Why the US wants to steal Venezuela's oil& resources?

[zazen]

I think it’s mostly empire logic (domination) with capital (profit) as a bonus - what BlueOak mentioned about BRICS basically if we zoom out.

They can’t have a nation be outside their system and survive that easily - especially if it’s in their own hemisphere. A defiant nation cracks their legitimacy - Venezuela has survived despite nationalising oil, sanctions and is doing so via a parallel non dollar system.

So maybe they want to make an example of Venezuela - to discipline them so other Latin American countries don’t think of trading outside that system in their local currencies etc. China’s the largest trading partner among South American countries.

Venezuelan oil is perfect for US refineries that are set up to refine it - only Canada and Russia have that type of heavy crude. But US already gets most from Canada so it’s not like they need Venezuelan oil so bad - maybe as an insurance as a country should never rely on a single source.

US oil companies aren’t too enthusiastic about it either due to risk: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/17/trump-oil-venezuela-return-00695292

Venezuela only provides 4% of China energy so cutting off China can’t be the main reason either. Maduro even offered Trump access: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/world/americas/maduro-venezuela-us-oil.html

From Sky news: 

In October, Mr Trump appeared to confirm reports that Mr Maduro had offered a stake in Venezuela's oil and other mineral wealth to ease mounting pressure from the United States.

"He's offered everything," Mr Trump said at the time. "You know why? Because he doesn't want to f*** around with the United States."

So if the oils not needed, they can’t blockade China in any meaningful way (only 4%), and Maduro’s open to working with the US then why still be aggressive? Has to be empire logic to protect the US led, Western world order from any defectors and defiant examples showing others that it’s possible to exist outside it.

lol 

Some interesting related vids:

 

[Schizophonia]

1 hour ago, Daniel Balan said:

@Schizophonia Ok, I'm openminded, but I still believe USSR was a textbook example of empire. They collonized the people of eastern Europe ideologically

 

It was a dictature yes.

I don't promote Staline 

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 they collonized the people who had capital and property and redistributed the land and the resources of the bourgeoisie to the lazy and unproductive.

 

No it is precisely the bourgeois who can have the privilege to be "lazy and unproductive"; the characteristic of being a bourgeois is precisely to earn excessively compared to others simply through the right to private property; because you were in the right place at the right time.

And if there are people who earn a lot because they own the capital, it means that on the other side there are people who earn less even if they are productive.

And it's natural for people to be productive if they're in good physical and mental health and not high on alcohol or heroin, lol; and even under any socialist system, even a lax one, you can't live on welfare alone—that's the bare minimum.
There are 5% of people in France who don't work and receive welfare and France is particularly lax; the French are also still one of the most productive populations in the world in terms of wealth generated per hour on average.

So you're fixated on this but it's just not true.

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They collonized eastern Europe with north Korea style secret police, ineffective central planning and a total backward dictatorship.

 

Ceaușescu was one of many communist leaders with their own vision of communism, and he was a rather foolish dictator.

Colonization means that you directly control a territory through colonists; this is not colonization.

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Furthermore, the industrialization was planned catastrophically, thus freezing eastern Europe for 50 years, after the collapse of the ussr, eastern Europe was after collonialism, the industry was bankrupt, people were starving, queueing for bread and clothes etc. 

 

I've already explained all of this elsewhere, I'm not going to repeat myself.

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Only after a colonialist empire there are such economic outcomes, easter Europe was in the same state as was a conquered city state after the retreat of the Roman empire back in ancient times, while Western Europe advanced industrially, economically, politically during the second half of the 20th century, after 1990, 

Western Europe was much less affected by the war and benefited greatly from the Marshall Plan particularly West Germany.
After the war France implemented a semi-planned economic policy due to the Communist Party's victory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1945_French_legislative_election)in the parliamentary elections, and this coincided with the greatest period of growth in its history. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trente_Glorieuses)

 

You're comparing Western Europe, where there were relatively few conflicts and deaths, and which ultimately received generous aid from the United States, with Eastern Europe which was devastated, undergone tens of millions of deaths, and had to rebuild itself on its own

And once again you're lying; it depends on the country. Ukraine has always been poor, but East Germany industrialized well despite the dictatorship and lack of aid. France and East Germany did recover in the west, but Spain remained quite poor.

