Venezuela Regime Change Helps Exxon—not Americans

Foreign Affairs

Venezuela Regime Change Helps Exxon—not Americans

Toppling Maduro’s government would spark regional instability and worsen the migration crisis.

This week, reports surfaced that President Donald Trump has authorized the CIA to carry out covert operations—including lethal action—inside Venezuela and across the Caribbean, marking a major escalation in a long-running U.S. campaign against President Nicolás Maduro’s government. Trump confirmed the reports on Wednesday and said the administration, which has attacked alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, is “looking at land” as it plans further strikes.

Venezuela, like Cuba, has been the target of a decades-long campaign of subversion, sabotage, and economic warfare from the U.S. national security state, highlighted by a maximum pressure sanctions regime which intentionally strangled Venezuela’s economy.

The new CIA effort to overthrow the government of Venezuela is therefore merely the latest attempt from the same political alliance between neoconservative foreign policy elites, the security state, and multinational energy corporations who—with allies like Secretary of State Marco Rubio—see the second Trump administration as a vehicle through which they can finally achieve their long-held goal. 

Like every other regime change effort of the past 25 years, this one serves no vital American interest. Indeed, regime change efforts in Venezuela have already exacerbated regional instability by fueling the Venezuelan refugee crisis, which by all accounts worsened as a result of the sanctions imposed on that country in 2017. Those sanctions killed thousands of Venezuelans and turned millions more into refugees. A successful regime change war could produce even wider suffering.

Ironically, the repeated attempts of the security state and its neoconservative foreign policy planners have bolstered Venezuela’s government, giving former President Hugo Chávez and current President Nicolás Maduro legitimacy among the Venezuelans who oppose foreign intervention in their country. Like his predecessor, Maduro can easily point to efforts by U.S. foreign policy hawks to destroy Venezuela’s economy and overthrow its government as the driving factor behind current economic woes—and some Venezuelans find that excuse to be credible. 

The Bush administration’s first attempt to overthrow Chávez through a 2002 military coup failed spectacularly. Chávez’s survival humiliated the CIA and neocon planners who had banked on a swift victory, discounting the power and appeal of the ideology of the Bolivaran Revolution within Venezuela. They should have known better. It is precisely because of Venezuela’s entrenched left-populism—not “drug trafficking,” or the supposed threat of “Chinese influence”—that the U.S. security state, neoconservatives, and oil executives have sought regime change in the country for more than 23 years.

A series of leaked emails published by Wikileaks involving Stratfor—the private intelligence firm that contracts with the US national security state—reveals the CIA and National Endowment for Democracy’s various subsequent failed efforts to overthrow the government of Venezuela and install puppet leaders loyal to neoconservative interests in the U.S. yet unknown or rejected by voters in Venezuela. 

In a February 2010 internal email published by WikiLeaks, Stratfor analyst Marko Papic briefed colleague Fred Burton on a Soros-style NGO called CANVAS and its potential to bring down the Venezuelan government. Papic described CANVAS as the successor to Serbia’s Otpor opposition movement and noted it was “still hooked into U.S. funding,” with earlier ties to entities like NED, Freedom House, and the Albert Einstein Institute. He characterized CANVAS as an “export-a-revolution” outfit that had “sowed the seeds for a number of color revolutions.”

With the backing of the U.S. security state, CANVAS and its offshoots launched various regime change efforts against the Venezuelan government, including a 2010 plot to “take advantage,” of a drought and a subsequent electricity crisis caused by low water levels in Venezuela’s dams—a natural disaster which Stratfor analysts predicted could plunge “70 percent of the country,” into darkness. By forging “alliances with the military,” NED/CIA backed groups could “spin [the crisis] against,” the Chávez government and install a pro-US regime in its place. Though, as even the Stratfor analysts acknowledged, “the past three coup attempts” failed because even though “the military thought it had enough support, there was a failure in the public to respond positively (or the public responded in the negative).” 

A 2019 bid to anoint the unelected opposition figure Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s president—endorsed by the Trump administration, Nancy Pelosi, and bipartisan factions of Congress—likewise failed miserably.

