The Unchanged Face of American Imperialism: From Iraq to Venezuela

The Continuity of Resource-Driven Aggression

The geopolitical playbook of the United States reveals a disturbing consistency in its approach toward resource-rich nations that dare to assert sovereignty over their natural wealth. As the article meticulously documents, both Iraq and Venezuela share the common fate of being oil-rich states whose resource nationalism placed them directly in the crosshairs of American imperial ambitions. The strategic logic remains unchanged across administrations: control over hydrocarbons translates directly into control over global hegemony. This brutal calculus has driven U.S. foreign policy for decades, regardless of whether it’s packaged as neoconservative idealism or MAGA-style punitive aggression.

Under George W. Bush, the intervention in Iraq was framed within the “peak oil” panic and concerns about U.S. dependence on foreign supplies. The invasion was justified through fabricated claims about weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, but the underlying motivation remained access to and control over Iraq’s vast oil reserves. Similarly, Donald Trump’s administration elevated fossil fuel dominance into an explicit instrument of American power, viewing control over global oil supply as essential to maintaining U.S. supremacy. The continuity is unmistakable—both administrations recognized that energy resources represent the fundamental currency of global power.

The Anachronism of Hydrocarbon Hegemony

What makes current U.S. policy particularly tragic is its profound anachronism. While Washington continues to pursue nineteenth-century resource wars, the global energy landscape has undergone revolutionary transformation. In 2024, U.S. clean energy production from wind and solar power exceeded energy produced by burning coal—a milestone that Dick Cheney’s National Energy Report assumed would never happen. Globally, installed renewable power is forecast to more than double by 2030, with China leading this clean energy revolution.

This transition makes America’s obsession with hydrocarbon dominance not just morally reprehensible but strategically obsolete. As Nils Gilman and other analysts argue, geopolitical alignments are increasingly structured by underlying energy systems. Trump’s wager on a hydrocarbon future reflects what the article accurately identifies as “willful materialism”—a political alignment between fossil fuel corporations and the backlash politics of the West. This alignment blinds American policymakers to the emerging realities of the multipolar world order, where clean energy technology, not oil reserves, will determine future global leadership.

The most sinister aspect of U.S. policy toward resource-nationalist states is the deliberate creation of humanitarian crises that then serve as justification for further intervention. Both Iraq and Venezuela were subjected to punishing sanctions regimes that devastated civilian populations, with the resulting suffering then presented as evidence of the target government’s failure and the need for “humanitarian” intervention.

Iraq’s UN sanctions after the Gulf War caused unimaginable suffering, with estimates suggesting hundreds of thousands of children died due to lack of medicine and food. Madeleine Albright’s infamous statement that the death of half a million Iraqi children was “worth it” exposed the brutal calculus behind these policies. Similarly, Venezuela’s sanctions targeting its oil sector—the lifeblood of its economy—combined with domestic challenges to produce mass migration, hunger, and political instability. In both cases, sanctions created the very pretext they purported to remedy, in a circular logic where suffering becomes both the means and the rationale for intervention.

The Personalization of Political Conflict

American imperialism has consistently relied on the personalization of political conflicts, reducing complex historical and structural challenges to the actions of individual “villains.” Iraq had Saddam Hussein; Venezuela had Hugo Chávez and now Nicolás Maduro. This personalization serves multiple purposes: it simplifies messaging for domestic audiences, creates easily identifiable targets for propaganda, and obscures the deeper structural reasons for resistance to U.S. hegemony.

The article correctly identifies how opposition movements in both countries aligned themselves with the United States in hopes of engineering regime change. Ahmad Chalabi played this role for Iraq, providing the Bush administration with fabricated intelligence about WMDs. In Venezuela, exile communities—particularly affluent, lighter-skinned populations in Florida—perform a similar function, working closely with figures like Marco Rubio to advocate for intervention. This dynamic creates what the article describes as a self-defeating cycle: U.S. threats trigger nationalist reactions that ironically strengthen the incumbent regime, making Maduro’s survival partly attributable to Washington’s own aggressive posture.

The Shifting Pretexts for Intervention

While the underlying motivation remains control over resources, the public justification for intervention has evolved from the neoconservative idealism of the Bush era to the punitive populism of the MAGA movement. Bush officials couched intervention in the language of spreading freedom and democracy, warning about weapons of mass destruction and terrorist collaboration. The Trump administration, by contrast, frames the threat in darker, more visceral terms: the United States is under invasion from criminals, drug dealers, and migrants emanating from the Maduro regime.

This shift represents what the article accurately describes as moving from promises of “redemption through war” to promises of “punishment.” The drug war has been rhetorically elevated to counterterrorism, with cartels framed as terrorist organizations and Maduro as their state sponsor. This narrative conveniently ignores several inconvenient truths: no South American country produces or transships fentanyl, which is overwhelmingly sourced from China; successful drug policy requires treatment and harm reduction, not interdiction; and the United States has long had deeply embedded demand for narcotic drugs across all demographic groups.