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eastern Europe had to go back to square one to rebuild and create efficient industry, agriculture, manufacturing etc and the process is still a lot behind compared to western Europe. All of that because communism created only inefficient and without any economical fundation industrialization. When the communism collapsed, the local population had no capital whatsoever to start rebuilding, thanks to the communist "non imperialism" political framework. 

Of course they do; all factories and infrastructure in general are capital.
Russia's transition to a market economy went badly and increased poverty, corruption, violence, and inequality; a large portion of that capital was simply stolen by a handful of oligarchs.
Poland's transition went very well, the best transition of all ex USSR's satellite states; it's a matter of organization, and here you're admitting that the shift to a market economy tends to jeopardize living standards and institutions more than the other way around ahah; perhaps you don't realize it but that's your own deduction.

Today the vast majority of poor and very poor countries are capitalist countries; capitalism doesn't systematically increase wealth it doesn't work that way; the causality is reversed, because a state industrializes it becomes more liberal by developing a bourgeois class that will in fine strive to increase its rights.
The French Revolution for example was bourgeois; among the first measures taken by the Jacobins were liberal ones such as the abolition of guilds.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Chapelier_Law_1791)

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If freezing in place half a continent for almost 50 years is not the highest form of collonialism, I think I will give up.

 

No that's not it; words have a definition.

Edited Friday at 03:36 PM by Schizophonia

[Daniel Balan]

@SchizophoniaBro, Russia and eastern Europe had no choice but to transition to a market economy, even if they wanted to remain communist they couldn't, the whole structure of the planned economy was falling down on itself, without the painful transition to the market economy, USSR and its Eastern Europe satellites would have had the same fate as The Weimar Republic in the late 1920's and early 1930's. The whole economy was in such dire straits that it could no longer bear its own weight. Some countries like Poland and Czechia had much more well thought transition phases, others like Russia, Ukraine, Romania had much more brutal outcomes. Why? Because Poland applied shock therapy, rapid well thought privatization, the population was educated on state television about free market, stock market and capitalism, whereas in Russia, Romania and Ukraine either the new private owners stole everything from the system or the state refused to privatize all together, for example in Romania it wasn't until 1996 until the state began privatization, here there was still this backward mentality of "Not selling the country to imperialist capitalists", this ended up destroying even the quasi profitable factories, the lack of proper serious privatization and the fact that the state continued to waste money on unprivatized, unmodernized factories, made the situation even worse, sky high inflation and a total destruction of even the factories that could have been saved with proper privatization by serious investors and modernisation. The fact that you don't see that communism was the very reason why people struggled massively in the 1990's is staggering. In the 1990's Russia and eastern Europe had to suffer precisely because of the effects of the disastrous communist management not  because of the transition to a free market. The transition to a market was the medicine. Blaming the transition to the market economy It is like you are blaming your doctor for giving you treatment for a deadly disease. 

Edited Friday at 04:08 PM by Daniel Balan

[Daniel Balan]

@zazen When China will invade Taiwan, what will you say, Eastern Imperialism? Or the word imperialist is solely attributed to the corrupt decadent west?
If Trump invades Venezuela is because he is a devil and a monster, not because of "WESTERN IMPERIALISM", the world is not a Soviet conspiracy theory.

[Daniel Balan]

1 hour ago, zazen said:

I think it’s mostly empire logic (domination) with capital (profit) as a bonus - what BlueOak mentioned about BRICS basically if we zoom out.

