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colonialism
Trump Is Just the Latest Strongman to Think He Can Control Venezuela
Again and again, external actors arrive convinced that this time, through capital, force, or expertise, they have finally grasped what Venezuela is and what it needs. The confidence never lasts.
Jan 11, 2026
When US forces carried out a large-scale military operation in Caracas on January 3, 2026—capturing President Nicolás Maduro and transporting him to New York to face US indictments—Washington framed the moment as resolution. President Donald Trump declared Venezuela’s long crisis effectively over, announcing that the United States would “run” the country for a period of time and openly discussing the reinstallation of US oil interests. The language was casual, almost improvisational, as if Venezuela were an unruly subsidiary finally brought to heel.
What the operation revealed, however, was not strategic clarity but a familiar blindness. Once again, US power moved decisively while understanding lagged far behind. Leadership was removed, headlines were captured, yet the deeper structures shaping Venezuelan life—its history of extraction, its social networks, its hard-earned skepticism toward imposed authority—remained untouched. The episode fit neatly into a long pattern: Outsiders mistaking control for comprehension.
For more than five centuries, Venezuela has attracted this kind of attention. It has been treated as a resource cache, a geopolitical puzzle, a cautionary tale, or a problem to be solved. Rarely has it been approached as a society with its own internal logic. Again and again, external actors arrive convinced that this time, through capital, force, or expertise, they have finally grasped what Venezuela is and what it needs. The confidence never lasts.
The misreading begins early. When Alonso de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci reached the northern coast in 1499 and named it Veneziola, they imposed a European metaphor on a place already dense with meaning. Indigenous societies—the Timoto-Cuica in the Andes, Carib and Arawak peoples along the coast—had built complex agricultural systems, trade routes, and ecological knowledge. Spanish conquest dismantled much of this world, extracting pearls, gold, and cacao while concentrating power in Caracas, a city whose monumental architecture masked the fragility beneath it.
Venezuela has been misread repeatedly. Not because it is unknowable, but because powerful outsiders rarely bother to know it on its own terms.
Colonial Venezuela was never cohesive. Authority flowed downward; legitimacy never followed. The German Welser banking house, granted control of the territory in the 16th century, pursued gold through enslavement and violence. Later, the Guipuzcoan Company monopolized trade, choking local economic life. Periodic uprisings were crushed rather than resolved. The lesson repeated itself quietly but insistently: Wealth could be extracted, order imposed temporarily, but social trust could not be engineered from afar.
Independence did not resolve these tensions. 19th century unfolded through fragmentation, regionalism, and civil war. Simón Bolívar understood Venezuela better than most foreign admirers or critics since, yet even he struggled to translate military success into durable political unity. The Federal War left the country devastated and more unequal, reinforcing a pattern in which power was centralized while social cohesion remained elusive. European creditors and early oil prospectors took note, circling patiently.
Oil altered Venezuela’s position in the world but not its underlying dynamics. In the early 20th century, Juan Vicente Gómez offered foreign companies stability and access in exchange for political backing. Later, Marcos Pérez Jiménez presented a gleaming vision of modernization—highways, towers, civic monuments—that impressed visiting dignitaries. The spectacle worked. Venezuela appeared governable, even exemplary. Yet outside the frame, inequality hardened and participation narrowed. Development was visible; legitimacy was thin.
By the time the bolívar collapsed on Black Friday in 1983, the illusion was difficult to sustain. An economy tethered to oil rents proved dangerously exposed to global shocks, while political institutions remained distant from everyday life. The Caracazo riots of 1989 were not a sudden breakdown but a release, an eruption from a society that had absorbed decades of exclusion. International observers described chaos. Venezuelans recognized continuity.
Hugo Chávez entered this landscape not as a rupture but as a condensation of long-simmering forces. His rise drew on popular frustration with a system that had promised stability and delivered precarity. The brief 2002 coup against him, quietly welcomed in Washington, collapsed almost immediately, undone by mass mobilization. Power changed hands; legitimacy reasserted itself. Chávez’s social programs produced real gains while deepening reliance on oil, leaving unresolved the same vulnerability that had defined Venezuelan political economy for a century.
