The overall thrust of his actions is in fact entirely consistent with the principles that have long guided US foreign policy. Foremost among those principles is using whatever means available to maintain US hegemony and secure control over global oil resources, without regard for international law and norms.
In 1953, the CIA overthrew the democratically elected Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh for nationalising his country’s oil. The US president at the time, Dwight D Eisenhower, was reputedly a wise and level-headed man. This did not prevent him from ordering an egregious violation of international law.
When Saddam Hussein decided in 2003 to stop conducting Iraqi oil transactions in US dollars, the reaction of President George W Bush was even more brazen. He launched a full-scale military invasion of Iraq on the false pretext that Saddam possessed illegal weapons of mass destruction.
In 2011, exploiting the events known as the “Arab Spring,” the US spearheaded the regime change operation in Libya. The US president at the time was the erudite Barack Obama, of African and Muslim heritage. Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi was working to create a unified African currency to replace the dollar in African oil transactions. After his convoy was struck by a NATO missile, Qaddafi was captured and murdered by extrajudicial killing.
Today the most brazen of US presidents is merely following in his predecessors’ footsteps. This time, instead of WMD, Trump alleges that president Nicolás Maduro headed a drug-trafficking ring. That ring proved fictitious. The truth is that Venezuela sits atop trillions of dollars’ worth of oil reserves. Caracas had concluded contracts for their sale to China with the payments settled outside US dollar channels. Accordingly, Maduro had to be eliminated, just as Mosaddegh, Saddam, and Gaddafi were before him.
The abducted Venezuelan president will be given a show trial along the lines of the farce that was staged for Saddam Hussein. The real crime committed by all these leaders was to assert control over their national oil resources in order to manage them in a way that served their national interests, as opposed to those of Washington and US oil companies.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 22 January, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
Short link: