11 January 2026. Trump & Venezuela | Music
10 notes on the US attack on Venezuela / Listening to the ‘folk albums of the year’ [#655]
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It’s mostly Just One Thing today, since I have spent the week piecing together an analysis of Trump’s attack on Venezuela that has grown like topsy, but might be overtaken by events if I split it into two. I’ve popped in a short piece about folk music that links to some articles I wrote about over Christmas elsewhere, as a second ‘Thing’.
1: Ten notes on the US attack on Venezuela
One of the problems with the Trump Administration is how much bandwidth it takes up. Just as I had resolved not to write about it for, well, at least a few weeks, it goes and abducts the President of Venezuela and enables a change of leader (although only up to a point, as we’ll get to). A lot of geo-materialists immediately assumed that this was all about oil, and it might be. But having held off a few days to digest the commentariat it’s worth untangling some of the threads. And just for the record: yes, Maduro was a vicious authoritarian who had stolen at least one election, imprisoned and tortured political opponents, and had presided over a collapse of the Venezuelan economy.
1. It’s not about drugs
I know that’s one of the things the White House says it’s about, and the charges against Maduro in the New York courts are mostly about drugs. But this is rhetoric. The fentanyl that goes into the US arrives from China via Mexico; Colombia is a bigger supplier of cocaine to the US than Venezuela. As Forrest Hylton noted in the LRB Blog,
“There’s stronger evidence of more serious involvement in narco-trafficking by the president of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa – but then he’s a Trump ally.”
Venezuela is a minor league player here, and most of its exports go to Europe. Of course, the former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández, found guilty of drug trafficking in a New York federal court in 2024, was pardoned by Trump last year. And, as Maureen Tkacik reported in The American Prospect last month, the ties between the Trump administration in general and several kinds of Latin American drugs business go quite deep.1
2. It’s not about regime change
The traditional cover for American intervention in Latin America was some combination of anti-communist and pro-democracy rhetoric. Whatever else you can say about the Trump Administration, they have spared us all of that pious bullshit here.
As Timothy Snyder pointed out,
Nicolás Maduro and his allies stole the 2024 Venezuelan election, but that very real crime is not what the Trump people are punishing... Venezuela has a legitimately elected president: Edmundo González. There is no sign that he figures in Trump’s plans.
Instead, the new President is the former Vice President, Delcy Rodriguez. She is a committed Chavista, who insisted that she was installed as “Acting President” in Maduro’s absence in a New York jail. But she speaks English and has a strong grasp of detail. She was involved in secret negotiations with the US about the possibility of Maduro going into exile. All the same, a former US official who had talked to her at length told the Financial Times,
She described for me in detail her father’s death at the hands of the security services. He was suffocated in his cell with tear gas... [S]he considered herself part of a revolutionary family and one that had made the ultimate sacrifice for the greater good of the revolution.”
As Snyder observed.
In the past, American governments chose leaders in Latin America who would support the interests of American companies. On the surface, the same thing appears to be happening here.
3. It might be about oil…
... but not in the way that people concluded. Venezuala does have large oil reserves, although those numbers that say that its has larger reserves than Saudi Arabia are likely overstated: the size of the reserves increased sharply about a decade ago. The details of this are discussed in an (updated) post by Hannah Ritchie. Venezualan oil is heavy oil, and is difficult to extract and expensive to process, so whether it is profitable or not depends on the oil price.
(Via Hannah Ritchie’s By The Numbers Substack)
All the same, Trump said it was about oil in his rambling news interview, as well as being a distant response to the nationalisation of the Venezualan oil industry five decades ago. And as the Spanish paper El Pais noted in its English edition, oil is at the heart of US-Venezuelan relations.
Although Trump was bullish about getting American companies to go in and sort out the Venezuelan oil industry, it is run-down and suffers from chronic underinvestment. Chris Aylett, on the Chatham House blog, suggests it would take more than $180 billion of investment to triple Venezuelan oil production, to 3 million barrels a day, by 2040.
