When United States President Donald Trump dispatched special forces into Caracas to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, the firefights and airstrikes raining down killed dozens of people. Trump soon announced that the US would “run” Venezuela and take control of its oil industry, claiming that the country “took all of our oil not that long ago.” It was only the most recent installment in Washington’s long, deadly history of meddling in Latin America.
Oil remains a prime motivator for US intervention in Latin America today, but relics of the supposed “communist threat” that defined past decades of dirty wars and deadly coups still frames US policy. Indeed, much of Washington’s rhetoric on oil involved depriving Cuba of its regular Venezuelan supplies. In the recent executive order declaring Cuba a threat to the US, Trump explicitly regurgitates Cold War-era narratives: “The Cuban regime continues to spread its communist ideas, policies, and practices around the Western Hemisphere, threatening the foreign policy of the United States.” The executive order stipulates additional tariffs for countries that sell oil to Cuba. In this case, rather than immediate profit, oil is perceived as the card to bring down the country that withstood the threats of US imperialism. The expectation is that without Venezuela, Cuba would disintegrate.
Choosing Venezuela reflects Washington’s long history of interfering in the country with the aims of controlling its oil supply. In 1972, the US expressed concerns about the possibility of Venezuela nationalizing its oil resources. Noting that the two main parties, the center-left Democratic Action (AD) and the center-right Social Christian Party (COPEI), agreed to minimize oil influence in their electoral campaigns,the US offered proposals incentivizing Venezuela with higher revenues while securing the US market for oil. A CIA document from October 1972 states that “the treaty would extend to the companies financial incentives and guarantees to explore and exploit new deposits believed to be large enough to provide the US with a reliable source of oil to help meet rising energy demands.”
Democratic Action’s Carlos Andres Perez was sworn in as president of Venezuela in 1974. In October 1975, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sent a telegram that amounted to a US threat to Venezuela: “If one or more companies perceive an element of discrimination in the process [of nationalization] we could have problems between us.” On Jan. 1, 1976, Perez announced the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil industry and the state-owned company Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) was created. It is possible that US President Donald Trump’s comments about Venezuela supposedly stealing US oil is a vague reference to the nationalization of the country’s natural resources.
As the news broke that the US kidnapped Maduro and Flores on unfounded allegations of narcotrafficking, Trump swiftly shifted his rhetoric back to oil. Maduro and his wife face steep charges in US courts. Meanwhile, Trump’s attack on Venezuela’s sovereignty and oil is part of a long, deadly pattern first established by the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. In fact, the Trump administration recently adapted this doctrine — now calling it the “Donroe Doctrine” — and outlined its rationale in the National Security Strategy Document the White House released late last year.
Long before oil, at the turn of the 20th century, the US was interested in asserting control over the tar in the Bermudez Lake in Venezuela.Through the National Asphalt Trust, the Philadelphia businessman John M. Mack, who was affiliated with the Republican Party and well connected to the US government, lobbied for battleships to be sent to Venezuela when President Cipriano Castro refused US monopoly over the country’s resources. Castro refused to back down, leading Mack to finance a revolt against the Venezuelan government. Thousands of Venezuelans were killed, but Castro survived, still facing Washington’s interference and threatening not to pay the country’s debts to the US, Germany, the United Kingdom. and Italy. In 1902, the European countries attacked Venezuela, bringing the colonial battlefield directly to the country.
While the US supported the debt payments, it was concerned about growing European influence in the region. In 1904, US President Theodore Roosevelt added the Roosevelt Corollary to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which paved the way for intervention in South America to ensure debt repayment. Under the guise of preventing “foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations,” the Roosevelt Corollary updated the Monroe Doctrine to justify US foreign intervention in the region.
When US Secretary of State John Quincy Adams originally wrote the Monroe Doctrine two centuries ago, the document sought to prevent European colonial powers from gaining dominion over further territory in South America. It also stated that, while the US would remain neutral on the already-existing European colonies in the region, it wouldn’t allow new ones to be established.
In 1895, US Secretary of State Richard Olney extended the Monroe Doctrine’s interpretation to greenlight Washington’s intervention in border disputes. In 1904, Roosevelt’s Corollary took Olney’s interpretation even further, overtly asserting that the US had the right to intervene against South American nations. The results were calamitous: By 1933, under the Roosevelt Corollary, the US had intervened militarily in Cuba, Honduras, Panama, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua.
During that same period, two other developments extended both the Monroe Doctrine and the US precedent for intervention in South America. In 1912, the Lodge Corollary claimed to give the US the right to interfere against non-European corporate interests in the region. During Calvin Cooldige’s presidency, the Clark Memorandum of 1928 also added that US intervention in South America was a right. While the Monroe Doctrine specified US intervention in the region within the context of European colonial interests, the Clark Memorandum gave the US the right to intervene directly in South America. With the anti-communist hysteria that followed World War II, the Monroe Doctrine soon became an integral part of US Cold War policy in the region.
