Emperor without Clothes: Trump's 'Crude' Pursuit Of Venezuelan Oil

The spectacle of Donald Trump’s brazen military assault on Caracas, the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores on 3 January, and their forcible transfer to New York—an operation accompanied by large-scale strikes across multiple locations in Venezuela and justified through the now-ritual pretexts of drug trafficking, narco-terrorism, authoritarian decay, and national security—reveals far less about Venezuela than it does about the United States itself.

What is on display is not moral authority, constitutional discipline, or respect for international law, but the naked exercise of imperial power. Like the emperor in the fable, the United States struts confidently, assuming its legitimacy is self-evident, while the clothes that once concealed its coercion—law, principle, restraint—have long since fallen away.

Trump did not invent this condition; he merely stripped away its camouflage. What earlier administrations cloaked in humanitarian rhetoric, multilateral posturing, and legal euphemism, Trump enacted with blunt menace. In doing so, he made visible what had long been structurally true: empire no longer needs persuasion. It no longer needs to pretend that coercion is reluctant, benevolent, or exceptional. It only needs to assert.

The danger lies not merely in Trump’s personality, but in the normalisation of this nakedness. When empire abandons even the ritual of justification, what remains is force unencumbered by law—power that no longer feels obligated to explain itself. The real danger is the world’s habitual spinelessness, which watches these spectacles with indulgent detachment while innumerable innocents are sacrificed at the altar of narcissistic bravado.

The Bogus Moral Alibi

The claim that Venezuela constitutes a threat because of drug trafficking is intellectually dishonest. Drug flows into the United States have historically moved through multiple transit countries, many of them close U.S. allies. Colombia—despite decades of U.S. military aid, intelligence cooperation, aerial fumigation campaigns, and counter-narcotics operations—remains central to the global cocaine economy. Mexico’s cartels kill more people annually than many declared war zones. Yet neither Bogotá nor Mexico City faces U.S. threats of invasion, regime change, or sanctions-driven economic strangulation.

This selectivity is not accidental; it is diagnostic. “Drugs” function not as a causal explanation but as a moral alibi—a vocabulary that enables punishment without admitting motive. If narcotics were genuinely the trigger for intervention, the United States would be compelled to confront its own allies, its own financial system, and its own demand economy. Instead, outrage is carefully curated. Venezuela is targeted not because it violates norms, but because it refuses subordination.

What Caracas has done—beginning under Hugo Chávez and intensified under Nicolás Maduro—is assert sovereign control over resources, resist U.S. economic discipline, cultivate strategic ties with China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba, and most provocatively, experiment with alternatives to the dollar-based oil trade. These actions, not internal misgovernance, constitute the real offence. Many states misgovern; few are punished. Venezuela is punished because it resists. But by what authority?

Empire in the Backyard

Latin America has long functioned as the United States’ informal empire. From the Monroe Doctrine through Cold War coups in Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, and beyond, U.S. intervention has been rationalised through shifting narratives—anti-communism, democracy promotion, counter-terrorism, humanitarian rescue. The rhetoric changes; the structure does not.

Trump’s Venezuela offensive fits squarely within this lineage. What distinguishes it is not substance, but crudity. Earlier administrations at least attempted to launder intervention through international institutions or allied consensus. Trump dispensed even with that decorum. Venezuela became a domestic political prop—proof that the United States could still punish “socialism,” discipline defiant states, and mobilise right-wing constituencies, particularly exile communities in Florida.

Electoral calculus merged seamlessly with imperial impulse. Venezuela was reduced to a caricature: a failed socialist dystopia whose destruction could be sold as ideological victory. The lives of Venezuelans, like those of Iraqis or Libyans before them, were incidental.

Yet Venezuela is not merely symbolic. It is materially central. It sits atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves, alongside vast deposits of natural gas, gold, bauxite, coltan, and rare earth minerals—resources critical not only for energy markets but for electronics, renewable technologies, and modern weaponry. In a world marked by energy transition but persistent hydrocarbon dependence, control over such resources is strategic power.

Since Chávez, Venezuela resisted wholesale privatisation, renegotiated contracts with multinational corporations, and sought to redirect oil revenues toward domestic redistribution rather than foreign shareholders. Even more threatening, it began exploring oil trade arrangements that bypassed the U.S. dollar. This was not mere economic improvisation. It was a political declaration.

The De-Dollarisation Sin

By the late 2010s, under escalating U.S. sanctions that severed access to the dollar-based financial system, Venezuela increasingly rerouted oil exports toward Asia—above all China. By the early 2020s, China had become Venezuela’s largest single oil customer, at times absorbing between 70 and 90 percent of total exports. Much of this crude—often disguised in shipping manifests or relabelled to evade sanctions—was settled in non-dollar currencies such as yuan, euros, or rubles.

Precise figures are elusive because PDVSA (the state-owned oil and gas company of Venezuela) and Chinese customs rarely publish currency-specific data. But tanker tracking, refinery intake records, and industry analyses converge on a clear pattern: a substantial share of Venezuelan oil was being traded outside exclusive dollar settlement. Estimates suggest that this shift generated billions in annual revenue and demonstrated—however imperfectly—that an oil producer could survive without full dollar dependence.

