On September 2, US President Donald Trump released grainy footage of a missile destroying a fishing boat off the coast of Venezuela. Eleven people died instantly. The government called them narco-terrorists. Venezuelan sources identified them as fishermen. Since then, the US military has carried out at least 22 airstrikes, killing 87 people. Investigation revealed that the first attack included a second attack that killed two survivors clinging to the wreckage. This may be a war crime under international law. On Wednesday, the United States continued to seize oil tankers in Venezuelan waters in an escalation that the Venezuelan government called “blatant theft” and “international piracy,” underscoring the United States’ shift toward economic coercion alongside military force.
The Trump administration has positioned all of this as “counter-drug measures.” Critics call it regime change. But the most dangerous aspect of this crisis has nothing to do with Venezuela. It concerns the strengthening of administrative power within the country.
The oil story doesn’t make sense.
If this were about oil, the current approach would make no sense. The United States produces more oil than any other country in history and exports millions of barrels every day. Neither the United States nor Europe are facing oil shortages that would require military intervention. Meanwhile, Venezuela boasts the world’s largest proven reserves (303 billion barrels), but its oil infrastructure is seriously deteriorating. Production has fallen from 3.2 million barrels per day in 2000 to about 900,000 barrels per day today. The country’s pipelines haven’t been updated in 50 years, and restoring them to peak production capacity will require an estimated $58 billion in investment, underscoring how far the sector is from posing a strategic threat that would justify military force.
Moreover, legal routes to Venezuelan oil already exist. The United States could lift sanctions, expand Chevron’s operations, or reopen energy corridors, without sending in warships or circumventing Congress. In fact, Chevron’s operations in Venezuela account for 25 percent of the country’s total production, demonstrating that commercial access is fully possible within the existing framework. This contradiction reveals how irrelevant current strategies are to securing resources. President Trump’s own Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, acknowledged the complexity, explaining that the sanctions policy is a balance between excluding China and providing foreign currency to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
The fundamental shift in Washington’s calculations of Venezuela has less to do with oil companies and more to do with private equity firms and defense contractors. Profits are focused not on barrels but on reconstruction contracts, mineral rights, and territorial exploitation in a post-Maduro scenario. Taken together, these dynamics reveal that the logic driving U.S. policy lies outside the economics of oil itself.
What does emergency power actually enable?
The Venezuelan story plays a different role. It provides an excuse to expand executive power through the declaration of a state of emergency. Since 2015, the United States has maintained an ongoing “state of national emergency regarding Venezuela” under the National Emergencies Act. The declaration unlocks access to more than 120 specific legal powers, including asset seizure, trade regulation, and military deployment. These powers are powers that bypass regular parliamentary approval and operate with minimal legislative oversight.
President Trump has systematically piled on additional emergency measures. In March, he designated Torren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization, expanded the legal definition of the Venezuelan government to include virtually every affiliate, from ministries to state-owned enterprises, and imposed a 25% tariff on Venezuelan oil importers. In August, he signed a secret directive authorizing military force against drug cartels in Latin America. The decision, made without Coast Guard involvement and relying solely on naval assets, broke decades of maritime interdiction precedent and further strengthened executive discretion.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth clearly defined its scope, declaring that suspected drug trafficking would “not be controlled by cartels” and vowing to “map networks, track people, hunt down and kill them.” This expression is more in line with war than with law enforcement. Secretary of State Marco Rubio went further, saying the Maduro government is not a “legitimate government” but rather a “transshipment organization” facilitating drug trafficking. This is a characterization that redefines foreign relations as a criminal enterprise and justifies treating state actors as targets.
Congress relinquishes oversight
What makes this deployment unprecedented is not its size, which brings together a carrier strike group, B-52 bombers, F-35 fighters, submarines and more than 15,000 personnel, making it the most significant U.S. military presence in Latin America since the Cold War, but the lack of congressional approval. Lawmakers from both parties complained that no legal justification, target list, or evidence regarding those killed was provided. The Senate has twice rejected resolutions to limit President Trump’s military powers over Venezuela, leaving his executive powers effectively unlimited.
Sen. Lindsey Graham made the administration’s objectives clear, telling CBS that regime change is the goal and that President Trump “has all the power in the world” to carry out a strike. Legal experts have broadly characterized the maritime attack as illegal under both U.S. and international law. But secret meetings with Congressional leadership, including the recent one in which Mr. Hegseth refused to commit to releasing unedited strike footage, have not resulted in meaningful constraints on executive action.
The pattern that is emerging is one of expanding presidential discretion, and once activated, emergency powers become a self-perpetuating tool that normalizes unilateral military action. Rather than being used for targeted deterrence, they are increasingly being used to orchestrate conflict and accelerate regime change without a declaration of war on Congress.
actual cost
The most insidious aspect of this crisis is that it creates a threat precisely tailored to justify the expansion of executive powers. Oil provides no such pretext (a foreign emergency large enough to use military force) and does not carry the label of terrorism. This allows them to exercise their powers without parliament, without oversight, and increasingly without resistance.
Venezuela becomes useful not because of its resources but because of its role as a political prop in the constitutional drama. Although President Trump has publicly threatened ground strikes and said he should consider closing the airspace over Venezuela, his administration has been secretly planning for the next day what would happen if Maduro is ousted, and the plan is proceeding without regard to Congressional approval or international law.
Already suffering from economic collapse and political repression, the Venezuelan people now face the possibility of becoming collateral damage in someone else’s power consolidation project. More than 7 million Venezuelans have fled the country, and those who remain endure the escalating dangers of a manufactured crisis designed not to liberate them but to serve distant political agendas.
This is not an oil grab. It is a power grab, using Venezuela as a pawn while setting a precedent that will outlast any single government. The question is not whether Maduro’s regime deserves international condemnation. That’s right. The question is whether democracies should abandon their own constitutional principles to achieve regime change abroad. On the current trajectory, the answer appears to be yes, but this is the most dangerous precedent.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
