Blowing Up Fishermen For Oil
Trump's narco-terror war on Venezuela is really a rehearsal or regime change and an oil grab
While Trump and his Christian Nationalist plutocracy slash health care and food assistance for millions of Americans, 1 they are pouring billions into a secretive war on small fishing boats they label “Venezuelan drug traffickers.”Since when does the U.S. military wage war on alleged drug mules?
Trump’s lawyers now call the targets “narcoterrorists” and insist that magic word somehow substitutes for a declaration of war or authorization from Congress. It doesn’t. There may be classified memos somewhere saying the president can use lethal force on unflagged boats that might be carrying cocaine, but the Constitution and international law haven’t been amended to match Trump’s fantasies.
According to Pentagon figures and independent tallies, the United States has now launched more than twenty air and naval strikes on small vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing at least eighty people.2 One of those attacks – the September 2 strike that started this campaign – is now infamous: a U.S. missile demolished a small boat near Venezuela, and when two survivors were seen clinging to the wreckage, a second missile was fired that killed them as well. 3
Under both U.S. military doctrine and international law, there is nothing “murky” about that second blast. Legal experts are explicit: shipwrecked, wounded, or otherwise incapacitated people are no longer lawful targets and must not be attacked. UN human-rights officials have already called these boat strikes extrajudicial killings, not combat. 4 In plain language: this isn’t war. It is a series of calculated killings.
As I write, the people who planned and carried out that September 2 attack are behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, trying to explain it away. Top Pentagon officials are giving a classified briefing to members of Congress and showing video of the second strike. The White House now says Navy Vice Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, then commanding the strike force, ordered the follow-up missile under authority from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Hegseth – under fire for allegedly telling commanders there should be “no survivors” – is publicly denying that he ever said “kill them all” and insists the operation was “100 percent lawful.” Bradley is expected to tell lawmakers that the two men clinging to the wreckage were still “legitimate targets” because they might call in other traffickers to recover the drugs. 5
In other words: everyone is denying ownership of the “kill them all” directive, but no one is denying that the United States knowingly struck men who were already shipwrecked and helpless. If that is not a war crime, it is very hard to imagine what would qualify.
Take just one name out of those eighty-plus deaths. A Colombian fisherman in his early forties leaves shore on a small boat to work the Caribbean waters, as he has done for years. When the boat’s engine fails and the vessel drifts, he and his crewmates become tiny dots on a vast expanse of water. Then, without warning, a U.S. missile slams into the boat. His family – parents, siblings, a partner who depended on his income – are later told that Washington considered him a “narco-terrorist.” They insist he was exactly what he had always been: a fisherman. They have now filed a human-rights complaint, accusing the United States of murdering him. 6 Their lawyers report threats and harassment simply for demanding answers.
Why Venezuela, and why now?
Trump campaigned – again – on “no more stupid wars,” selling himself as the leader who will bring troops home and end “regime change.” He is not going after Venezuela because he suddenly cares about democracy in South America or about drugs. In reality, he has been itching to take over a country ever since he returned to office.
He floated the idea of “buying” Greenland. 7He has suggested that friendly neighbors ought to fold themselves into a greater United States. These remarks are treated as jokes, but they reveal something real: he fantasizes about acquiring territory the way he acquires golf courses and hotels. And in his second term, he has settled on Venezuela as the perfect stage for that fantasy.
When President Nicolás Maduro refused Trump’s demand to resign, the White House reached for an old script with a new twist: call the government a narco-regime, declare its coastal waters full of “narcoterrorists,” and send in the Navy. Trump doubled the U.S. bounty on Maduro’s head and ordered a massive naval buildup off Venezuela’s coast. By late fall, the United States had deployed some fifteen thousand troops, eleven warships, submarines, and aircraft to the region – including the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier. 8 It is the most significant U.S. military buildup in those waters in decades, all rolled into what the Pentagon calls “Operation Southern Spear.” 9
Formally, this is a counternarcotics mission. In reality, the waters off Venezuela are saturated with American firepower, U.S. aircraft patrol its skies, and Trump has quietly authorized lethal covert operations. The operation is estimated to cost around ten million dollars per day – nearly a billion dollars in its first three months – in the very same budget that tears hundreds of billions out of Medicaid, the ACA, and SNAP.
The “no more wars” president is running a regime-change campaign in the Caribbean while Americans at home are told there is no money for food or health care.
This is not a grand humanitarian intervention. It is a deliberately asymmetric pressure campaign: billion-dollar platforms and precision weapons aimed at open skiffs and coastal targets in order to force Maduro to step down or collapse. The “drug war” branding is there to make a resource grab look like law enforcement.
Regime Change for Oil, Not Democracy
Trump really, really wants Venezuela’s oil.
