GOA - The phrase "Venezuela and the Return of Colonial Seizure Politics" is a term used primarily by the Venezuelan government and its international allies to describe recent actions by the United States, particularly those involving sanctions, asset seizures, and military pressure. This perspective argues that U.S. actions amount to a modern form of imperialism aimed at seizing the country's vast oil and mineral wealth and imposing a U.S.-backed government.

Venezuelan President repeatedly claimed that U.S. actions, especially statements made by President Trump, reveal a desire to "steal" the country's oil, land, and minerals. This is framed as a return to 19th-century imperialistic behavior.

The arguments draw parallels to historical U.S. interventions in Latin America under the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary, which often involved protecting U.S. interests and intervening in the internal affairs of sovereign nations.

Venezuela's history with foreign oil companies, which held significant sway until the industry was nationalized in the 1970s, adds a layer of historical grievance to these claims.

Left-wing parties and allies of the Maduro government worldwide have condemned the U.S. actions as "imperialist aggression," calling for an end to the "war" on Venezuela and the lifting of the blockade. The debate highlights an ongoing geopolitical power struggle, where the language of "colonial seizure politics" is used by the Venezuelan side to frame U.S. policy as an attempt to re-establish external dominance over the nation's wealth and political future. 

What is unfolding in Venezuela as I write, if reports of the kidnapping and removal of President Nicolás Maduro are accurate, is not a crisis of governance or a response to criminality. It is the re-emergence of colonial seizure politics - the logic that powerful states may appropriate not only territory and resources, but also political authority itself.

This is not regime change as an unfortunate by-product of policy failure. It is regime removal as strategic method. The United States is not acting in the name of democracy, legality, or human rights. Those languages are decorative. The actual grammar here is older and cruder: control, extraction, and discipline.

From sanctions to seizure

Venezuela was functionally colonized long before bombs fell. Years of sanctions dismantled its economic sovereignty, collapsed state revenue, and made independent governance increasingly impossible.

This was not collateral damage. It was the mechanism.Sanctions hollowed out the Venezuelan state so that intervention could later be presented as “inevitable”. Economic suffocation was followed, predictably, by political delegitimization, then by direct coercion.

This is textbook imperial sequencing. When proxy leadership failed—most visibly through the US-engineered farce of Juan Guaidó—the project did not end. It escalated. What could not be secured through economic warfare and diplomatic fiction would be taken through force.

The abduction of a president is not law - it is ownership

The reported removal of a sitting president and his spouse to US custody marks a decisive shift. This is not about courts or crimes. It is about who claims jurisdiction over sovereign power. Empires do not recognize equals. They recognize administrators.

By asserting the right to “try” a foreign head of state, Washington is declaring that Venezuela is no longer a political subject but a managed space—its leadership provisional, its resources negotiable, its future externally arbitrated. This is not international law stretched. It is international law discarded.

Oil is not the subtext - it is the text

Venezuela’s oil is not incidental to this intervention. It is central. The country holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves. That fact alone makes sustained sovereignty unacceptable to an empire that treats energy as strategic property rather than national inheritance.

The Venezuelan state’s insistence on controlling its oil revenue—however imperfectly or corruptly executed—has always been the red line. Governments that privatize resources on Western terms are tolerated regardless of repression. Governments that assert national control are destabilized regardless of elections. This is not hypocrisy. It is consistency.

What is unfolding is not intervention to correct mismanagement, but intervention to reorder ownership.

Colonial memory is not anti-Americanism

The reflexive dismissal of Latin American resistance as “anti-Americanism” misses the point. This is not about sentiment. It is about structure. From Guatemala to Chile, from Panama to Nicaragua, the pattern is uninterrupted: economic pressure → political destabilization → leadership removal → resource realignment.

Venezuela fits precisely into this historical arc. The only difference is the absence of embarrassment. What was once covert is now openly declared. Imperial power no longer feels compelled to deny itself. Trump Is Not the Anomaly - He Is the Instrument

This moment should not be personalized. Trump is not the cause. He is the executor.

The architecture - sanctions regimes, energy interests, strategic doctrine, bipartisan hostility to Venezuelan sovereignty - predates him and will outlast him. His role is simply to discard the remaining niceties.

Calling this recklessness or ego misses the point. This is imperial policy operating without restraint, not without reason. What Is Being Normalized?  The most dangerous consequence is not Venezuela’s immediate devastation, but the precedent being set: That leaders can be seized rather than negotiated with. That sanctions are preparatory weapons, not alternatives to war.

That sovereignty exists only by imperial permission This is colonialism without administrators on the ground—rule through coercion rather than occupation.

Empire without justification

What we are witnessing is not the failure of the international order, but its clarification.

The rules were never meant to bind empires—only to discipline the weak. Venezuela’s crime is not authoritarianism or corruption. It is defiance. It is the refusal to accept that its resources are globally negotiable and nationally disposable.

This is not a moral story. It is a political one. And it ends, as colonial stories always do, with theft presented as necessity and domination presented as order.