You Don’t Have to Support Maduro to Oppose U.S. Intervention in Venezuela

The problems in Venezuela, as we all know, are immense. The humanitarian and economic crisis brought upon the Venezuelan people by socialist regimes and terrible economic policies is innumerable. Millions fled the country, many to the United States, and those who remained in Venezuela face crippling inflation, food shortages, and political repression akin to any socialist ‘utopia.’ Acknowledging that the situation in Venezuela is horrendous, however, does not obligate Americans to support U.S. intervention to remove Nicolás Maduro and set up another puppet government. President Donald Trump’s aggressive intervention to capture Maduro, as well as the multiple oil tanker seizures and attacks on supposed “Narco-terrorist boats,” with little oversight, represents a familiar, dangerous pattern of U.S. interventionism abroad. The Trump administration is using moral language to justify coercive foreign policy decisions driven by power, profit, and geopolitical signaling.

Libertarians and non-interventionists reject the false choice that has been given in the media: you support the intervention, or you support the Maduro regime. The framing is dishonest and is used by both sides of the political spectrum in the United States to bring their followers to their calls for more political action and grandstanding on what needs to be done. Opposition to intervention in Venezuela is not a support for the tyranny that the Maduro regime brought to Venezuela; it is a defense of liberty, national sovereignty, and the constitutional limits on executive power. Pushing back against that dichotomy of choices is clear for anyone who has been following the situation. Just because you are against intervention does not mean you support the Maduro regime. History has shown that American-led regime changes rarely produce the outcomes the United States wishes to see and destroy many of the civil societies it wishes to protect.

In the capture of Maduro, Trump made it very clear what the U.S. intentions were with Venezuela: use their massive oil reserves for U.S. profits.

When Leaders Tell You the Reason, Believe Them

Throughout the Trump administration campaign against Venezuela, oil was never far from the conversation. In a news conference from January 3rd, he stated that, “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela… and it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the dangerous damages caused us by that country.” Trump has repeatedly emphasized Venezuela’s vast petroleum reserves, often mentioning oil multiple times in his press conferences, and framing that oil as American, even though the ground and the oil within it are very clearly under Venezuelan-owned territory.

At another conference on January 6th, Trump announced that Venezuela’s interim authorities would transfer between 30 million to 50 million barrels of oil to the United States for sale, with any proceeds controlled by the U.S. government. This statement was not an offhand remark made by Trump; it was explicitly reported and confirms what critics of the intervention had argued: that control of Venezuelan oil is central to U.S. policy.

This context matters as before the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil industry in 1976, American and other companies dominated the oil production under concession agreements. The massive American companies exerted enormous influence over Venezuela’s most valuable resource, ensuring huge American profits while the Venezuelan state received just a small share of those. The arrangement ended when Venezuela asserted national control over its oil.

When Hugo Chávez came to power, multinational firms were forced under his socialist policies to accept minority ownership stakes or leave the country altogether, which forced some American companies, including ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, to exit in 2007. Many of these companies, and the political allies that they have in Washington, have never stopped wanting to regain what they lost under more favorable terms. When Trump says that he is going to sell Venezuelan oil under U.S. control, he is describing resource transfer. Americans should recognize this for what it is: state power being used to reshape foreign economies in ways that benefit politically connected companies.

The Drug War Is a Convenient Pretext

Alongside the oil and ‘protecting democracy’ rhetoric, the Trump administration has leaned heavily on another justification for its intervention in Venezuela: Drugs, specifically fentanyl. Americans were told that Venezuela was not only a socialist dictatorship but a major contributor to the fentanyl crisis here in the United States. This claim collapses when viewed through our own federal agencies’ straightforward reporting.

According to U.S. CRS reports, UNODC World Drug Report (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime), and law enforcement reporting on drug threat assessments, the overwhelming majority of fentanyl entering the United States is produced by Mexican criminal organizations, often using precursor materials sourced from China. Fentanyl is trafficked across the U.S.-Mexico land border. Venezuela does not appear as a significant source or producer in these federal threat assessments. The rhetoric has persisted because it served the purpose of emotional appeal to the American public. By tying Venezuela to fentanyl and the thousands of deaths that it has caused in the United States, intervention could be reframed not as an optional foreign policy, but as a needed policy to combat the thousands of deaths in self-defense. This rhetoric is not evidence-based policymaking, but instead narrative construction that we have seen before.