After Chávez’s death, Nicolás Maduro governed a system already under strain. Falling oil prices, hyperinflation, protest cycles, mass migration, and partial dollarization followed. External pressure mounted, sanctions, recognition battles, diplomatic theater, often treating Venezuela less as a society than as a message. Leadership was personalized; history flattened.
The capture of Maduro followed this script. It was decisive, dramatic, and legible to a US political culture that favors clear villains and clean endings. What it did not do was engage the complexity of Venezuelan life: the informal economies that keep neighborhoods fed, the communal networks that substitute for absent institutions, the cultural memory shaped by centuries of extraction and resistance. These dynamics do not disappear when a president boards a plane.
Venezuelan resilience rarely makes headlines because it lacks spectacle. It is found in Indigenous land stewardship, Afro-Venezuelan cultural traditions, cooperative food systems, remittance networks, and everyday improvisation. Migration, so often framed solely as collapse, has also become a form of continuity, extending social ties across borders rather than severing them.
Oil still looms over everything. The 1970s boom, including Saudi-Venezuelan cooperation, promised autonomy through abundance and delivered deeper dependence instead. Resource wealth invited intervention and centralization while postponing harder questions about participation and governance. The pattern has proven remarkably durable.
Venezuela’s history does not yield easily to slogans or interventions. It resists tidy moral arcs and quick fixes. Again and again, external actors—most recently the Trump administration—have approached the country as if force, markets, or managerial confidence could substitute for understanding. Each time, they discover too late that Venezuela is not an abstraction but a living society shaped by long memory and adaptive survival.
Venezuela has been misread repeatedly. Not because it is unknowable, but because powerful outsiders rarely bother to know it on its own terms. And so the cycle continues: decisive action, confident declarations, and, beneath them all, a society that endures—complex, unfinished, and stubbornly beyond control.Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump's Attack on Venezuela Would Be Wrong Even If It Were Legal
Making a a war “legal” doesn’t make it just or moral. Legal wars still kill and maim innocent people, still destroy communities, still create intense hatred that guarantees future wars.
Jan 08, 2026
Oh good. Now we have a war to focus on. Everyone’s tired of Epstein by now, and tired of the possibility that the bad guy may be, ho hum, our own national leader, aka, the commander in chief.
So the commander in chief has stepped in for the sake of the public good, bestowing on America a far more traditional enemy to hate and fear and let dominate the headlines: narco-terrorists.
I’m still trying to grasp the fact that President Donald Trump has actually invaded Venezuela. He’s no longer simply bombing boats in the ocean. The US military bombed Caracas on January 3 and broke into the home of the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife Cilia Flores. They were kidnapped and extradited to the United States, where they are now on trial for drug trafficking—as though that was the moral purpose of the invasion.
Obviously it wasn’t. As The Intercept notes:
This is a clear-cut act of military aggression, a brazen violation of international law, and a textbook example of unreconstructed 19th-century colonialism.
Donald Trump now says that the US will "run" Venezuela and "take" the country’s vast oil reserves.
I’m in sync with the enormous outrage over this invasion, both here in the US and around the world. Where I back away slightly, however, is when a critic points out that Trump’s military action was “illegal,” because he invaded Venezuela without congressional approval. When I read this kind of criticism, I feel an inner alarm go off. Making a a war “legal” doesn’t make it just or moral. Legal wars still kill and maim innocent people, still destroy communities, still create intense hatred that guarantees future wars. In other words, war itself is always the core of the wrong.
In no way am I saying I oppose self-defense, or even retaliation. I’m saying, instead, that I believe we need to rethink what self-defense actually means.
What, oh what, is power? We live in a world that is armed against itself with preposterous enormity—nuclear armed against itself, for God’s sake. Violent response is embedded in the way we think, regarded as the nature of protection. Where’s my gun? And it’s likely to be the first response to a perceived threat, especially at the national level. And anyone who dares to question this is easily belittled as crying: “Gosh, can’t we all just get along?”
I took aim, so to speak, at this cynicism in a poem I wrote some years ago, called “Can’t We All Just... Oh Forget It,” which begins:
The cynics
play with their sticks
and knives, mocking
the merciful, the naïve,
the cheek turners.
Can’t we all just . . .
oh, forget it.
But maybe the answer
is yes,
if we undo the language,
the easy smirkwords
that belittle
our evolving...