Rather than an organic internal movement demanding regime change in Venezuela, the same small clique of U.S. neoconservative elites and oil interests have led each effort to topple the government. The neocon official behind the 2002 failed coup against Chávez—Iran-Contra criminal Elliot Abrams—became Trump’s special envoy to Venezuela in 2019 and set out to organize further regime change efforts. As Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT)—himself a longtime proponent of Soros-style color revolutions and coups around the world—said to Abrams in 2020, “we tried to construct a kind of coup and it blew up in our face when all the generals who were supposed to break with Maduro decided to stick with him in the end.”

Perhaps the most aggressive proponent of regime change in Venezuela has been ExxonMobil and think tanks funded by the oil company, mainly the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which frequently hosts conferences with Washington’s various handpicked Venezuelan leaders. Such think tanks advocate maximum pressure sanctions and market regime-change war in Venezuela as “democracy promotion.” As Joseph Bouchard and Nick Cleveland-Stout of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft reported, CSIS is one of 20 DC think tanks funded by Exxon, receiving at least $250,000 annually; the CSIS board of trustees even includes the CEO of Exxon. 

CSIS analyst Ryan Berg, who announced last month that he had joined the Trump administration to work with the State Department and Joint Chiefs of Staff on Venezuela, praised the Trump administration’s bombing of accused Venezuelan “narcoterrorists,” which is reminiscent of the NATO strategy which led to the 2011 regime change war in Libya. There is no reason to believe that a regime change war in Venezuela would turn out any better than did the one in that country, where chaos ensued, the slave trade has returned, and millions of refugees have fled, often to Europe. Though if there were a regime change war in Venezuela, the refugees produced from that conflict would likely not flee to Europe—they would come to the United States.

Evidently, Exxon is less concerned with immigration flows and regional stability than with oil profits; its current pick to govern Venezuela, María Corina Machado, has vowed to privatize Venezuela’s oil sector and sell its vast resources to multinational companies abroad. As Max Blumenthal reported in The Grayzone, Machado has been plotting to overthrow the government of Venezuela for over 15 years.

After winning the Nobel Peace Prize last week—thanks in part to an August 2024 letter nominating her signed by Rubio—Machado has embarked on a press tour promoting U.S. military action to overthrow the government of Venezuela. In a bid to flatter Trump and bring about that outcome, Machado declared on Fox News that the U.S. president should have won the prize instead, dedicating the award to him “because his actions have been decisive to having Venezuela on the threshold of freedom,” i.e., to having Maduro removed from power. Machado has applauded the Trump administration’s extrajudicial maritime attacks on civilian vessels suspected of “narcoterrorism,” though they killed her fellow countrymen.  

Whether or not a successful regime change will materialize may depend on an internal battle within the Trump administration between hawks led by Rubio and those favoring de-escalation and diplomacy, represented by special envoy Richard Grenell, who favors negotiations and resource-for-security deals with Caracas. With Trump ordering Grenell to halt his diplomatic efforts—despite recent offers from Venezuela to revive talks and even give the U.S. oil and rare earth exports—Rubio’s approach has won out in recent weeks.

The key to Rubio and Exxon’s designs lies next door in Guyana. In March, Rubio traveled there to warn Venezuela not to attack Exxon mobile operations, which currently operate in disputed offshore territory. Exxon’s partnership with Guyana began in 2007 and—though profitable for that company—has ignited tensions between Venezuela and Guyana while leaving the latter country with billions of dollars in oil exploration bills due to a provision in a 2016 deal signed with Exxon mobile which sticks Guyana with the bill for all exploration activities.

Exxon’s activities in Guyana reveal not only the oil motivation for regime change in Venezuela but expose as fraudulent many of the propagandistic narratives driving the effort, namely that a military intervention would be about confronting Chinese influence. As Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) pointed out last month, Exxon’s 2016 partnership in the region is not only with Guyana but with China’s state owned oil firm. 

That partnership with Exxon has deepened China’s involvement in Latin America as much as any other Belt and Road initiative. Exxon, though an American company, is a multinational corporation and therefore is less interested in the national security agenda of the Trump administration or the national interests of the United States than in its own profits.

President Trump campaigned on ending American wars and dismantling the neoconservative foreign-policy establishment that produced them. But by authorizing covert operations in Venezuela, his administration has intensified an old regime-change effort—one that previously failed and may now succeed. If it does, it will not be a victory for Venezuelan freedom or American security but for the same elite interests that have corrupted U.S. foreign policy for far too long.

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