This was the real crime. The petrodollar system underpins U.S. global power. Oil traded in dollars forces transactions through U.S.-controlled clearing mechanisms, enabling sanctions to function as financial strangulation. Even partial deviation weakens this leverage. Symbolism matters in geopolitics. Precedents matter more.

Washington remembers Saddam Hussein’s decision to price Iraqi oil in euros. It remembers Muammar Gaddafi’s proposal for an African gold-backed currency. Both paid with the destruction of their states. Venezuela’s challenge was smaller in scale, but dangerous in implication. At peak production, Venezuela pumped over 3.5 million barrels per day. Even at reduced output, the prospect that such volumes could circulate outside dollar dominance was intolerable.

Sanctions were not a response to collapse. They were instruments of collapse.

Economic Siege as Political Strategy

The humanitarian catastrophe routinely cited to justify intervention did not precede coercion; it followed it. Asset freezes, denial of credit, exclusion from global banking, seizure of overseas properties such as CITGO (previously owned by Petroleos de Venezuela), and secondary sanctions systematically dismantled Venezuela’s economic capacity. Shortages of food, medicines, spare parts, and essential inputs were not accidents of governance alone; they were foreseeable consequences of economic siege.

This suffering was then cynically repurposed as proof of regime failure, furnishing the very justification for further coercion. Economic strangulation was first presented as a “non-military” alternative to war; once it produced predictable devastation, that devastation itself was cited as evidence of incompetence, illegitimacy, or moral unfitness to govern. The logic is circular and brutal: destabilise, then blame; immiserate, then indict. What is framed as diagnosis is in fact the outcome of a deliberate policy.

Humanitarian rhetoric collapses entirely under scrutiny when the primary driver of suffering is the very power claiming concern. To invoke starvation, medicine shortages, or economic collapse—conditions materially produced by sanctions—as grounds for intervention is not moral reasoning but moral fraud. It is akin to lighting a fire and then claiming the right to enter the house because it is burning. Such arguments invert responsibility, absolve the arsonist, and rebrand coercion as compassion.

Blatant Illegality

Defenders of American exceptionalism insist that U.S. power is constrained by constitutional checks. Formally, the Constitution assigns war-making authority to Congress, reserving the presidency for command. In practice, this architecture has been hollowed out over decades.

Since World War II, U.S. presidents have repeatedly initiated military action without declarations of war—Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Syria. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 was meant to restrain such adventurism. Instead, it has become a procedural inconvenience, evaded through semantic manoeuvres: wars renamed “operations,” invasions rebranded as “defensive strikes.”

The deeper problem is congressional abdication. Legislators surrender authority out of political convenience or bipartisan consensus when force is directed at weak Global South states. Trump’s threats against Venezuela therefore do not represent constitutional breakdown; they reveal constitutional exposure. The checks exist. They no longer function.

Under the UN Charter, the threat or use of force against a sovereign state is prohibited except in self-defence following an armed attack or with explicit Security Council authorisation. Neither condition applies to Venezuela. Drug trafficking, economic mismanagement, authoritarian governance, or ideological deviation do not constitute legal grounds for war.

Any U.S. military action would therefore amount to aggression. That this is rarely stated plainly speaks less to legal ambiguity than to global hierarchy. International law is enforced rigorously against the weak and rhetorically against the strong. The so-called rules-based order operates downward, never upward.

Geopolitics, Risk, and the Global South

Venezuela is not isolated. It is embedded in a network of strategic relationships with China and Russia. Beijing has invested tens of billions in Venezuelan energy and infrastructure. Moscow has supplied military equipment, advisors, and credit. Threatening Venezuela is therefore not merely regional bullying; it is a challenge to rival powers in the Western Hemisphere.

Unlike Iraq or Libya, Venezuela sits at the intersection of great-power rivalry. Any military escalation risks entanglement with nuclear-armed states. That such risks were entertained casually underscores the recklessness of the posture.

The implications extend beyond Latin America. India, once a major importer of Venezuelan crude, was forced to halt purchases under U.S. sanctions—subordinating its energy security to American geopolitical priorities. The precedent is unmistakable: sovereign trade decisions can be criminalised. Strategic autonomy becomes conditional.

For the Global South, Venezuela is not an exception. It is a warning.

The Empire Unmasked

Trump did not create empire. He merely stopped pretending it was clothed. Previous administrations laboured to present U.S. power as reluctant, benevolent, and rule-bound. Trump spoke the language of domination openly—threats, sanctions, ultimatums. In doing so, he revealed what had long been true: empire functions through coercion, not consent.

The tragedy is not that the emperor has no clothes. It is that the world has learned to accept naked power as normal. Institutions issue statements. Allies hedge. Media cycles move on. Meanwhile, an entire nation is punished for the crime of asserting sovereignty.

Venezuela’s future will be decided by Venezuelans. But the question Trump’s actions pose will not disappear. Are we moving toward a world where power alone determines legitimacy? Where law is invoked selectively and discarded conveniently? Where de-dollarisation is treated as a capital offence?

The emperor has long been unclothed. Trump merely made it impossible to ignore. The only remaining question is whether the world will continue to pretend the garments are still there.

(Views expressed are personal)

Anand Teltumbde is an Indian scholar, writer and human rights activist.