Belittle our evolving! Disagreement—conflict—is often incredibly complex. Simply “eliminating” it, shooting it out of existence, may be a tempting course of action, but it solves nothing. Instead, we have to understand it. And every time we understand the reasons for a conflict—and figure out how to rectify and transcend those reasons—we evolve.
Consider these words about the Venezuela invasion by Jordan Liz:
Ultimately, whether it’s removing Maduro or invading Cuba, Mexico, or Colombia, none of these actions will solve the drug crisis because they fail to tackle the root cause: public suffering. While there are many reasons people turn to drugs, the lack of adequate healthcare, poverty, homelessness, social stigmas about drug use, and criminalization are the leading factors. People turn to drugs when their governments and communities turn their back on them. Drug cartels, like any other capitalist enterprise, exploit these people’s hopes and desires for their own gain.
...If Trump really cared about the drug crisis, he would be working tirelessly to solve the affordability crisis—not denying its existence or spending billions on battleships.
War is not the answer, even if it’s legal.
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The Planetary Crime of a Trump Invasion of Greenland
In a rational world, the conversation about the island would be about the melting ice sheet that could easily add a foot or more to the level of the ocean before the century is out.
Jan 07, 2026
When President Donald Trump first started fantasizing about seizing Greenland for the US, it sounded farcical—a little Gilbert and Sullivan, or maybe The Mouse that Roared. In the wake of America’s attack on Caracas, however, it now seems as likely as not that we’ll soon be landing troops in Nuuk, a truly hideous prospect that we should all try to head off. Here’s my small effort:
First off, I think it’s a very real possibility.
Here’s Stephen Miller on Monday, talking with Jake Tapper:
TAPPER: Can you rule out the US is going to take Greenland by force?
MILLER: Greenland should be part of the US. By what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland? The US is the power of NATO.
TAPPER: So force is on the table?
MILLER: Nobody is gonna fight the US militarily over future of Greenland.
And here’s our leader himself, speaking to a press gaggle on Air Force One while a beaming Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-Obsequious) grinned by his side:
Trump: We need Greenland. Right now, Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships.
Reporter: What would the justification be for a claim to Greenland?
Trump: The EU needs us to have it.
None of this makes any actual sense—Greenland is not covered with Chinese and Russian ships, the EU does not want us to have it (European leaders united Tuesday to say, “Greenland belongs to its people. It is for Denmark and Greenland, and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland,” which seems pretty clear), and Denmark asserts control over Greenland in pretty much the same way Washington asserts control over, say, Alaska or Vermont.
In fact, though, Denmark has been slowly loosening that control over the decades—not because it wants to sell it to America, but because it recognizes that the people who live there, most of whom are Inuit, should have the greatest say in how it’s managed. Greenlanders have exercised that say in ways that would be uncongenial to the White House: for instance, civil partnerships for gay people have been standard since 1996, and gay marriage legal since 2016 when the island’s parliament approved it by a 28-0 vote. Under the Kinguaassiorsinnaajunnaarsagaaneq pillugu inatsit law, sex changes have been allowed since 1976. In other words, Trump’s claim that Greenlanders “want to be with us” is palpable nonsense—a poll last January found that 85% of the population opposed the idea.
Discerning Trump’s “real” reason for wanting Greenland is a pointless exercise; he’s a sad, ancient baby, and babies just want. He seems to think that the point of a ruler is to acquire more territory, and that he more or less owns by divine right the land masses adjacent to our country. (MAGA bloggers this week were busily talking about “vassal states” across the hemisphere). There are minerals there, but hard to get at. Oh, and there’s petroleum in and around Greenland as well, and that usually sings a siren song to this child of the oil-driven 20th century.
Really, however, there’s only one truly vital strategic asset in Greenland, one thing that could change the world. And that’s the ice that covers almost all its landmass.
I’ve been up on this ice sheet—I’ve hiked up glaciers from the tideline, climbing and climbing till the sea disappears behind you and all you can see in every direction is white. It is uncannily beautiful.