Drugs as “WMDs”: A Relic of Iraq Policymaking

Even more troubling is how this rhetoric mirrors one of the worst tragedies of American foreign policy in American history, the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In the lead-up to the Iraq War, exaggerated and ultimately false claims about weapons of mass destruction were used to manufacture the American public’s consent for invasion. If we would not intervene in Iraq, Saddam was about to launch nuclear weapons towards the United States, and millions would die. We had to act, or so we were told. That war led to hundreds of thousands of American and Iraqi lives lost, trillions spent on defense spending, and, looking at the situation in Iraq now, a less stable region that had seen a rise of ISIL forces and sectarian fighting.

Today, drug trafficking, particularly fentanyl, is elevated to an existential national security threat, framed eerily similar to the “WMD” discourse of the early 2000s. If the threat is portrayed as severe enough, and as the thousands of American lives unfortunately lost to this drug ties the emotional appeal, ordinary restraints are ignored for the sake of ‘safety.’ This emotional appeal lets this administration bypass Congress, bypass the national sovereignty of Venezuela, and allows war to be acceptable.

Those who lived through the “WMD” false claims should recognize this tactic immediately.

Venezuela As a Signal to Others

Venezuela, however, does not seem to be the end goal, but only the message that the Trump administration wishes to send.
Foreign policy interventions are often about signaling just as much as the outcomes. Trump’s posture towards Venezuela can reasonably be interpreted as a demonstration of the administration’s willingness to go to war against other countries deemed to be threats, and just how far the Trump administration is willing to go to achieve its goals.

Colombia is one country that Trump may be signaling to. Trump has repeatedly criticized Colombia over drug trafficking, and publicly, more drastic actions may be needed, including the possibility of military pressure, again under the idea of a war on drugs. By framing Venezuela as a legitimate target due to alleged narcotics involvement and the humanitarian crisis in the country, the administration is establishing a precedent that governments deemed insufficiently cooperative may face U.S. military action.

Iran may be another country that the Trump administration is signaling to. Trump has openly expressed support for the Iranian protests in recent days and stated on Truth Social that, “If Iran shoots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue.” In this context, the Trump administration has Venezuela as proof of how far they are willing to go, that they are eager to escalate from rhetoric to action under the guise of supporting ‘the people.’ The implication is clear that the logic used to justify intervention in Venezuela could be applied to Iran, this time under the ‘humanitarian’ framing.

When regime change interventions become the signaling tool, every protest abroad can be a potential next pretext, and every American geopolitical rival becomes a candidate for intervention.

Liberty Cannot Be Exported

Trump’s Venezuelan intervention exposes the uncomfortable truth that when a president openly links intervention to control another nation’s natural resources and backs it with exaggerated cases of drug trafficking, the moral superiority collapses.

Liberty cannot be delivered by force. It cannot be engineered through U.S. interventions and regime change wars. There may be videos now of cheering Venezuelans on social media, but much the same as the fall of Saddam, there soon was more unrest, sectarian violence, and a power vacuum that another power will fill.

We have seen this play out before, and we know where they all lead. The Senate, in approving a War Powers Resolution, is trying to rein in the Trump administration’s executive power; however, it needs to actually enforce the resolution. Calling out the Trump administration and trying to stop future interventions before they occur is only possible if Congress does its job. More than likely, it will be vetoed if passed by the House, and the Trump administration will undermine the resolution by noncompliance. Adding teeth to the resolution, including judicial enforcement, would help bolster it.

Venezuela’s suffering is very real, but it cannot be used as a blank reason for American interventionism. History offers no shortage of examples showing that regime change, justified through a multitude of reasons, often entrenches chaos, civil wars, totalitarian regimes after the fact, and corrodes liberty at home. When intervention is openly tied to another nation’s natural resources and propped up by exaggerated threats, the moral argument collapses entirely. Americans are not obligated to choose between endorsing dictatorships and endorsing wars abroad. Defending liberty means rejecting this idea. It means insisting on constitutional restraint, respecting national sovereignty, and not letting rhetoric be weaponized to justify another endless conflict. If the United States is serious about upholding freedom, it must do so by limiting its intervention abroad, especially when carried out under the guise of benevolence.