I wrote an essay called “Pieces of the Puzzle” on November 2, 2025, in which I laid out what I believed were the signs of an oncoming takeover of Venezuela. Many people, particularly Trump supporters, told me at the time that I was crazy, that we would never take over another sovereign country.
I wrote then, in early November, that I believed that Mr. Trump is an old-fashioned Mercantilist, who believes that the way you make a country strong is to capture as much of the world’s resources as possible. You then use tariffs to impose your nativist views. I wrote that I believed that the desire for acquiring Greenland and Venezuela was motivated ONLY by avarice to acquire their natural resources, specifically rare earth minerals and oil.
I think we can see Mr. Trump’s actions as being exactly on point to this analysis. All of the professed reasons trumpeted in the preface to our actions in Venezuela were just smokescreens to cover the actual motivation. With Venezuela, we were told that it was the corrupt government, the drug export trade, the needs of the Venezuelan people. We now know that these were never the real reasons.
And how do we know it?
We look at what has happened.
We didn’t change the government; we just removed Maduro (a bad guy). The rest of the government remains in place.
We did not bring in the opposition from whom the election was stolen.
We didn’t call for quick new elections, monitored and protected by the US; as a matter of fact, Mr. Trump has publicly stated that it might be two years or more before elections can be held.
Meanwhile he is reestablishing diplomatic relations with Venezuela’s “illegitimate” government, headed up by a Vice President who was illegitimately elected alongside Maduro.
And have the Venezuelans benefitted now that Mr. Trump “is running” the country?
Have we put any officials in place? No.
Have we begun to fix the infrastructure? No.
Have we continued to attack boats carrying drugs? No.
Have we cracked down on the drug manufacturing facilities in Venezuela? No.
What have we done?
We have taken the oil revenue from Venezuela.
We have appropriated their oil infrastructure for our own benefit.
The profits are not being used to benefit the people of Venezuela, but to pad the pockets of those American companies that have contributed to Mr. Trump’s campaign, or his inauguration, or his new ballroom.
And the next step in Venezuela?
This week US Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum went to Venezuela with the executives of US mining companies to initiate “partnerships” for mining rare earth minerals, gold, diamonds, and other valuable commodities.
And who do you think will get the profits from this mining?
Will it be used to benefit the Venezuelan people?
Or will it simply benefit the American investors and the American government?
And Greenland?
It is not about national security.
It never has been.
We already have agreements in place to provide the US with military access; Greenland is owned by Denmark, a staunch ally and a member of NATO.
If we really wanted more security we would take over the area of Canada adjacent to our own border, or better yet, take over some of the land around the arctic currently owned by Russia.
No, the attraction of Greenland is its natural resources, specifically the trillions of dollars’ worth of rare earth minerals that have become accessible due to the change in climate and the melting of the ice layers in Greenland. You can be sure that any “negotiated settlement” about Greenland will cede mineral and mining rights to the US.
Now we have attacked and “decimated” Iran.
Why?
Again, don’t believe the smoke screens.
The current administration and its spokespeople have been throwing all sorts of reasons out to the public, trying these test balloons to figure out which ones play best and get the most positive responses. There will be focus-groups testing these strategies to determine which to concentrate upon. Once they have found the argument that plays best, you will be sure to hear it voiced by everyone in the administration, every day, and every elected representative that supports the administration. Watch, because they will probably even use the same words - those words that tested best. That strategy is even more critical now, since polling numbers for support of this war are staggering low.
The Supreme Leader was awful; the world is a better place without him.
Period.
However,
Just a few months ago we “obliterated” the Iranian nuclear capabilities and set them back “years if not decades.” So there really is no nuclear threat.
Iran had already been crippled militarily. As had Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, and Syria.
We have shown that we have the military capacity to intercept and destroy any vessels carrying arms to any other country from Iran. We did it with drug transport in the Caribbean; we are doing it with drug transport in the Eastern Pacific. We can do it with arms transports in the Middle East also.
But I again propose that all of these reasons are camouflage. Mr. Trump simply wants to control the Iranian oil and the infrastructure to distribute it. He chooses to attack Iran because they are weak and cannot resist well (trying to seize land from Russia in the arctic would be a far more difficult task). Interestingly, none of the oil, LNG, gas, pipelines, terminals, processing plants, or refineries have been attacked. Why? Because we want to protect them for ourselves.
You can well expect that in the next few weeks, we will begin to hear statements from Mr. Trump and his talking heads, about how the action to “liberate” the Iranian people has cost us billions of dollars, and that for having spent that money FOR the Iranian people, Iran should REPAY us by ceding oil reserves, or infrastructure to the US. Perhaps the US should be given perpetual control of the land on both sides of the straits of Hormuz, upon which the US could build military installations. We could then “protect” the world and maybe charge a fee to use the straits the way the Suez and Panama canals charge for their use.
When you start from the assumption that the world is a limited source of natural resources, and that the country that controls the most has the most intrinsic power, you are forced into strategies to acquire as much of those resources as you can. You can do it by purchasing the land, conquering the land, or colonizing the land. This was the model of the world up until the 19th Century. This is the model of the world that Mr. Trump would like to bring back.
And perhaps you also support this view. But it has been rejected both economically, politically and academically for over a century. Few colonies continue to exist and far-flung empires have all crumbled. Trying to rewrite history, politics, and economics to reframe the world in the 17th Century model cannot be good policy.