During his last campaign, he gathered the heads of major oil companies and bluntly asked for a billion dollars in support. In return, he promised to rip up climate policies, dismantle support for renewables, and restore fossil fuels to their throne. 10 He got their money. And he has kept his promise to them, even as he breaks his promises to everyone else.
Since returning to office, Trump-era policy has helped drive the cancellation or downsizing of tens of billions of dollars in clean-energy factories and projects. One industry analysis estimated that more than $22 billion in clean-energy investment and over 16,000 jobs were lost in just the first half of 2025 as companies pulled the plug on solar, wind, battery, and EV-related projects. 11 His administration has also overseen the termination of roughly $7.6 billion in federal grants for more than two hundred clean-energy projects across multiple states. 12 While the rest of the world – including Trump’s favorite villain, China – races ahead on solar, wind, and energy storage, he is deliberately steering the United States back toward coal and oil. Offshore wind auctions have been shelved. Renewable leasing on public lands has been slowed or frozen. New “national security” tests are being weaponized to block projects whose components or supply chains touch China or other disfavored countries. Private investors have taken the hint. They are walking away.
At the same time, Trump never misses a chance to gripe about gas prices at the microphones, usually while misstating what people are actually paying at the pump. With energy costs rising as his administration kneecaps alternatives, he is desperate for a new source of cheap crude to point to, and a new villain to blame.
Enter Venezuela, the oil jackpot he thinks should be his.
Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves – roughly 303 billion barrels as of 2023 – and yet the country exported only around $4 billion in crude that year, a fraction of its potential. The state-owned oil company, PDVSA, is a mess: refineries are outdated, pipelines and storage facilities are degraded, and sanctions have made financing and technology imports far more difficult. Even so, Venezuelan exports have ticked up in spite of U.S. pressure, as the government has found new buyers and workarounds. Analysts agree on one point: with serious investment and competent management, Venezuela could again become one of the world’s dominant oil exporters. 13
The state-owned oil company, PDVSA, is a mess. Refineries are outdated. Pipelines leak. Tankers sit idle. Skilled engineers have fled. Sanctions make financing and technology imports difficult. Even so, Venezuelan exports have ticked up in spite of Trump’s attempted embargo, as the government has found new buyers and workarounds. Analysts agree on one point: with serious investment and competent management, Venezuela could once again become one of the world’s dominant oil exporters.
To a president who sees everything – including foreign countries – as distressed assets waiting to be flipped, that untapped reserve looks like the prize behind Door Number One. He does not see Venezuela as a sovereign nation with its own people and politics. He sees a massive underground bank account waiting for a change in management.
So when Trump talks about “poison coming from Venezuela,” remember what he is not talking about. Fentanyl, the drug actually driving overdose deaths in the United States, overwhelmingly comes from precursor chemicals produced in China and processed in labs in Mexico, not from Venezuelan fishing boats. 14 Whatever cocaine might move through Venezuelan waters is a sideshow compared with those flows. The hardware he has deployed – aircraft carriers, destroyers, bombers, special-operations forces – does not fit the job of drug policing. It fits the job of regime change and coercive control of a petro-state sitting on a mountain of oil.
Once you see that, the mission reads very differently. The point is not to “save” Venezuelans from cocaine or Americans from overdoses. The point is to choke off the revenue that keeps Maduro’s inner circle loyal, scare off alternative buyers, and send a simple message: full access to Venezuela’s oil reserves will only be possible under a government that will play ball with Trump and his donors.
The narco-terror language is covering for a resource grab.
The Real Pattern
Strip away the slogans and the flag-draped language, and a simple pattern emerges.
Trump has created an American budget that tells hungry children, disabled people, and low-income families there is no money for food, medicine, or rent – while quietly spending close to a billion dollars in a few months blowing up small boats off the Venezuelan coast. He promised “no more wars,” but he is waging a low-visibility, high-lethality campaign designed to topple a government and install something more friendly to his own interests.
He has dismantled long-term clean-energy projects and climate policies, throwing away tens of thousands of jobs and ceding technological ground to China, while positioning himself as the man who can bring back “cheap gas” by prying open someone else’s oil fields. He has wrapped this all in the language of drug war and terrorism, counting on the public’s fear of “cartels” to blur the line between fishermen and kingpins.
Why Venezuela, and why now?
Because Venezuela offers him everything he wants at once:
- A pliant future government sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves.
- A dramatic stage on which to act out his fantasies about “taking” a country.
- A convenient dress rehearsal for a new kind of American empire, where billion-dollar weapons enforce the interests of fossil-fuel oligarchs.
- And, as always, a distraction – a spectacle that lets him posture as tough on drugs and crime while his administration guts the social safety net at home.
Now do you see why Trump wants regime change in Venezuela?
It is not about democracy. It is not about the rule of law. It is not even, really, about drugs. It is about oil, power, and a president who has never seen a struggling country he didn’t want to carve up and sell.
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