Originally published in Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.
Donald Trump certainly has global ambitions. He is using tariffs to remake the global economy. He is withdrawing the United States from as many multinational organizations and agreements as possible in order to destroy the liberal international order. And he has alternated between confronting adversaries (like Iran) and brokering ceasefires (like the one in Gaza).
But he also has hemispheric aims—to consolidate U.S. hegemony in America’s “backyard” of Latin America and the Caribbean. In some ways, these aims are merely his global ambitions writ small. Here, too, he is slapping tariffs on allies and adversaries alike. He has threatened to withdraw the United States from multinational pacts like the Organization of American States. He has embraced autocratic friends—Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, Javier Milei of Argentina, Daniel Noboa of Ecuador—and sought to punish anyone who has stood up to him, including Lula in Brazil and Gustavo Petro in Colombia.
In this context, his policy toward Venezuela seems to be a departure from his usual approach to U.S. adversaries, which has usually involved transactional negotiations (as with North Korea and Belarus) or, more frequently, threats and non-military actions (as with China and Russia). In recent months, by contrast, the Trump administration has attacked nearly two dozen boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, and killed more than 80 people, most of whom the administration has attempted to link to Venezuela. The United States has put a price ($50 million) on the head of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. It has sent considerable firepower to the region, including F-35 jets, eight Navy warships, a special operations vessel, a nuclear-powered attack submarine, and the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, along with approximately 10,000 U.S. soldiers and 6,000 sailors. To top it off, the administration has also advertised its dispatch of a CIA mission to Venezuela.
This military force is sufficient to conduct a sustained air war against Venezuela. But an amphibious assault or ground invasion would require at least 50,000 troops, according to CSIS, so that doesn’t seem to be on the horizon yet. Trump has suggested that war is unlikely, but he rarely reveals his plans beforehand. For the time being, then, this show of force seems designed to scare Maduro into stepping down or embolden the opposition and/or elements of the military to seize power.
Elsewhere, the administration has not hesitated to threaten military action (as in Greenland) or even use force (as in Iran). But the campaign against Venezuela is of a much greater magnitude. The declaration of a “war” against “narco-terrorists” provides the administration with an almost unlimited justification for killing anyone deemed a threat to U.S. national interests. Trump has periodically criticized previous administrations for their involvement in “forever wars,” a populist message that struck a chord with many voters. Yet this new version of the forever war on drugs, with an ill-defined set of targets and no clear timeline, has not elicited much criticism from Trump’s Republican supporters. A vote in the Senate to invoke the War Powers Act failed by a slender margin, attracting only two Republican votes.
At first glance, Trump’s singling out of Venezuela seems more opportunistic than strategic. The Venezuelan government, particularly after the presidential elections in 2024 revealed widespread discontent with the regime, is relatively weak. The Venezuelan economy suffers from the highest inflation rate in the world and a serious erosion in living standards. Just as Trump bombed Iran only after Israel had made such a mission virtually risk-free, he is pressuring Venezuela because its modest size, military weakness, and unpopular government makes it an easy target.
But Cuba, too, is suffering from similar internal challenges, and it has not (yet) merited a full-scale U.S. pressure campaign. Venezuela has supplied Cuba with oil for the last two decades, keeping its economy from collapse. But that trade has declined substantially, from 56,000 barrels per day to only 8,000 in June 2025. Key actors in the Trump administration, particularly Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have long championed regime change in Cuba. So, one possible explanation for the campaign against Venezuela is its capacity to further isolate Cuba and possibly trigger regime change there as part of a new domino theory held by elements of the administration.
However, the Trump team is not entirely unified on its approach to Venezuela. A neo-isolationist wing has been lobbying against regime-change strategies. Until recently, Trump’s envoy to Venezuela Richard Grinnell was pushing this line, and Maduro was more than receptive to a diplomatic solution. According to The New York Times, Maduro “offered to open up all existing and future oil and gold projects to American companies, give preferential contracts to American businesses, reverse the flow of Venezuelan oil exports from China to the United States, and slash his country’s energy and mining contracts with Chinese, Iranian and Russian firms.” Even this generous offer, bordering on the sycophantic, failed to move Trump.
Opportunism doesn’t fully explain the magnitude of the Trump efforts in and around Venezuela. Nor does a well-known animus toward Maduro that dates back to Trump’s first term. Although Trump’s instincts are generally transactional, he does from time to time make geopolitical calculations. In this case, Venezuela attracts his attention because, unlike Cuba, it lies at the crossroads of several obsessions: immigration, drugs, fossil fuels, and China.
Pushing China Out of the Hemisphere
China is now South America’s leading trade partner and number two for Latin America as a whole. The region sends China raw materials such as soybeans, copper, and oil in exchange for manufactured goods. China’s Belt and Road Initiative has funneled considerable investments into mining, agriculture, and infrastructure projects throughout Latin America. Beijing has also opened up multiple lines of credit for countries in the region. Venezuela is the largest borrower, having taken on $60 billion in debt to China, twice the size of the next leading recipient, Brazil.
