Since about 1991, the US has spent about $14.2 trillion to finance some 13 wars, or more than the total spent by the world’s eight most significant military powers.
Most Americans never hear about American colonialism or the US government’s coups and coup attempts, but this is what is playing out before everyone’s eyes as Trump tries to muscle his way into Venezuela, its vast oil and natural resources, and precious metals reserves. Even more important, Trump and his imperialist backers want to silence the socialist government of Nicholas Maduro, the democratically elected president.
American coup attempts worldwide are not new. Since about 1991, the US has spent about $14.2 trillion to finance some 13 wars, or more than the total spent by the world’s eight most significant military powers.
These wars were the Gulf War (1991), the Kosovo War (1999), the Afghanistan War (2001), the Iraq War (2003), the Libya War (2011), and the Syria War (2011). This does not include the secret murders, coups, and government destabilization and dirty tricks done by the US government, CIA, and its mercenaries who overthrew governments that were not “cooperative” or malleable to US foreign policy, the World Bank, IMF, and other supra-national international banking entities.
Why were these wars conducted, and who did they benefit?
The answer is obvious: average citizens paid for the war, and some corporations in very select industries (oil, energy, defense, electronics, security, and mercenaries) walked away wealthier. Most Americans never knew what the wars were about.
This is how Trump and his predecessors, including President Barack Obama and Joe Biden, all neoliberals, have been trying to overthrow the Maduro government for 20 years. This has involved sanctions starting in August 2017, when Trump policies caused the Venezuelan government to lose about $6 billion in illicit revenues, or 6% of the country’s GDP, in about one year.
Obama’s attack on Venezuela began in March 2015 when he declared that Venezuela was a threat to US security. This claim that Venezuela was “a threat to national security” was also used by Ronald Reagan when he declared that Nicaragua was a threat. Reagan used 
this as a pretext to back the Sandinistas, who were later integral to the famous Iran-Contra Scandal that involved Reagan, the CIA, and clandestine shipments of arms to Nicaragua in exchange for drugs. All of this was engineered, executed, and approved by the CIA and the Reagan regime.
Trump’s 2017 sanctions prevented CITGO, based in Texas, from sending its profits and dividends back to Venezuela. This was calculated at a $1 billion annual loss in exports from 2015. This prevented PDVSA, the Venezuelan national oil company that owned CITGO, from obtaining loans and engaging in other business operations that were supposed to be repaid from oil revenues.
This loss from oil exports (paid in US dollars) soon reached $6 billion and reduced the amount of money the Venezuelan government needed to import crucial goods, including food and medicine. In a 2019 paper by Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot (“Economic Sanctions and Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela,” CEPR, April, 2019), it was stated that the shortage of medicine led to a 31% increase in mortality among Venezuelans. “In a civilized world, these sanctions would put numerous high-ranking US officials in jail for murder,” Joe Emersberger and Justin Podur wrote in an article, “The Guido Era: A Sixth, Very Long Coup Attempt.” (Monthly Review June 2021).
In December 2018, Trump seized Venezuelan assets in the US. This meant that Venezuelan oil shipped to the US would never be paid for. To ratchet up the pressure, Trump used his hatchet men, Rex Tillerson, the Texas oilman, and later, Mike Pompeo, Elliott Abrams, and John Bolton, to threaten the Maduro government. Bolton also had a significant role in the Iraq War, which cost an estimated 500,000 lives and triggered a refugee crisis that destabilized Europe and the Middle East.
Trump first used the threat of a military option in August 2017. In May 2020, US mercenaries attempted a coup against Maduro, but were repulsed by the Venezuelan army and armed citizens. Secretary of State Pompeo said the US was not involved, but the attack was clearly consistent with US policy.
By 2020, Trump said Maduro was behind a cocaine export business to the US. IN Trump’s second term, he renewed his attacks on Venezuela and Maduro as a continuation of his fossil fuel platform, and as a sop to his oil donors, the Koch brothers and Harold Ham, the Texas oilman and major Trump donor.