The Absurdity of the Drug Pretext

The Trump administration’s purported rationale for intervention—stopping drugs “pouring in”—collapses under minimal scrutiny. The article correctly notes that interdiction does not reduce supply; it merely raises prices and attracts new market entrants. The development of synthetic opioids demonstrates the capacity of drug markets to restructure themselves in response to suppression efforts. If fentanyl is suppressed, another substance will emerge to meet the demand.

This reality exposes the drug pretext as what it truly is: a cynical manipulation of public fears to justify imperial aggression. The narrative of foreign drug dealers poisoning Americans deliberately ignores the complex socioeconomic factors driving drug demand in the United States, including the opioid epidemic fueled by American pharmaceutical companies. By externalizing the problem, this narrative serves to reinforce white innocence against racialized threats and justify punitive action against brown-skinned foreigners.

The Grim Lessons from Iraq

Any serious consideration of intervention in Venezuela must begin with the catastrophic lessons from Iraq. The invasion shattered the Baathist state, ignited sectarian conflict, empowered Iran, and created conditions for the rise of ISIS—outcomes directly contrary to U.S. goals. The human cost was staggering: hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, millions displaced, and a country torn apart by violence and instability.

Venezuela presents similar risks of catastrophic blowback. As the article notes, Maduro serves as the guarantor of equilibrium among competing civilian and military factions, criminal networks, and insurgent spillover from Colombia. Removing him risks fragmentation, civil war, or the rise of armed factions that the United States cannot control. A successor government might not even command the loyalty of the armed forces, leading to further instability. As with Iraq, destroying the Venezuelan state would be easy; rebuilding it would be nearly impossible.

Why War Remains Tempting for MAGA

Despite these risks and the anti-interventionist rhetoric of the MAGA movement, war with Venezuela fits its deeper political logic. It distracts from domestic crises including affordability challenges, potential recession, and the Epstein scandal. It reasserts white innocence against racialized threats, reinforcing the narrative of aggrieved victimhood that fuels Trump’s base. It revives the Monroe Doctrine in competition with China, asserting American dominance in its traditional sphere of influence. And it delivers a spectacle of power that reaffirms Trump’s dominance as a strong leader.

Most disturbingly, as the article concludes, this would be a war waged not for “freedom” but for punitive enjoyment—a revanchist spectacle meant to renew MAGA’s sense of grievance and entitlement. The human costs would fall overwhelmingly on Venezuelans, but for MAGA, that is not a problem—it is the point. The suffering of brown-skinned foreigners serves as features, not bugs, in this calculus of racialized punishment.

The Rising Alternative

While the United States remains trapped in its hydrocarbon hegemony mindset, China and other Global South nations are investing in the future. China’s leadership in renewable energy technology represents the actual emerging paradigm, not the obsolete resource wars of the past. The Belt and Road Initiative offers infrastructure development without the political conditionalities of Western institutions, providing alternatives for developing nations seeking to escape the debt traps and resource exploitation of neocolonialism.

This contrast between America’s punitive obsessions and China’s developmental approach illustrates the broader shift in global power dynamics. The multipolar world emerging from the ashes of unipolar hegemony offers opportunities for nations like Venezuela to pursue development paths free from imperial domination. The challenge for the Global South is to resist being caught in the crossfire as declining powers like the United States lash out in their death throes.

Conclusion: Solidarity Against Imperialism

The continuity from Iraq to Venezuela reveals the unchanging nature of American imperialism, regardless of its changing ideological packaging. The pursuit of resource control, the manufacturing of humanitarian pretexts, the personalization of political conflicts, and the racialized narratives of threat all serve the same fundamental goal: maintaining U.S. hegemony at any human cost.

As nations committed to the growth and sovereignty of the Global South, we must stand in firm opposition to these predatory practices. The people of Venezuela, like those of Iraq before them, deserve the right to determine their own destiny without foreign interference and manufactured crises. The international community must reject the circular logic where sanctions create suffering that then justifies intervention. We must build alternative institutions and partnerships that prioritize mutual development over exploitation, respect sovereignty over imposing hegemony, and embrace the renewable future rather than clinging to the hydrocarbon past.

The struggle against imperialism requires recognizing these patterns and standing in solidarity with nations targeted for refusing to submit to Western domination. The future belongs to those who build, not those who destroy; who develop, not those who exploit; who cooperate, not those who dominate. Venezuela’s fate will test whether the world has learned anything from the tragic lessons of Iraq, or whether we are doomed to repeat the same catastrophic mistakes in the endless pursuit of empire.