Oil, drugs, sphere of influence: How Venezuela became the epicenter of Trump’s foreign policy

The stunning military operation that captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and brought him to the U.S. to stand trial was a drastic step taken by a commander in chief who traditionally has been cautious about military entanglements abroad.

For President Trump, the situation in Venezuela represented a once-in-a-generation opportunity to advance many core national interests simultaneously, in one place, with a single bold action.

Mr. Trump’s ouster of Mr. Maduro from power in Caracas could help stop the flow of illegal immigrants and drugs into the U.S., reestablish American dominance over its own hemisphere and deal a major blow to the growing influence of China and Russia in the region, and provide a windfall of oil revenue and access to rare earth elements and other crucial materials in the mineral-rich country.

On the more personal side, it finally allows Mr. Trump to claim victory over Mr. Maduro, who dealt the U.S. president a significant foreign policy embarrassment in 2019 by weathering a diplomatic pressure campaign in which Washington attempted to oust him by recognizing opposition figure Juan Guaido as the country’s rightful leader.

This time, Mr. Trump tried a much different pressure campaign. It began in September with strikes on boats allegedly carrying drugs from Venezuela toward the U.S. and ended with the Saturday morning raid on Mr. Maduro’s compound.

“This is the natural culmination of a maximum pressure campaign. President Trump signaled his willingness to take combat operations for nearly three months — and then he did it,” said retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, former director for transnational threats at the White House National Security Council and now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

At a press conference later Saturday, Mr. Trump made no secret that Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, the largest in the world, were a key factor. He said the U.S. will “run” Venezuela in the days and weeks to come and capitalize on the country’s oil riches.

“So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition. And it has to be judicious because that’s what we are all about,” Mr. Trump said. “We can’t take a chance that somebody else takes over Venezuela that doesn’t have the good people of Venezuela in mind.”

He added, “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure.”

Venezuela holds the world’s largest oil reserves, estimated at 303 billion barrels, significantly more than Saudi Arabia.

It also holds significant mineral deposits, including some of the rare earth elements needed to power cellphones, fighter jets and other key pieces of 21st-century technology. China dominates the global market of rare earth element processing.

China and another leading U.S. adversary, Russia, have been cultivating deeper ties with Venezuela in recent years. Russia is Venezuela’s largest arms dealer, and China has invested billions of dollars in the South American country, with a focus on its vast deposits of resources.

Installing a more U.S.-friendly government in Caracas that could perhaps loosen those ties with Beijing and Moscow seems to be a central part of the administration’s broader calculus.

Specialists say Venezuela also offers a real-world example of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy philosophy, which crystallized over the course of 2025.

Longtime diplomat and former Associate Director of National Intelligence Joseph DeTrani said the administration has made it clear that it prioritizes the protection and promotion of U.S. core national interests over the pursuit of a rules-based international order.

In a recent op-ed for The Washington Times, he praised the Trump administration’s boldness in deprioritizing Europe and the Middle East while emphasizing the Western Hemisphere as “the primary security region for the U.S. … with a focus on border control, mass migration, narco-trafficking and international crime and terrorism as the principal threats to our nation’s security.”

Other analysts said it became clear that a more personal dynamic was at play behind the scenes, with Mr. Trump believing, as a matter of principle, that Mr. Maduro should not remain in power.

“There’s a sense of unfinished business,” Christopher Sabatini, senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House, a leading think tank based in London, told The Washington Times recently.

Mr. Sabatini said key figures inside the administration, led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, seem to have convinced Mr. Trump that the Maduro regime was as weak as it had ever been. They pushed the idea that things had changed dramatically since the failed attempt to install Mr. Guaido in Caracas became one of the most significant geopolitical missteps of Mr. Trump’s first term.

Mr. Maduro clung to power despite virtually all credible international observers believing he lost the 2024 presidential election to former Venezuelan diplomat Edmundo Gonzalez. That election, some administration officials seem to think, made the Maduro government especially vulnerable to U.S. pressure.

That reality, along with Mr. Trump’s desire to crack down on illegal immigration and the flow of drugs from Latin America into the U.S., put Venezuela squarely in the center of the administration’s foreign policy.

“They converge on this policy that originally went from justifying this as an anti-narcotics strategy … to clearly an anti-Maduro strategy,” Mr. Sabatini said in an interview.