal mechanisms that prevent dictatorship, and the external mechanisms designed to protect against a lawless world of colonialism and gunboat diplomacy.
Hedge’s recent article “America the Rogue State” is well worth reading in full.
Trump is also talking about more illegal military operations, threatening Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, and Greenland.
Trump has since spoken to the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, and is arranging a meeting in Washington with Petro.
And the Trump regime will hold a meeting with Danish officials next week, to discus its plans to buy, or invade, Greenland.
Regime change?
Paul Krugman notes that Trump was not attempting regime change in Venezuela:
He’s more like a mob boss trying to expand his territory, believing that if he knocks off a rival boss he can bully the guy’s former capos into giving him a cut of their take.
Trump was apparently hoping that Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez would do whatever he told her to do. In a press conference on 3 January 2026, Trump said that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had spoken to Rodríguez and, “she’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again. Very simple.”
But only a few hours later, Rodríguez spoke live on television demanding “the immediate release of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. The only president of Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro.”
Bloomberg reports that for several months, oil industry executives, lawyers, and investors had been lobbying in favour of Rodríguez taking over from Maduro.
On 7 January 2026, Reuters reported JD Vance, US Vice President as saying on Fox News that,
“We control the energy resources, and we tell the regime: ‘You’re allowed to sell the oil so long as you serve America’s national interest; you’re not allowed to sell it if you can’t serve America’s national interest’.”
Rodríguez has since said that Venezuela is “open to energy relations where all parties benefit”.
Venezuela’s oil
This is a straightforward neo-colonial resource grab.
The New York Times reports Trump as saying that “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground.” Trump added that,
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”
But the energy data company Energy Aspects told the New York Times that a major increase in oil production in Venezuela could cost “tens of billions of dollars over multiple years”.
Hannah Ritchie has written a useful overview of Venezuelan oil.
Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world. However, it produces relatively little. Oil production has fallen dramatically since Nicolás Maduro came to power in 2013. Production is less than one-third of the peak in the 1970s.
Since about 2008, oil production in the USA has increased from about 7 million barrels per day to more than 20 million barrels per day. By 2013, 43% of US oil production came from fracking.
There are many different types of crude oil. “Heavy” crude oil is more viscous and “light” crude oil is less viscous. Almost 70% of refining capacity in the USA currently runs on heavy crude oil. Fracking produces light crude oil. As a result, 90% of crude oil imports to the US consist of heavy crude oil.
This is unlikely to change any time soon, because it would be expensive to rebuild oil refineries to process light oil.
A lot of Venezuela’s oil reserves are of heavy crude oil. The Orinoco Belt, which accounts for the vast majority of the country’s oil reserves is “extra heavy”.
There is also an interesting discussion in the comments following Ritchie’s post. The oil in the Orinoco Belt is extremely dense, viscous, and dirty (over 5% sulphur and high concentrations of the metals vanadium and nickel). The oil needs to be diluted with much lighter crude oil before it can be exported. Even then, it is one of the heaviest, dirtiest crude oils in the world.
“To stay anywhere close to global climate targets, most of these reserves will need to stay in the ground,” Ritchie points out.
The USA-Venezuela-Guyana oil triangle
Investigative journalist Amy Westervelt, executive editor of the excellent website Drilled, points out that the involvement of US oil companies in Guyana could have played a role in the Trump regime’s interest in Venezuela.
US oil companies are far more interested in extracting oil from Guyana than they are in rebuilding Venezuela’s dilapidated oil fields. In 2015, ExxonMobil announced that it had found a massive oil deposit off the coast of Guyana. A few years later, ExxonMobil started extracting the oil, and announced that it would soon be the company’s most productive oil field in the world.
For the last decade, the Maduro regime has been threatening to claim Guyana’s oil as its own. Westerveld writes that,
When Maduro first began yelling about how Essequibo, the Guyanese state that is home to the country’s lucrative oil deposits, is actually Venezuelan territory, few took it seriously. Venezuela had been making this claim off and on since 1962 after all, even occupying and setting up a military base and airfield on a small island in the region since 1966. Maduro’s announcements seemed like just the latest in a long line of brash moves made by a president losing his grip on power and watching his country’s top economic engine — the oil industry — sputter.
In response to Maduro’s increasingly aggressive claims to Essequibo, Guyana filed a case at the International Court of Justice. In 2020, the ICJ issued an interim ruling barring any changes in governance of the region until the Court’s final ruling. The ICJ has not yet delivered its final ruling.
In December 2023, Maduro held a referendum on whether Essequibo should be made a Venezuelan state. Essequibo covers two-thirds of Guyana’s territory. According to Venezuela’s National Electoral Council the vote was in favour of Venezuela taking over Essequibo. However, the turnout was very low. Phil Gunson, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, told The Guardian that is was “obvious” that the results were rigged.
In April 2024, Maduro signed a law declaring Essequibo a Venezuelan state.
On 17 February 2025, Guyanese officials reported that six soldiers in Guyana were injured when Venezuelan “suspected gang members” shot at them.
On 26 February 2025, Trump cancelled the license that allowed Chevron to produce and export oil from Venezuela. Trump said the cancellation was because Maduro was not legitimately elected and was not accepting Venezuelans deported from the USA fast enough.
Shortly after this, Venezuelan sent naval ships to threaten an ExxonMobil floating oil production units operating in Guyana’s maritime territory. Guyana deployed its air force in defence. The US State Department stated that,
Venezuelan naval vessels threatening ExxonMobil’s floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) unit is unacceptable and a clear violation of Guyana’s internationally-recognized maritime territory. Further provocation will result in consequences for the Maduro regime.
“A fossil-fuel act of war”
“President Trump’s launch of large-scale military strikes in Venezuela, included the capture of President of Nicolás Maduro,” Oil Change International’s Executive Director, Elizabeth Bast, responds, “is a flagrant act of war and violation of international law.”
This reckless aggression is part of a shameful pattern of U.S. imperialism in Latin America, where military power secures economic interests, in particular fossil fuels and critical resources. . . .
This act defies the U.S. constitution’s delegation of Congress’ war making authority and disregards international rules that prevent acts of war without debate or authorization. The U.S. must stop treating Latin America as a resource colony. The Venezuelan people, not U.S. oil executives, must shape their country’s future.
In an interview with Glenn Diesen, professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway, Columbia University economics professor Jeffrey Sachs points out that,
The whole history of US regime-change operations, which number probably around 100 such operations since the end of World War II, is a record of bloodshed, violence, deliberate creation of instability, coups, assassinations, civil war.
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