Trump’s Plan Serves U.S. Armaments and Oil Billionaires, Harms All Else

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

On January 8th, the Wall Street Journal’s front page had three articles that together document what Trump’s plan not just for America, but for the world, consists of.

Headlining “Trump Team Works Up Sweeping Plan to Control Venezuelan Oil for Years to Come: The U.S. president believes the effort could lower oil prices to his target price of $50 a barrel.”, this paywalled article was summarized in Ukraine’s Kyiv Post:

The Trump administration is preparing a far-reaching plan to assert long-term control over Venezuela’s oil sector, a strategy aimed at reshaping global energy markets, lowering oil prices and sidelining Russia and China in the Western Hemisphere.

According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), US President Donald Trump and his advisers have discussed an initiative that would give the United States effective stewardship over large parts of Venezuela’s state-run oil industry, Petróleos de Venezuela SA (PdVSA), just days after US forces captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

Plan centers on PdVSA control

Experts familiar with the matter told the Journal that the plan under consideration would see the US acquiring, marketing and distributing most of PdVSA’s oil production, either directly or through existing and revived joint ventures with major energy companies.

If implemented, the strategy could place much of the Western Hemisphere’s oil reserves under US influence, when combined with production already controlled by American companies elsewhere. Administration officials view this as a way to block Russia and China from Venezuela’s energy sector while strengthening Washington’s leverage over global oil supply.

Trump has repeatedly told advisers that increased access to Venezuelan crude could help push oil prices down to about $50 a barrel – a level he has publicly described as his target.

Oil prices and political risks

US oil prices are already relatively low, with benchmark crude trading near $56 a barrel this week, complicating the president’s push. Many US producers have warned that sustained prices near $50 would make drilling unprofitable, potentially harming the domestic shale industry, a key political constituency for Trump.

Still, the White House argues the benefits outweigh the risks.

Also paywalled, the WSJ’s headlined report “Trump’s Plan to Run the Hemisphere Scares Friends and Puzzles Foes: China and Russia see new opportunities as the U.S. focuses on the Americas, while Europe braces for a clash over Greenland.”, opened:

President Trump’s new ‘Donroe Doctrine’ — loudly proclaimed by the seizure of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and the president’s assertion that Washington now ‘runs’ the Latin American country — seeks to establish U.S. hegemony over the entire Western Hemisphere.

The question America’s adversaries and allies are asking themselves in the aftermath of the Caracas raid is whether this embrace of 19th-century-style imperial thinking also means a pivot away from the rest of the world that would give China and Russia greater sway in their neighborhoods.

However, to raise that “question” is really to miss the point of what Trump’s plan will do if it succeeds. What it will do is to weaken both Russia ad China — and this isn’t merely on account of his driving them out of Venezuela and maybe even out of Latin America, but also because his ploy’s flooding the oil markets with Venezuelan oil would be (in his view) driving down oil prices so low as to reduce Russia’s oil income (and thus its war in Ukraine), and Trump would also thereby pressure China, because China has become the clear global leader in non-fossil-fuels energy sources (which would then need to be even cheaper in order to compete against oil). By driving down oil prices, Trump aims to reduce not only Russia’s income, but also China’s income, and thereby to bring America to dominate not ONLY in the Western Hemishere, but also throughout the entire world.

Further indication that this is Trump’s plan is another of the WSJ’s front-page headlines, “The U.S. Pumps More Crude Than Anyone Else. Here’s Why It Wants Venezuela’s Too.”, which is also carried (nonpaywalled) at msm, and that story reports:

Refineries from Puget Sound to the Texas coast were designed decades ago to run the types of heavier and more sour grades of crude that the U.S. imports from countries including Canada, Mexico and Venezuela. Much of the oil that’s pumped in the U.S. is lighter, sweeter crude.

“Our refineries on the Gulf Coast are the best in the world in terms of refining this heavy crude and there’s been a shortage of heavy crude around the world so I think there will be tremendous demand and interest from private industry if given the space to do it,” Rubio said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

Rubio’s insinuation there, that heavy crude is more attractive to buyers than light crude is, is the exact opposite of the truth, because light crude is more attractive to buyers than heavy crude is. Light crude oil is generally cheaper to produce from than heavy crude, because it’s easier and cheaper to refine, yielding more high-value products like gasoline, diesel, and heating oil, while heavy crude requires significant investment and complex processing, therefore often trading at a discount, especially for those high-value purposes. 70% of U.S. refineries are designed for the heavy crude oils that have been coming from Venezuela and Canada, both of which countries produce almost only heavy crude. (They are called “tar sands” because they consist 80% of sand.) The domestic U.S. crude is light crude, but has become costlier and costlier because all of the easy-to-extract domestic oil in the U.S. has already been extracted, so almost all U.S. production now is of shale oil, which is much costlier to extract than the loil that America formerly produced was. The only advantage of heavy crude is for producing asphalt road-surfaces — a very limited market. For Marco Rubio to have tried to suggest that tar-sands are more valuable than the much purer “light crude” oils are, was for him to lie, and his purpose clearly was to use that lie to argue that America’s stealing that oil from Venezuela is going to help the public, instead of to help American billionaires.

