"This is not to dismiss the ideological or geopolitical dimensions of U.S. intervention—reviving the Monroe Doctrine, reasserting imperial spheres of influence.
But oil is the core motive behind this power play: control over the world’s largest petroleum reserves, long exploited with extraordinary returns by U.S. multinationals and their shareholders.
Maduro was a brutal and corrupt autocrat. But Trump has never had any trouble working with brutal and corrupt autocrats; such traits rarely trouble him.
The real goal of the Trump operation lies elsewhere: reclaiming Venezuela’s oil rents for the benefit of America’s economic elite—an arrangement that peaked in the 1950s, during the mythic “golden age” endlessly invoked by the MAGA movement
To understand what the White House is aiming for, one must revisit this largely forgotten history: a period of cross-border extractive capitalism pushed to its extreme, which Trump now seeks to resurrect—and possibly surpass."
gzucman.substack.com/p/understanding-us-intervention-in
#USA #Trump #Venezuela #Oil #FossilFuels #ExtractiveCapitalism
Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹
@remixtures@tldr.nettime.org