They can’t have a nation be outside their system and survive that easily - especially if it’s in their own hemisphere. A defiant nation cracks their legitimacy - Venezuela has survived despite nationalising oil, sanctions and is doing so via a parallel non dollar system.

The projection is off the charts here and laughable. This is exactly why China wants to invade Taiwan and why both China and North Korea hate South Korea and Japan. 

I can't believe how laughable these "Anti-Western, BRICS " naratives are, they are basically projecting their own devilry and wicked intentions on to the west. 

[Ulax]

Seems reasonable for US to take these ships over.

The Venuzvelans are selling  oil illegally. And to my understanding those are the oil tankers being targeted.

[Schizophonia]

21 hours ago, Daniel Balan said:

@SchizophoniaBro, Russia and eastern Europe had no choice but to transition to a market economy, even if they wanted to remain communist they couldn't, the whole structure of the planned economy was falling down on itself, without the painful transition to the market economy, USSR and its Eastern Europe satellites would have had the same fate as The Weimar Republic in the late 1920's and early 1930's. The whole economy was in such dire straits that it could no longer bear its own weight. Some countries like Poland and Czechia had much more well thought transition phases, others like Russia, Ukraine, Romania had much more brutal outcomes.

 

No; the USSR collapsed and liberalized because Boris Yeltsin basically staged a coup.

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Why? Because Poland applied shock therapy, rapid well thought privatization, the population was educated on state television about free market, stock market and capitalism, whereas in Russia, Romania and Ukraine either the new private owners stole everything from the system or the state refused to privatize all together, for example in Romania it wasn't until 1996 until the state began privatization, here there was still this backward mentality of "Not selling the country to imperialist capitalists", this ended up destroying even the quasi profitable factories, the lack of proper serious privatization and the fact that the state continued to waste money on unprivatized, unmodernized factories, made the situation even worse, sky high inflation and a total destruction of even the factories that could have been saved with proper privatization by serious investors and modernisation.

 

That's what I said; you're paraphrasing me.

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The fact that you don't see that communism was the very reason why people struggled massively in the 1990's is staggering. In the 1990's Russia and eastern Europe had to suffer precisely because of the effects of the disastrous communist management not  because of the transition to a free market. The transition to a market was the medicine. Blaming the transition to the market economy It is like you are blaming your doctor for giving you treatment for a deadly disease. 

If the transition to a free market is a medicine why did Ukraine have a lower GDP per capita than even Algeria just before the Russian invasion; most of the former Soviet bloc countries are still poor including Russia; Russia is overall a very poor country.

The USSR had a GDP around the half to that of the United States, and now Russia, despite the opening to the global market that the end of the USSR allowed, isn't even worth a quarter of it.

There has only been regression.

Edited yesterday at 01:19 PM by Schizophonia

[Daniel Balan]

@SchizophoniaI can't believe you take the soviet numbers as accurate, they lied from top to bottom about their economy, you can't trust anything number related from the USSR, the truth is that in the 90's people lived worse than in the 70's but without transition to a market economy the 90's would have been double or triple worse if they kept doubling down on communism. 

And the reason Ukraine, Belarus and Russia have a very low GDP per capita is because of corruption, no rule of law, no independent courts, no nothing, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus are some of the most corrupt countries in the world, You westerners have no idea what corruption even is until you step foot in the ex-Soviet space, literally you guys in the west are living in a corrupt free paradise, Ex-Soviet countries have unimaginable levels of corruption.

[Elliott]

2 hours ago, Ulax said:

Seems reasonable for US to take these ships over.

The Venuzvelans are selling  oil illegally. And to my understanding those are the oil tankers being targeted.

The u.s. doesn't make international law.... Venezuela is a sovereign nation.

[Elliott]

One upside to Trump defunding stuff, a Democrat president can now defund the department of 'war', sell off a bunch of military equipment and fire all the nazis!!!!