This is how the Trump Administration hopes to fool the U.S. public to think that Venezuela’s heavy crude is superior to, instead of inferior to, the oils from almost all other countries. Trump is trying to make an economic case that his grab of Venezuela will benefit the American people, when actually it will instead benefit America’s billionaires in the oil industries, and in the weapons-production industries (because wars need weapons, which the warring countries’ governments must buy), at the expense of everyone else (taxpayers, soldiers, and the citizens in the invaded countries, etc.). Those oil billionaires are overwhelmingly megadonors to the Republican Party, not to the Democratic Party, whose billionaires are invested mainly in non-fossil-fuels energy sources. Both Parties’ billionaires are heavily invested in weapons-producers, and this is the reason why almost all members of the U.S. congress are neoconservatives, which is why the U.S. already spends 65% of the entire world’s military expenditures — all other countries combined spend only 35% (though SIPRI hides, instead of reports, this fact).

Yet another clear sign that Trump is trying to boost Republican billionaires at the expense of Democratic billionaires is a January 7th New York Times article, “Trump Pulls Out of Global Climate Treaty: The action could make it more difficult for a future administration to rejoin the Paris climate accord, the agreement among most nations to fight climate change.”, which event is of huge historical significance, because this “Presidential Memorandum” is as the NYT described in its opening:

President Trump announced on Wednesday that he was withdrawing the United States from the bedrock international agreement that forms the basis for countries to rein in climate change.

The treaty, which has been in place for 34 years, counts all of the other nations of the world as members.

In a social media post, the White House announced that Mr. Trump signed a presidential memorandum that pulled the United States from the climate pact and 65 other international organizations and treaties that “no longer serve American interests.” About half of those are United Nations organizations.

“As this list begins to demonstrate, what started as a pragmatic framework of international organizations for peace and cooperation has morphed into a sprawling architecture of global governance, often dominated by progressive ideology and detached from national interests,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement.

The climate treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, was established in 1992 and is referred to as the UNFCCC. It formed the legal foundation for the Paris agreement, a 2015 voluntary pact among nations to keep global temperatures at relatively safe levels.

The administration said it was also pulling the United States from the top United Nations climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as well as a host of other major international environmental organizations. They include the International Renewable Energy Association, which represents global clean energy interests, the International Solar Alliance and the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The moves cement the United States’ isolation from the rest of the world when it comes to fighting climate change.

The decision is not only an indicator of America’s rejection from global diplomacy, it’s a finger in the eye to the billions of people, including Americans, suffering through intensifying wildfires, storms and droughts, threats to the food supply and to biodiversity, and other dangerous and costly effects of a warming planet.

“It sends a major signal around the world of U.S. disdain for climate policy that’s essential for the world,” said Jean Galbraith, a professor specializing in international law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.

At the same time as Trump is pumping billions of dollars into additional net worths of Republican billionaires, he is doing war against Democratic billionaires, who are major investors in the types of non-fossil-fuels industries that have recently been getting more federal subsidies than even the fossil-fuels-industries have recently been getting.

Though the word “China” did not appear in Trump’s “Fact Sheet” about this change, it clearly is aimed at reducing the value of China’s enormous investments in non-fossil-fuels energy technologies.

And, yet further confirmation of his plan to pump up his Party’s billionaires (though in this case also of Democratic Party billionaires, who are just as much neoconservatives as the Republican Party’s billionaires are), the German Government’s Deutsche Welle news service headlined on January 7th, “Trump seeks record military budget of $1.5T: US President Donald Trump proposes setting the military budget at $1.5 trillion in 2027, saying it would allow the US to build a ‘dream military.’”, and opened (and they cite SIPRI’s false figure of current U.S, military spending, of around $900B, when the real figure is already around $1.5T):

US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he would seek to raise the military budget to $1.5 trillion (€1.3 to €1.4 trillion) in 2027, citing “troubled and dangerous times.”

The massive surge represents an increase of more than 50% on the current year’s defense budget set at $901 billion.

“This will allow us to build the ‘Dream Military’ that we have long been entitled to and, more importantly, that will keep us SAFE and SECURE, regardless of foe,” Trump wrote in a social media post announcing his proposal.

The US president said the “tremendous income” brought in by tariffs would allow the government to “easily hit the $1.5 trillion dollar number.”

Trump admin pursues military action to achieve foreign policy goals

The Trump administration has in recent days built pressure on certain countries by either making use of its military force or by threatening military action to achieve its foreign policy goals.

Trump’s demand that European countries increase their military spending to 5% of their GDP, would, if they obey, cause America’s armaments sales-volumes (and thus America’s billionaires’ wealth) to soar.

If all this does not describe Trump as a fascist-imperialist, then what does “fascist imperialism” even mean? But if he is that, then why are not America’s colonies (‘allies’) breaking away from the fascist-imerialist Government that they are ‘allied’ with? Would they not ALSO be fascist-imperialist?

Whereas Biden said “I am running the world,” Trump said “I run the country and the world.” The statement was aspirational for both of them. But ‘merely’ the aspiration proves how deadly dangerous this Government (in BOTH of its Parties) really IS. Any country that is allied with it is hostile toward its own population. That’s just a fact.

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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.