At the 10th Inter-American Conference in Caracas, Venezuela, in March 1954, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles exploited the occasion to isolate Guatemala, which, under the presidency of Jacobo Arbenz, threatened the interests of the United Fruit Company. Dulles introduced the Caracas Declaration of Solidarity, which sought to curtail communist influence and recommended the exchange of information between governments to counteract “the subversive activities of the international communist movement.” Seventeen countries voted in favor, with two abstentions and Guatemala voting against. That June, Arbenz was toppled by the CIA-backed coup known as Operation PB Success.
In 1962, US President John F. Kennedy applied the Monroe Doctrine to Cuba in the context of the Cuban Missile Crisis, saying that if Cuba “should ever attempt to export its aggressive purposes by force or the threat of force against any nation in this hemisphere, or become an offensive military base of significant capacity for the Soviet Union,” the US would interfere to protect its interests and those of its allies. Only a year earlier, in 1961, the Monroe Doctrine was also used to justify the Bay of Pigs invasion, which sought to topple the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro.
As is plainly stated in a 1969 memorandum, the US shifted towards overt assertions of applying the Monroe Doctrine to South America: “We are too rich and powerful to leave the nations of our hemisphere to drift alone into economic stagnation and social upheaval. That such a drift could open the hemisphere to hostile foreign powers is true; but more fundamentally, it would be incompatible with our own history and principles.”
In the meantime, the US had started monitoring Grenada’s Maurice Bishop, the leader of the New Jewel Movement. “They are sensitive to international reaction to their coup, and eager to obtain international legitimacy, but if we are not sensitive to their overtures, it is conceivable they could turn to Cuba,” a memorandum dated 1979 stated. In October 1983, after Bishop was murdered in a takeover by Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard, the Reagan administration authorized Operation Urgent Fury against Grenada over concerns that the construction of an airport for tourism purposes was a plan to bring Soviet power in close proximity to the US. CIA documents state that while no documentary evidence was found to that purpose, Grenada was perceived as “a springboard” by Cuba and the Soviet Union to further communism in the region.
In 1989, US President George HW Bush ordered the invasion of Panama to depose dictator Manuel Noriega, who was a graduate of the School of the Americas, an informer for the Eisenhower administration, and on the CIA payroll in 1971. Noriega’s drug trafficking was largely overlooked despite being known to Washington well before he took power in Panama, until it became a liability for the US. One of the objectives cited to justify Operation Just Cause was “to apprehend Noriega and bring him to the United States to stand trial for drug trafficking.” However, another mentioned objective was to assert US interests in the Panama Canal. Noriega’s kidnapping, of course, is the more recent precursor to the US intervention in Venezuela this year, in tune with the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine that the 2025 National Security Strategy document outlined.
During the Obama administration, in 2013 US Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the era of the Monroe Doctrine was over. The next year, US President Barack Obama embarked on normalizing relations with Cuba, notably the release of the Cuban Five agents and in 2015, removing Cuba from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list.
In 2017, however, Trump invoked the Monroe Doctrine at the United Nations General Assembly, targeting Venezuela within the context of migration and socialism in the region. Two years later, US National Security adviser John Bolton, a hardline neoconservative, said that foreign policy will be governed by the Monroe Doctrine. “In this administration, we’re not afraid to use the word Monroe Doctrine,” Bolton said, referring to Venezuela. In 2020, Trump announced that the US would be deploying its navy to combat alleged drug trafficking in which Maduro was allegedly involved.
Since Trump returned to office last year, his second administration has latched onto the same narrative and reinforced it through the National Security Strategy document. “After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies in the region,” the document partly reads.
Under the goals “Enlist and Expand,” the NSS 2025 document states it will work with ‘established friends in the Hemisphere” while “enlisting regional champions that can help create tolerable stability in the region.” It further emphasizes US military presence in South America under the guise of combating human and drug trafficking, and sends a warning to “non Hemispheric competitors” that have established considerable influence through trade relations in the region.
China, for example, invested heavily in Venezuela. Ninety percent of Venezuela’s oil exports were headed to China in June 2025, compared to 75% in May of the same year. In the aftermath of Maduro’s kidnapping on Jan. 3, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared, “This is the Western Hemisphere. This is where we live — and we’re not going to allow the Western Hemisphere to be a base of operation for adversaries, competitors, and rivals of the United States.”
Rubio’s statement is reminiscent of the foundations of the Monroe Doctrine, with bigger implications for both the region and non-European countries. As the Trump Corollary asserts US hegemony, Colombia, Mexico, and Cuba have been warned of possible military action. In December, Rubio indicated that attacking Venezuela would enhance the chances of toppling the Cuban government. Cuban President Miguel Diaz Canel has stated he is open to dialogue with the US “without political concessions.”
Since the US captured Maduro, no Venezuelan oil has reached Cuba, and Trump has called upon the country to “make a deal.” Cubans, however, have expressed unity against Washington’s interventionist threats. It is, after all, thanks to US foreign policy and the illegal blockade on the island that Cubans have experienced decades of hardships. And while the US hardly disguises its pursuit for oil and regime change under the pretext of narcotrafficking and terrorism, it is the Cubans that have worked with the US Coastguard to prevent real drug trafficking, as opposed to the cartels invented by the Trump administration to justify intervention in Venezuela.
