US Seizes Maduro, Trump Tells American Oil Majors to Pour Billions into Venezuela

Washington last engineered an oil-centred regime change in 1953 Iran (Operation Ajax); the 2003 Iraq invasion and 2011 Libya intervention showed that removing a ruler is far easier than stitching a viable petro-state afterward. Trump’s gambit reprises a century-long tug-of-war between resource nationalism and external corporate control: Venezuela nationalized in 1976, Chávez re-asserted control in 2007, and now the pendulum swings back under U.S. guns. Long-term, the move tests two structural trends: declining Western appetite for ground occupations, and intensifying U.S.–China rivalry over energy access—China currently buys much of Venezuela’s covert crude. If U.S. firms can restore output (300 bn-barrel reserves) before the global transition away from oil accelerates, it could reshape supply for a decade; if not, it risks joining the list of costly, destabilizing interventions that, on a 100-year arc, only deepen skepticism about great-power control of sovereign resources.