In late-August 2025, Trump ordered the US Navy to start sending ships to Venezuela to threaten or support an invasion. At about this same time, Trump and the Navy began destroying civilian small craft that the feds said were trafficking cocaine or other drugs, but there was never any evidence provided for these claims. The attacks on small, open boats, unarmed civilian watercraft, were called murder by some in Congress, while the Navy and Trump defended the attacks as part of protecting the US from drug smuggling.
This is a pathetic statement since it happened at the same time Trump pardoned a convicted cocaine trafficker, the former Honduran President, Juan Orlando Hernández. US officials said Hernandez ran one of the most significant and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world. He was sentenced to 45 years for conspiring to import cocaine to the United States, but Trump let him go because he said Hernandez was treated “unfairly.”
America: An Imperialist Nation
So, after 10 years of training to overthrow the socialist president of Venezuela, America’s imperialist pathology shows no signs of abating.
The US has always wanted control over the Southern Hemisphere, including Mexico, since it offered riches, cheap labor, and colonial benefits to US corporations. Here is a list of US military actions in the Western Hemisphere since 1910:
Mexican Border War (1910–1919)
Little Race War (1912) Part of the Banana Wars in Cuba
United States occupation of Nicaragua (1912–1933)
United States occupation of Veracruz, Mexico, (1914)
United States occupation of Haiti (1915–1934)
United States occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916–1924)
Puerto Rican Nationalist Party insurgency (1950–1954)
Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996)
Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba (1961)
Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)
Dominican Republic Civil War (1965–1966)
Ñancahuazú Guerrilla Campaign in Columbia (1966–1967)
Contra War in Nicarauga (1979–1990)
El Salvadoran Civil War (1979–1992)
United States invasion of Grenada (1983)
Operation Golden Pheasant against Nicaraugua (1988)
United States invasion of Panama (1989–1990)
Intervention in Haiti (1994–1995)
This list does not include secret CIA or mercenary army operations and assassinations, such as the murders of Salvador Allende in Chile, and Che Guevara in Bolivia, as well as elected presidents in Bolivia, Agentina, Brazil, Cuba, Chile, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, Panama, and Venezuela.
So What If We’re Imperialists?
US military and CIA involvement in the Southern Hemisphere is nothing new. It’s part of the Monroe Doctrine, a 1823 doctrine that warned European nations that the United States would not tolerate further colonization or puppet monarchs in the Western Hemisphere, unless they were regimes that favored and served US interests.
President John Kennedy almost started a nuclear war with Russia over the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Cuba was considered a threat to the US because of Fidel Castro’s successful communist revolution in 1959, which ejected a corrupt president (Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar) and, more importantly, planted a communist state within 90 miles of Florida.
Was Cuba ever going to invade the US? Never. But Cuba’s ideology was more dangerous than its army, especially when it would oppose American imperialism in the Southern Hemisphere, and its monopoly capitalism.
If Florida became communist, would it have been more corrupt than under the administrations of Ron DeSantis, the Medicare-Medicaid fraudster Senator Rick Scott, Governor Jeb Bush, who stole the 2000 presidential election, or the fact that Florida is now the fraud capital of the US?
The MAGA supporters who voted for Trump because he was not going to enter any wars should be surprised by the saber-rattling against Venezuela. This is a country that most Americans cannot find on a map, yet its oil is a multi-billion-dollar addiction to Trump’s oil industry backers.
So, will America go to war with a country that never threatened the US just because it has oil? The answer is “Yes.”
Look at Iraq. Iraq had vast oil reserves, and when George Bush and the war criminal Dick Cheney made their case for invading Iraq to destroy those “weapons of mass destruction,” the Pentagon’s war planner said Iraq’s oil would pay for the war.
That never happened. Nor did anyone ever find the “weapons of mass destruction.” What did happen was that an estimated 200,000 Iraqis were killed, and the most significant exodus of Iraqis left their country to find safe havens in Europe and the Middle East.
The same will happen again in Venezuela if Trump and his lackeys in Congress cannot stop an American attack on an innocent nation whose only crime is that it is socialist and will not go along with US foreign policy and the dictates of the international banks.
