Originally published in the Summer/Fall 2025 edition of the Virginia Defender, issue 77, printed December 11. Reproduced here for accessibility and archival purposes. To find other stories in the Summer/Fall 2025 issue or to download the full PDF, see this post. For other issues dating back to 2012, see the Full Issues page.

By Phil Wilayto

“And we’re gonna hit ’em on land very soon, too.” – President Donald Trump, speaking with a reporter from Politico Dec. 8 about the U.S. attacks on boats in the Caribbean.

Since the middle of the summer, the Trump administration has been dramatically escalating its campaign against the South American country of Venezuela and its president, Nicolas Maduro.

On Dec. 10, U.S. forces, including the Coast Guard, F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security, seized an oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast.

“Speaking at the White House before an event on a new luxury visa program, Mr. Trump announced the operation and said it was ‘a large tanker, very large,’ adding, without elaboration, that ‘other things are happening.’” (The New Times, Dec. 11, 2025)

The tanker is believed to have been carrying Venezuelan oil. The Venezuelan government has called the seizure “blatant theft and international piracy.”

Hard to argue with that.

Venezuela has also called this a battle between a David and Goliath. Also hard to argue against: Venezuela currently spends $5 billion a year on its military. The U.S. Congress just passed a $900 billion military spending bill.

For months now, the Trump administration has been steadily ramping up military, economic and political pressure on Venezuela, which just happens to be the country with the world’s largest known oil reserves.

That pressure includes:

A huge buildup of U.S. forces in the region, with more than 15,000 sailors and marines and a dozen ships in the Caribbean, including the USS Gerald R. Ford, the largest and most advanced aircraft carrier in the world.

Dubbed “Operation Southern Spear,” this is the largest buildup of U.S. naval forces in the Caribbean since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

The U.S. military has launched more than 22 known strikes against small boats in the region, killing more than 80 people. Trump claims, without providing evidence, that the boats were smuggling drugs.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is under intense Congressional pressure to release video of the Sept. 15 missile strike on survivors of a U.S. attack on one of these boats. Killing disabled enemy combatants is a violation of U.S. and international law. Killing helpless civilians is just plain murder.

Trump has warned that the U.S. may “very soon” expand its attacks from boats to targets inside the country.

Trump has signed off on C.I.A. plans for covert actions inside Venezuela, operations that could be meant to prepare a battlefield for further action, or “sabotage or some sort of cyber, psychological or information operations,” according to The New York Times.

None of this is happening because Venezuela is presenting any kind of threat to the United States. Even Trump’s claims that President Maduro runs a major drug cartel is contradicted by experts in the field.

And if Trump is so concerned about drugs, why did he just pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted last year in a U.S. court of large-scale drug smuggling and sentenced to 45 years in prison for helping to transport tons of cocaine into this country?

No, this isn’t about drugs. It’s about oil.

Unlike in the United States, most oil-producing countries own and control their own oil. Venezuela’s reserves belong to the state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), which was established in 1976 when the country nationalized its oil and took full control of the industry from foreign companies like Exxon, Shell and Mobil.

This government-controlled oil is by far the country’s main source of foreign revenue. The U.S. used to be its major partner, but U.S. sanctions have ended that relationship.

The U.S. started imposing sanctions on Venezuela in 2015, under President Obama, with sanctions greatly increasing under Trump.

The sanctions involved targeting the oil sector, blocking access to foreign capital and freezing the government’s assets.

These sanctions have been devastating to the country’s economy, which has shrunk by 80%.

And the sanctions have coincided with a big drop in world oil prices, causing Venezuela to be hit with a double whammy.

This is the reason for the hard economic times that have led many Venezuelans to leave and look for a better life elsewhere.

Whatever other problems the country has can best be solved by the people themselves, not by the power that has systematically repressed and exploited Latin America since the first days of the republic.

The question now is, what are we, as the people of the aggressor country, going to do about it?

For our part, the Defenders are initiating a Pledge of Resistance, in which organizations and individuals promise to hold a protest the day after any U.S. military attack against Venezuela. A similar Pledge of Resistance in the 1980s was able to build considerable pressure on the Reagan administration not to invade El Salvador or Nicaragua.

We are also making a serious effort to reach out to sailors stationed in Norfolk, to talk with them about the real reasons they are being prepared to possibly go to war against Venezuela and to remind them that, under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, they have the right – and the duty – to refuse illegal orders. (See the Open Letter to Norfolk Sailors.)

We also are upgrading our Defenders Antiwar Committee, and will continue to use the pages of The Virginia Defender to try and educate the public with facts and analysis about international issues, including the escalating threats against Venezuela.

If this is the kind of action you’d like to get involved with, please reach out to us – from any part of Virginia and beyond.

Together, we can make a real difference.