Did Trump steal Venezuela in order to use its oil to pay U.S. government’s debts?

4 January 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Peter Haenseler (whom I normally don’t even mention because he doesn’t link to or otherwise cite any sources) presented a fascinating hypothesis to explain why Trump stole Venezuela:

The world is selling US bonds and America is running out of money – it’s as simple as that. With the oil that the Americans want to steal, they will once again have assets with which to refinance ailing America. Trump was therefore forced to carry out this raid, because otherwise the empty coffers in Washington would blow up in his face. Being a businessman, he even found a way to make his friends in the oil business rich at the same time.

He was also able to rely on the corrupt military and business leaders in Venezuela – even Maduro’s bodyguards abandoned him. The military, probably in consultation with the CIA, shut down its own air defenses to guarantee safe passage for the robber barons.

The parallels with Syria are obvious, with the difference that Assad smelled a rat and had himself flown out by the Russians.

If I undestand correctlly what he was saying, Trump’s plan is to privatize to U.S. oil firms Venezuela’s oil and then tax those firms on their profits from selling it, so that the 300 billion barrels of Venezuela’s petroleum reserves will become effectively collateral to back the U.S. dollar in order to further delay what would otherwise inevitably be the collapse in the dollar’s international value and the consequent end of the U.S. empire.

He expains why he doesn’t think that Trump’s ploy will work, for example:

The Chinese and Russians will not intervene militarily under any circumstances. Rather, it is to be expected that the Chinese will take revenge by destroying COMEX; we will know more in the next few days. The gold and silver prices should be watched closely. The higher the prices of these precious metals, the worse the situation is for the US dollar and the American public finances.

We must hope that Venezuela will defend itself – by any means necessary.

What is certain is that the western world has turned its back on the rule of law.

However, as I documented yesterday, under the headline “Why I Distrust Trump’s Takeover of Venezuela”: “ALL of this fascism by the American Government started on 25 July 1945, which was when the U.S. Government became taken over by what we call its “Deep State” or the billionaires.” The new President Truman had already (during the San Francisco Conference at which the U.N.’s Charter was drawn up) effectively watered-down his predecessor FDR’s plan for a U.N. and international laws that would have enforcement mechanisms behind them; and, so, now that Truman, on 25 July 1945, finally made the decision that the U.S. Government must take over ultimately the entire world, there would be nothing institutionalized that could prevent this outcome. The U.S. Government’s contempt for international law didn’t start with Trump, on 2 January 2026; it started with Truman, on 25 July 1945. The two political Parties play a “good cop versus bad cop” routine against the public: the only difference between the conservative fascist Republicans and the liberal fascist Democratts is that the latter pretend to be the “good cop,” so as to sucker liberals into the false belief that they don’t BOTH represent ONLY their political megadonors — the masters of the show. A 900-word Semafor report, on January 3rd, “How Trump kept Republicans behind his Maduro campaign”, had 820 words about Republicans, and only 80 about Democrats:

THE VIEW FROM DEMOCRATS

Democrats asserted for months that Trump does not have the authority to strike Venezuela or boats off of the coast of it. Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., said lawmakers were misled by the administration during recent briefings.

“Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth looked every Senator in the eye a few weeks ago and said this wasn’t about regime change,” Kim said. “Trump rejected our Constitutionally required approval process for armed conflict.”

The very idea that Senate Democrats didn’t know that this was all about regime-change is ludicrous — only a liberal fool would take it seriously. (That’s how much contempt they have against the public.) The billionaires of both Parties are united in favor of neoconservatism (advancing U.S. empire). Privately, even if not publicly, they favor expanding the empire. Every Senate Democrat publicly opposed but actually supported (did nothing to even try to prevent) this invasion. It was bipartisan, but the Parties pretend otherwise. It’s all just for show.

Therefore, U.S.-and-allied billionaires’ corporations will now be sucking the life’s blood out of the Venezuelan people, who will be ruled first by Trump’s appointees, and then by giving the Venezuelans elections between political contestants all of whom will have passed muster by the U.S. regime as being suitable to serve as the U.S. regime’s stooge-leaders there.

In this American ‘democracy’, it makes no difference how the public vote, because all of the major Parties’ candidates are only individuals who have been pre-approved — and are funded — by billionaires. And only those political megadonors get what they want out of this Government. (The public get only promises, which only fools trust, because none of the public promises are kept.)

Under Haenseler’s hypothesis, Trump decided to take the oil away from Venezuelans so that he wouldn’t need to take that amount of wealth from America’s own taxpayers. Perhaps this is what Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is trying to do: give tne American people a cut from the booty that the U.S. Government extracts from foreign populations in order to prevent the U.S. population from overthrowing the billionaires’ Government.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.