Between January and June, Venezuelan crude generated more than 13 billion dollars in gross revenue under American supervision. Of that, 300 million was formally released to the government in Caracas, restricted to civil service payrolls and basic humanitarian supplies. The proceeds sit in accounts Washington controls; Caracas submits budget requests. There is a word for an arrangement in which one country collects, holds and disburses another country's export earnings, and it is not partnership.
The word has been unavailable in polite American commentary for a long time. Writing in Jacobin in February, Gilbert Achcar noted how abruptly it became usable: outlets that had declined to call the Panama and Iraq invasions imperialist reached for the term within days of Nicolas Maduro being taken. What changed was not the conduct, which has a two-hundred-year pedigree. What changed was that the conduct stopped being narrated as democracy promotion.
Every empire has said it was there for the drugs, the weapons or the democracy. This one has largely stopped saying. That is the only novelty on offer.
The candour is useful as evidence. Gabriel Hetland wrote in The Intercept that “Venezuela posed no threat to the United States, and under international law, there is no plausible justification for Trump's attack.” The stated justification was narcotics. Venezuela supplies none of the fentanyl behind most American overdose deaths, is a minor route for cocaine, and most of what does transit it is bound for Europe rather than for the United States. The fentanyl at the centre of the case was to Caracas what the missing weapons were to Baghdad: a reason offered after the decision, not before it.
Set that ledger beside the domestic one, because they are the same ledger. The administration has asked Congress for 1.5 trillion dollars in defence funding for 2027, a 38 per cent real increase once the 350 billion routed through reconciliation is counted, and the largest single-year figure since 1945. It arrives alongside 73 billion in cuts to non-defence spending. Nothing about that pairing is mysterious. It is a decision about who the state is for.
The concession this reading owes is real and should be paid in full. Maduro presided over an authoritarian government that jailed opponents and hollowed out the oil industry through mismanagement and expropriation, leaving output at roughly a third of its 1990s peak. Little of the Latin American left mourns him. The argument was never that Caracas was well governed. It is that the remedy for a bad government is not a receivership run from Washington with an 84 million dollar audit contract attached.
Look at what the receivership produced. A privatisation law transferred oil production to private companies on 29 January. Restoring the fields is an 80 to 90 billion dollar project, and whoever funds it will own the return for a generation. The interim president who signed is the same vice-president who served the government the operation was launched to remove. Continuity of personnel, discontinuity of ownership: that is the shape of the thing.
None of this is the American public's project. Fifty-six per cent told Marist in January they opposed military action in Venezuela, and 86 per cent told Quinnipiac they opposed taking Greenland by force, including 68 per cent of Republicans. Majorities are not the constituency here. The constituency is whoever ends up holding the concession on the largest proven reserves on earth, and they have not had to win a single vote.