I helped organize a trip there in 2018 so that two very fine poets could record a piece from atop this ice sheet. Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner came from her home in the Marshall Islands, which is already slipping under a rising sea (and which has long known about US imperialism; part of the atoll is still radioactive and off limits, thanks to US bomb testing in the 1950s); Aka Niviana is a native Greenlander whose home has begun to melt, a melt that if it continues will guarantee the submersion of Polynesia, and much else.
They stood there on that ice, in a chill summer wind, and recited their long and majestic poem for a camera; my job was to stand just outside its range with a pair of sleeping bags that they could wrap themselves in between takes. “Rise: From One Island to Another,” as their work was called, has won both prizes and large audiences on YouTube; it will, I think, be one of the documents of this global warming era that someday people will look at in a kind of outraged awe, one more proof that we knew exactly what was coming and did nothing about it.
The stakes are so enormous that they make the Trumpian greed for this land seem all the punier and more puerile.
We were camped above the Eagle Glacier—Jason Box, the American-born climatologist now living in Denmark who helped lead the trip had named it that because of its shape when he first visited five years earlier, “but now the head and the wings of the bird have melted away. I don’t know what we should call it now, but the eagle is dead.” And that’s true of so much of the island; we watched as one iceberg after another came crashing off the head of glaciers, each one raising the level of the ocean by some infinitesimal amount.
Greenland holds 23 feet of sea-level rise, should we eventually melt it all. That will take a while, but we’re doing our best. It’s been losing mass steadily for the last quarter-century—it lost 105 billion tons of ice (billion with a b) in 2025, and the ice was melting well into September, unusual in a place where winter usually descends in late August. The people of Greenland, by the way, recognize all this: They passed a law in 2021 banning all new oil exploration and drilling—the government described it as “a natural step” because Greenland “takes the climate crisis seriously.” (More than two-thirds of their power comes from renewables, mostly hydro).
I found those Greenlanders I met to be hardy, thrifty people very much in tune with their place. I spent a memorable afternoon with Box planting trees outside the former American air base in Narsarsuaq in an effort to, among other things, soak up some carbon dioxide. And I spent an equally pleasant afternoon drinking beer with him and the rest of our party at a microbrewery in Saqqannguaq (one of several in the country) which brews “with the purest drinking water on Earth, coming from the Greenlandic ice cap” and hence “free of toxins, chemicals, and microplastics.” Highly recommend the IPA, reminder of yet another imperial adventure.
Obviously seizing Greenland would be a terrible idea because it would break up NATO and put America at loggerheads with the liberal democracies of Europe (though that may be the single biggest incentive for the administration). Obviously, it would be a gross example of modern colonization, obliterating the rights of the people who live there. Obviously, it would raise tensions around the world even higher, and send the strongest possible signal that Beijing should just go grab Taiwan. Lots of people are talking about those things, though there’s not the slightest sign that anyone in power is listening. (Stephen Miller’s wife has tweeted out a map of Greenland decked out in red and white stripes).
But in a rational world what we’d mostly be talking about is all that ice. That’s what, for the other 8 billion people on the planet, actually matters about this island. It could easily add a foot or more to the level of the ocean before the century is out, all by itself (the Antarctic, much bigger but slower to melt, will eventually add much more). A foot is a lot—on a typical beach on, say, the Jersey shore, which slopes up at about 1°, that brings the ocean about 90 feet inland.
And the fresh water pouring off Greenland seems already to be disrupting the great conveyor belt currents that bring warm water north from the equator, maintaining the climates of the surrounding continents. That too could raise—by significant amounts—the level of the sea, especially along the coast of the southeast US (and also plunge Europe into the deep freeze even as the rest of the planet warms).
The stakes are so enormous that they make the Trumpian greed for this land seem all the punier and more puerile. Here’s how Jetnil-Kijiner and Niviana put it in their poem:
We demand that the world see beyond
SUVs, ACs, their pre-package convenience
Their oil-slicked dreams, beyond the belief
That tomorrow will never happen
And yet there’s a generosity to their witness—a recognition that whoever started the trouble, we’re now in it together.
Let me bring my home to yours
Let’s watch as Miami, New York,
Shanghai, Amsterdam, London
Rio de Janeiro and Osaka
Try to breathe underwater…
None of us is immune.
Life in all forms demands
The same respect we all give to money…
So each and every one of us
Has to decide
If we
Will
Rise
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