On September 2, United States President Donald Trump released grainy footage of a missile obliterating a fishing boat off Venezuela’s coast. Eleven people died instantly. The administration called them narcoterrorists. Venezuelan sources identified them as fishermen. Since then, the US military has conducted at least 22 strikes, killing 87 people, with investigations revealing that the first attack included a second strike to kill two survivors clinging to wreckage — a potential war crime under international law. On Wednesday, the US went on to seize an oil tanker in Venezuelan waters, an escalation the Venezuelan government described as “blatant theft” and an “act of international piracy,” underscoring Washington’s shift towards economic coercion alongside military force.
The Trump administration frames all this as “counter-narcotics”. Critics call it regime change. But the most dangerous dimension of this crisis has nothing to do with Venezuela at all. It is about the consolidation of executive power at home.
The oil narrative does not add up
If this were about oil, nothing about the current approach makes sense. The US produces more oil than any country in history, exporting millions of barrels daily. Neither America nor Europe faces an oil shortage that would require military intervention. Venezuela, meanwhile, sits atop the world’s largest proven reserves — 303 billion barrels — but its oil infrastructure is severely deteriorated. Production has collapsed from 3.2 million barrels per day in 2000 to roughly 900,000 today. The country’s pipelines have not been updated in 50 years, and restoring peak production capacity would require an estimated $58bn in investment, underscoring how far the sector is from posing any strategic threat that might justify military force.
More tellingly, legal pathways to Venezuelan oil already exist. The US could lift sanctions, expand Chevron’s operations, or reopen the energy corridor — measures that require neither warships nor circumventing Congress. In fact, Chevron’s operations in Venezuela represent 25 percent of the country’s total production, demonstrating that commercial access is entirely possible within existing frameworks. This contradiction exposes how little the current strategy has to do with securing resources. Trump’s own Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent acknowledged the complexity, describing sanctions policy as a balancing act between displacing China and providing foreign currency to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
The fundamental shift in Washington’s Venezuela calculus has less to do with oil companies and more to do with private equity firms and defence contractors — interests focused not on barrels but on reconstruction contracts, mineral rights and territorial leverage in a post-Maduro scenario. Together, these dynamics make clear that the logic driving US policy lies outside the economics of oil itself.
What emergency powers actually enable
The Venezuela narrative serves a different function: it provides the pretext for expanded executive authority through emergency declarations. Since 2015, the US has maintained a continuous “national emergency with respect to Venezuela” under the National Emergencies Act. This declaration unlocks access to more than 120 specific statutory powers, including asset seizures, commerce regulation and military deployment — authorities that bypass normal congressional authorisation and operate with minimal legislative oversight.
Trump has systematically layered additional emergency measures. In March, he designated Tren de