America’s new era of energy imperialism is about more than oil

President Donald Trump has no shame in admitting what he wants to get out of attacking Venezuela and threatening other energy resource-rich nations. “We’re gonna get the oil flowing the way it should be,” he said January 3rd, soon after his administration stunned the world with what many policy experts and Democratic lawmakers are calling an unlawful incursion into Caracas that led to the arrest of President Nicolás Maduro.

Trump’s fixation on so-called “energy dominance” is also more pretext — on top of federal drug trafficking charges against Maduro — for a plain-old power grab. “Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again. Won’t happen,” Trump added. Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, and others better watch out, Trump and other senior officials have warned. And White House adviser Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday that it’s been the “formal position of the US government” under Trump “that Greenland should be part of the United States.”

In other words, the US will try to take whatever it wants — borders be damned — whether that’s Venezuela’s oil, Greenland’s rare earth elements, or some other nation’s sovereignty. If you’re in Trump’s inner circle, like the fossil fuel industry and tech oligarchs that backed his ascendancy, you might be able to share in the spoils. It’s a terrifying time for other countries with something shiny the US might covet. And even if you’re not directly in Trump’s crosshairs, people around the world will likely have to grapple with the political and environmental ripple effects of whatever global game of chicken his administration plays next.

“We’re entering this really uncertain, scary moment where this aggressive, toxic way of doing business is being put on the table,” says Catherine Abreu, director of the International Climate Politics Hub.

Abreu, who is half Venezuelan and lives in Canada, first heard news about the US attack on Caracas from her family. “There’s a lot of uncertainty and fear and mixed feelings, I would say, on the ground in Venezuela … as many Venezuelans have been protesting against [the Maduro] regime for years and want a change in Venezuelan government, but want that change to come from the Venezuelan people,” she says.

Very soon after her family reached out, Abreu heard about the attack from worried colleagues in the climate movement who were “alarmed by the fact that this was being done in large part in the name of the interests of expanding United States oil and gas production.”

Venezuela holds the world’s largest oil reserves, but only produces around 1 percent of global crude oil supply. This is because of years of neglect and mismanagement since the 1970s, when the country nationalized its oil industry. Now, Trump says, “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies … go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken [oil] infrastructure.”

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said Wednesday that the federal government is in talks with American companies to ramp up oil production in Venezuela, and that the US plans to control future oil sales in the country. The US has also seized two tankers believed to have carried or attempted to carry Venezuelan oil. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have said that Venezuela will turn over 30 to 50 million barrels of oil, which the US plans to sell at market price.

To be sure, there’s a lot of uncertainty around whether American companies will want to take their chances investing in a resurgence of Venezuelan oil production with so much instability still in the country. The US is already the world’s biggest oil producer, with more than 20 million barrels each day. Venezuela produces less than a million barrels of oil a day currently, and it would take more than $50 billion in investment over 15 years just to get that figure up to a steady 1.1 million barrels a day, according to research firm Rystad Energy.

Nevertheless after Maduro’s arrest, stock prices rose for fossil fuel companies including Chevron, the sole US oil major that’s been been able to keep operating in the country by brokering deals with the Venezuelan government after it expropriated assets from foreign oil businesses. “A lot of what drives the interest in places like Venezuela, places with large reserves, is the speculation market,” Abreu says. And regardless of whether US oil companies ultimately descend upon Venezuela, financial speculators who stand to benefit from the possibility of more oil production “are making money right now based on this invasion,” says Basav Sen, Climate Policy Project director at the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies.

There’s an argument to be made that a transition to renewable energy limits the vulnerability many countries in the Global South face from more wealthy and powerful governments eyeing their oil and gas. “These are inherently nonrenewable resources, which means that those who want to continue producing oil, gas, and coal are always going to need to be on the lookout for where the next source of this nonrenewable resource is coming from,” Abreu tells The Verge. Solar and wind power, which have become far more affordable over the decades, are now the fastest-growing sources of electricity around the world. “I really see the escalation of these kinds of conflicts being fueled by oil and gas interests as a response to and an attempt to arrest that momentum that we’re seeing in renewable energy,” Abreu says.

Things can get messy with renewable energy development, too, of course. Greenland happens to be a good case study. Trump has fixated on taking over Greenland since his first term in office. Opening up the country to foreign mining interests could yield a vast new supply of critical minerals and rare earth elements used in electric vehicles, wind turbines and solar panels, and rechargeable batteries. Likely more important for the Trump administration, these minerals are also used in oil refining and military radar and missile systems. Research also suggests Greenland holds large fossil fuel reserves, although they may be so hard to reach that extraction would be commercially unviable. Not to mention that burning fossil fuels makes Greenland’s ice sheets even more vulnerable to global warming, which risks raising sea levels around the world.

The Trump administration has framed the annexation of Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, as a matter of US national security regardless of protests from its people and government. “Greenland is not for sale, and this has been clearly stated by both Greenlandic and Danish authorities,” Anne Merrild, who grew up in Greenland and is now head of the Department of Sustainability and Planning at Aalborg University, says in an email to The Verge. “In Greenland, the statements we hear in the media these days are often met with frustration and growing resentment, as they tend to overlook Greenland’s self-government and its ongoing efforts to define its own economic and societal development,” Merrild writes.

Extracting Greenland’s resources is already entrenched in local political debate, she adds, and something that would need to be approached with the “meaningful involvement” of nearby communities to make sure they benefit from any new projects and to minimize any harm to the environment or fishing and hunting livelihoods.

Trump’s posturing toward Greenland now, however, “sends a signal that the US is willing to take over places just to access resources, and that is naked 19th-century imperialism,” Sen says. “It is a very threatening signal to the rest of the world … Either you make the resources in your country available to us on our terms or you are subject to invasion.”

Trump’s former White House director of energy during his first administration, Landon Derentz, says in a January 4th Atlantic Council blog that “Venezuelan oil was the enabler,” while the real prize is the ability to exert US influence across the Western hemisphere.

It’s the revival of a philosophy that has underpinned centuries of calculated interventions in Latin America that have sowed political upheavals across the region in the name of installing governments friendly to US interests. “The United States is now practicing an enhanced version of the two-hundred-year-old Monroe Doctrine,” Derentz says in his blog. A new national security strategy document the Trump administration released late last year says plainly that the plan is to “assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine.”

With that underlying power structure in place, history repeats itself — whether the conflict is over oil in Venezuela or minerals in Greenland. The rules of the game determine the outcome. Tackling climate change and transitioning to cleaner energy through joint efforts like the Paris accord, incidentally, has been a major test of global cooperation over the brute force of strongman politics. The US flip-flopping from one philosophy to another with Trump back in office is obviously tipping the scale.

“I worry about the ways in which the US with these actions is kind of normalizing the idea that a country would just completely set aside the norms of multilateralism, of lawful interactions between states in the international arena,” Abreu says. “Would just throw those norms aside in the name of pursuing its oil and gas interests, even if that ultimately isn’t what is served.” On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced that it would withdraw the US from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and 65 other international organizations and treaties.

Even if America throwing its weight around to get what it wants is nothing new, it’s suddenly taking a more brash turn than the US has dared in decades. The president is “deadly serious about getting back the oil that was stolen from us,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said on January 3rd. “And deadly serious about reestablishing American deterrent and dominance in the Western hemisphere.”

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