[Ulax]

1 hour ago, Elliott said:

The u.s. doesn't make international law.... Venezuela is a sovereign nation.

*facepalms*

[Schizophonia]

19 hours ago, Daniel Balan said:

@SchizophoniaI can't believe you take the soviet numbers as accurate, they lied from top to bottom about their economy, you can't trust anything number related from the USSR,

You just imagined it.

19 hours ago, Daniel Balan said:

the truth is that in the 90's people lived worse than in the 70's but without transition to a market economy the 90's would have been double or triple worse if they kept doubling down on communism. 

You just imagined it too.

The semi-planned Chinese economy and to a lesser extent the French one functioned very very well after the war, and Stalin's USSR transformed a group of corrupt eurasian states into an industrial superpower where living standards and life expectancy skyrocketed despite civil war, the First and especially the Second World War, and western embargoes.

The USSR essentially collapsed due to Brezhnev's spending/laxity, bureaucracy and corruption, a lack of openness to global capital (I discuss this in my article about Trotsky if i rememer well), and nationalists.

The USSR would have survived were it not for Boris Yeltsin's conspiracy and the support of the United States.

19 hours ago, Daniel Balan said:

And the reason Ukraine, Belarus and Russia have a very low GDP per capita is because of corruption, no rule of law, no independent courts, no nothing, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus are some of the most corrupt countries in the world, You westerners have no idea what corruption even is until you step foot in the ex-Soviet space, literally you guys in the west are living in a corrupt free paradise, Ex-Soviet countries have unimaginable levels of corruption.

No it's not the countries of the former Soviet bloc that have a lot of corruption, it's poor countries in general.
Central American and African countries are also very corrupt, perhaps even more so, and they are very capitalist countries; because they are poor.
Countries are poor because they lack capital, skilled labor, and raw materials.

Now the question is, which production and distribution system throughout history has most fostered such a surge in production? I've provided ample evidence that communist states who are well planned, benefited from this surge or at least are stable while capitalist states only collapse in on themselves due to crises before rebounding by enslaving themselves in a Ponzi scheme called debt.

I also talked about it in my topic on Trosky; I should make a V2 because from memory it is too shaky for my taste.

[Rafael Thundercat]

Nice movie about America Rougue Actions to kill Mumumba in Africa just because he was a threath to their agenda

And even a Jazz festival was used to distract about the CIA operation.

[zazen]

On 18/12/2025 at 7:37 PM, Daniel Balan said:

I've realised that the US is as big of a pig as Russia! Why on earth the US is now trying to steal the oil of the powerless Venezuela? 

This makes me wanna throw up. Doesn't the US have endless money? Can't they buy the damn oil fairy? 

I've never would have thought that I would start to buy into Russian narratives. This means that the filthy westerners have also done that in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and eastern Europe after the collapse of the communist regime.

I've never would have thought that I would buy into Russian narratives, but what the US is doing now in Venezuela makes me sick. 

I was rationally going through the options of what the US could be up to - answering your own threads question which I myself was also confused about. Why get triggered because I haven’t mentioned China in the same light when you yourself are referring to Westerners as filthy which I’ve never done lol

On 19/12/2025 at 8:32 PM, Daniel Balan said:

@zazen When China will invade Taiwan, what will you say, Eastern Imperialism? Or the word imperialist is solely attributed to the corrupt decadent west?
If Trump invades Venezuela is because he is a devil and a monster, not because of "WESTERN IMPERIALISM", the world is not a Soviet conspiracy theory.

This is where words can be limiting. The world is more complex than our labels or definitions - and in each definition there are distinctions and contexts  that differentiate the thing being described. Things are more on a gradient or spectrum than simply being black and white.

Notice how you need to use a future hypothetical example of China acting blatantly imperial yet we could pluck examples upon examples of western imperialism including from just this morning. Yet you’re getting worked up about me not critiquing China enough or to the same degree. You confuse the frequency of my critique with bias when there’s just more Western imperialism to critique.