The Trump administration is focused on delinking the U.S. economy from China. Its greater ambition is to delink the entire hemisphere, beginning with North America. Its strategy so far in negotiations with Canada and Mexico, which will proceed either bilaterally or trilaterally through the renegotiation of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, has been to close off Chinese access to North American markets by blocking the transshipment of Chinese finished products, reducing the quantity of Chinese parts and components in the supply chain, and restricting Chinese investment into manufacturing sites that then export to the United States. Trump is obsessed with Chinese attempts to enter the North American market through these backdoors, even though the Chinese use of these strategies is quite modest. U.S. trade negotiators have been pressuring their Mexican and Canadian counterparts to block these entry points into the U.S. market.
Trump is putting similar pressures on other Latin American leaders. He started by pushing Panama to withdraw from China’s Belt and Road Initiative. More recently, he has been focusing his attention on Argentina, which is China’s second largest trade partner in the region after Brazil. China has invested in several major infrastructure projects in Argentina, including two hydroelectric dams, a space observatory, and another planned nuclear power plant. Trump, meanwhile, has extended a $20 billion bailout package to Milei to forestall an economic crisis while making clear his preference to see Argentina downgrade its relationship with China.
There has been much talk of Trump falling back on a geopolitical strategy of “spheres of influence” by which China focuses on Asia, Russia on its “near abroad,” and the United States on the Americas. Such a division of the world perhaps appeals to Trump’s preference for looking at geopolitics as business by other means, with different regions functioning like corporate territory.
But Trump is not withdrawing the United States from the rest of the world. He has secured mineral rights in Ukraine, negotiated U.S. involvement in a transportation corridor between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and established agreements on minerals with the “club of nations” (Australia, Cambodia, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand). And his administration is doubling down on its containment of China—through alliances, expansion of Pacific bases, and increased Pentagon spending.
Meanwhile, Trump’s approach to the Americas is running up against considerable resistance. Mexico has asserted its sovereignty with respect to its economic relationship to China and its rejection of U.S. military intervention against narcotraffickers. The Brazilian government has refused to back down from its prosecution of former president Jair Bolsonaro in the face of higher U.S. tariffs. Even Ecuador, where President Daniel Noboa has a strong ideological affinity for Trump, can’t afford to jeopardize its relationship with China, which has involved considerable trade, investments into infrastructure, and $11 billion in loans.
Trump’s effort to reduce Chinese economic influence in the region has less to do with any “spheres of influence” geopolitical strategy and more to with the president’s desire to reduce U.S. dependency—and by extension, hemispheric dependency—on Beijing. He wants U.S. corporations, U.S. goods, and U.S. capital to occupy the first position in Latin America, not in the sense of globalized production but in a hub-and-spoke system where all key decisions and manufacturing takes place in the United States.
Other Drivers of Venezuela Policy
Donald Trump won reelection largely because of his focus on domestic issues, especially immigration, drugs, and energy policy. He deliberately downplayed international issues except to promise to end various wars that were costing the United States money and arms.
Venezuela, however, ticks off many boxes on Trump’s domestic to-do list. Even though the country is not the main source of either cocaine or fentanyl entering the United States, Trump has portrayed the Venezuelan criminal operation Tren de Aragua and the Maduro government as key perpetrators killing Americans with drugs. He has also used Tren de Aragua to vilify immigrants and made a big show of deporting Venezuelans allegedly connected to the gang to a highly dangerous prison in El Salvador (few if any of those deported had any such connections). The administration’s order terminating Temporary Protected Status for approximately 300,000 Venezuelans living in the United States made multiple mentions of Tren de Aragua.
Venezuela has the largest proven reserves of petroleum in the world—five times more than the United States. U.S. oil companies, primarily Chevron, have worked with Venezuela’s state-owned oil company to produce and ship petroleum. Trump initially severed that relationship, only to quietly reinstate it in July. At the same time, the Trump administration imposed an additional tariff on countries importing Venezuelan oil. Nevertheless, Venezuelan oil exports recently surged to a five-year high, led largely by sales to China and helped by Chevron’s involvement in production.
Trump, meanwhile, has pushed forward his own expansion of U.S. fossil fuel interests, opening up new areas of drilling, providing tax incentives to gas and oil companies, reducing regulatory oversight, and weakening clean energy competition. But any long-term reorientation of the U.S. economy back to oil will require access to other sources. Russia is out of the equation for the time being. The Middle East is unpredictable. Venezuela is problematic if the government there decides to restrict Chevron’s access or give preferential treatment to China or some other client. So, regardless of how conciliatory Maduro might be at the moment, the Trump administration wants to ensure secure access to Venezuela’s deposits well into the future.
The Trump administration has framed its rush to secure critical raw materials such as lithium, rare earth elements, and oil as part of its competition with China. But China has long anticipated the centrality of key minerals—for instance, taking over the processing of rare earth elements from the United States some decades ago—and is moving quickly away from its own dependency on fossil fuels. So, the Trump administration is both too late and too focused on the wrong target.
Nor is Venezuela China’s most important partner in Latin America. But the Trump administration might be going after Maduro as the weakest link. According to the Chinese adage, one must kill the chicken to warn the more powerful monkeys. The increasing pressure on Venezuela is a signal to China and other powerful actors to reduce their investments in the hemisphere and, even more so, a warning to other Latin American states that they’d better toe the Trump administration line—or else.