None of the American oil majors appears to have the appetite for expansive new investment right now: they are all behaving like an industry that knows it is heading for decline, much more about share buybacks to sweeten their investors and keep their share price up, than new production. In particular, Chevron, the only US major that currently has a licence to operate in Venezuela, is a cost-driven business.
In his newsletter John Ganz argues that the US oil industry is quite fragmented, and there might be smaller players who would take a punt on Venezuela. But there are also American oil companies who are happy to see sanctions on Venezuelan oil because it reduces competition. It’s worth reading his analysis. None of it suggests massive investment in the Venezuelan oil industry any time soon.
On TNR’s Daily Blast podcast, Norm Eisen suggested a different model. Since the Trump Administration is a well-oiled corruption machine (his phrase was “payback machine”) , Eisen said he thought that Trump would assume that he had done the oil industry a favour, and would use it to shake down oil industry leaders for contributions to Trump’s various aggrandisement projects.
4. …And projections of power
One of the obvious features of the 2025 National Security Strategy was the invention of the ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine, with a list of things that the US didn’t want to see in the ‘Western Hemisphere’ (meaning the Americas). It hasn’t taken long for this to inflate itself into the ‘Donroe Doctrine’ (the White House staff certainly know how to keep a narcissist happy.)
The National Security Strategy also has quite a lot of verbiage about respecting sovereignty, but, when you read it, it is most about the United States respecting its own sovereignty and interfering as it sees fit with other people’s.
In an article in The Conversation, Adriana Martin describes this as “the principle of selective sovereignty”, under which “[s]tates governed by leaders that have been labelled as criminal, illegitimate or destabilising are seen as having forfeited their rights.” This isn’t, of course, how international law would see it.
So events like the assault on Venezuela, or the bombing of Nigeria or Iran, are best seen as projections of American power.
5. Of course it’s all illegal
Obviously this is illegal under international law. One of the rhetorical ploys of the Trump Administration, at home and abroad, is an argument that characterises parts of the world, and parts of the United States, as experiencing forms of instability and violence that are caused (mostly) by drugs and racialised violence that then represent such a threat to local, national, or international order that it requires some kind of intervention, often justified with reference to historical bits of legislation that are barely used now. The White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is particularly enthusiastic about this line of argument, since it supports his use of ICE in their violent and lawless immigration sweeps.
This is probably why Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth were careful in the aftermath to position the attack on Venezuela as a policing operation, as the veteran reporter James Fallows noted, rather than an attack on a sovereign state. But this comes with its own risks, especially when Trump doesn’t seem to have got the memo.
[Trump] flatly and 100% contradicted what others at the microphone were claiming... “We are going to run the country,” he said of Venezuela, with “we” meaning the United States. What he announced today is one man (plus his enablers) violating the Constitution of 1787, the War Powers Act of 1973, and the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, all of which require a president to involve the Congress in war-and-peace decisions.
But it also makes more sense of the United States Government sanctioning the International Criminal Court, last year, which might take such issues seriously. It wasn’t just about being nice to Bibi.
6. The example of Panama is telling
Of course, America has a long history of interfering in Latin American countries. As Juan Zahir Naranjo Cáceres writes in The Conversation:
For anyone familiar with the history of US interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean, the basic pattern is grimly familiar: a small state in Washington’s “backyard”, a leader deemed unacceptable, military force applied with overwhelming effect, and a government removed overnight.
You can count them off: Guyana, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Chile, Grenada, Panama, Haiti. I’m sure I have missed some. But the 1989 intervention in Panama has some tell-tale similarities, as multiple commentators have observed. Ariana Martin, in The Conversation, points out that the Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega was portrayed not just as an authoritarian ruler, but as a criminal figure:
[T]he two episodes reveal a continuity in how the US approaches intervention, sovereignty and legality in the western hemisphere... Panama... established a powerful precedent: a smaller state could be reshaped forcibly without multilateral approval, provided the intervention was framed persuasively and executed decisively. Central to that framing was what I call the criminalisation of sovereignty.