The same thing happens with the labels of authoritarian vs democracy. Most people moralise governance structures into binary buckets then lump countries into them as if they’re equal. China, Russia and North Korea are all lumped together erasing their differences, despite NK being a dystopia. Russia is way less functional and more corrupt than China. China has localized democratic mechanisms while having a meritocratic-technocratic governance structure that’s insulated from the “tyranny of the masses” type democratic outcomes such as voting in clowns like Trump.

The consequence of having a popularity contest as your voting system for over a billion people is different in scale to using it to govern under 10 million. Certain things being left to the whims of the people can be dangerous if those people aren’t wise enough to vote. Scale matters. Nordic countries for example are highly functional - yet they’re lumped together with the US in the democracy bucket as if the US is an equal - when instead it’s way more plutocratic. Singapore is in between and sort of a grey area of what it is. Nuance, context and distinctions matter.

Me criticising geopolitics (the politics between nations) isn’t me endorsing or claiming those nations as angels and demons. A country can be better internally and worse externally in its relation to other nations - and vice versa. A country can be a hell hole dystopia domestically yet neutral and non threatening externally.

So nuance applied to your hypothetical :

Firstly, China sits in a different geopolitical category. It’s a rival superpower that has to deal with the current superpower openly trying to contain it with think tank pieces contemplating a naval blockade. To add insult to injury, just as is the case with Russia - Ukraine and Taiwan aren’t alien neutral territories to them but are like family. Weaponising a kin state isn’t the same as doing so in a neutral third country. It’s like turning your cousin against you vs a stranger - turning a cold power game into an emotional one and only upping the stakes.

Secondly - Taiwan isn’t a clean imperial test case because like Singapore it’s sits in a sort of a grey zone. China frames it as protecting internal territorial integrity because it see’s Taiwan as part of itself - yet governed separately. There’s ambiguity and a unsettled question around the status of Taiwan which is being weaponised.

From wiki: “The One China policy refers to a United States policy of strategic ambiguity regarding Taiwan.[1]In a 1972 joint communiqué with the PRC, the United States "acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China" and "does not challenge that position."

Thirdly - it can pose an existential threat because its part of the first island chain along a critical sea route China depends on to feed and energise the country. 80% of oil imports come through there - China isn’t self sufficient the way the US is. Imagine for example if Russia weaponised Corsica against France who depended Mediterranean Sea trade to survive as a nation.

When you have a superpower adversary (context mentioned earlier) wanting to contain you via proxy - your posture towards that country and adversary will of course shift.

Simply calling this “defending democracy” (just like with Ukraine) flattens the context and sanitizes what is basically a superpower trying to structurally contain you (as spelled out in think tanks and shown in behaviour) + emotional provocation of doing so via a kin proxy. That’s how a cold competition turns hot - with a civilizational spit in the face - hawk tuah.

Both countries, including much of the world - know this isn’t about democracy promotion but simply weaponising the notion of democracy for geopolitical aims. I don’t need to provide the countless examples of US dickriding the idea of democracy as something it and the West stands for and wants to promote yet undermining it across the global South and working with dictators when it suits them. When I sound harsh on the West it’s me being harsh about the empire, not the people. The nation state is different from the imperial empire state.

Absolute sovereignty is a luxury belief in a world of unequal power. The fact that laws exist to equalise and arbitrate power / survival dynamics doesn’t erase that power dynamics exist. 

A utopian view hopes for no power dynamics. A unjust view says the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. A pragmatic view understands that balance of power politics is the least bad option in a non-utopian world.

That balance was ignored in the fault line of Ukraine and was moralised away till it collided with reality.

One can be pro-Ukrainian whilst simultaneously understanding that balance of power must be managed as to not have weaker nations (via proxy) be destroyed when that balance tilts toward great power competition.

 

Edited 6 hours ago by zazen