And the Panama precedent didn’t go unnoticed: Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, had anticipated it:
Years ago, someone told me: ‘They’re going to end up accusing you of being a drug trafficker – you personally – you, Chávez... They’re going to try to apply the Noriega formula to you.’
One of the curiosities here is a theme in the discussion about Trump’s 1980s thinking: as if he’s got stuck there and hasn’t noticed that the world has changed in the last 40 years. In Wired magazine (paywalled), Garrett Graff said that the attack made more sense “as a retro, nostalgic effort—the last war of the 20th century,” not least because it was for oil that it seems that nobody wants.
7. It is probably about spectacle and White House politics
In the LRB Blog, Forrest Hylton noted that “Maduro was reportedly willing to leave Venezuela as long as he was granted amnesty”, although this has been disputed. In an interview on a Latin American television news service on 1st January, Maduro said that the Americans could have got what they wanted through negotiation.
(“Boys… like huddling in gangs and knowing the exact time”, as Auden wrote. Photo: United States government)
Which leaves the thought that it is the spectacle of the thing that is the attraction. And we know that Trump loves the military and its works, a form of projection that sits well with a man whose Vietnam draft was deferred five times, once on possibly fabricated grounds. One of the telling details in the photo of the White House situation room during the Venezuela attack is that Twitter/X is being displayed on the large screen at the back of the room.
The second element here is the alignment of different interests in the White House, who each wanted an attack on Venezuela for different reasons. At some point it became over-determined. Rubio and his hard-right Cuban-American allies wanted a hard line on Venezuela for ideological reasons (and potentially to destabilise Cuba); for Stephen Miller it was about reinforcing his story about Venezuelan drugs gangs in the US as a cover for attacks on migrants.
For Trump, it might be—as he told an advisor during his first Presidency—that he needs to “win something” everyday, but it could also be about dragging the Epstein Files off the front pages and the news shows.2 Because it’s clear that there’s no real plan about what to do next. It’s also clear that in not consulting Congress beforehand—which they could have done beforehand through the so-called Gang of Eight—that they knew that it was a risky operation which also flew in the face of the Constitution.
8. So: the geopolitical implications are scary
This kind of state-sponsored violence is not a precedent, although some commentators have treated it as if it is, but what it does is to normalise breaches of international law, which provides only two exceptions to attacks on other states. As South Africa’s Daily Maverick reported, quoting Attila Kisla of the Southern African Litigation Centre:
“The prohibition of the use of force constitutes the bedrock of the modern international order,” said Kisla. “There are only two narrow exceptions where force may be used under the UN Charter ” — either the UN Security Council (UNSC) authorises it, or a state uses force in self-defence under Article 51 of the charter.3
Neither of these two exceptions apply here. But, going back to the National Security Strategy, attacks like this are about constructing a world where those who have power use it to promote their interests. It is another assault on the idea of the rules-based international order, which as societies we put in place after the last war, after we had discovered that the ‘power’ model didn’t work out so well.
As people have observed, America’s actions and Trump’s rhetoric would legitimate Russia’s attack on Ukraine and, potentially, an attack by China on Taiwan. As Kisla told the Daily Maverick.
“Trump’s approach in this context reflects contempt for international law, multilateral institutions, and the view that power should not be constrained by rules.”
9. Despite the threats, attacks like this are complex
In the immediate aftermath of the raid, Trump’s response to heads of state who criticised (such as Gustavo Petro of Colombia and Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico) was along the lines of “if you say that again you could be next.”4
But despite this noise, just looking at the attack on Venezuala from logistical point of view, they are complex and take time to plan. They’re not video games. They also lose their element of surprise if they are used repeatedly.
But it is worth noting that the operation against Maduro was 3-4 months in the planning, including covert CIA operations within Venezuela, and the actual attack involved around 150 aircraft launched from around 20 different sites. There were also extensive cyberattacks both ahead of and during the raid.
10. Any short-term gains come with longer-term problems
One of the features of Donald Trump is that he seems to have no anticipatory capacity of any kind. He always lives in the moment. This is one of the reasons why the current US Administration is so dangerous: it is quite literally unpredictable. So we can probably ignore the various articles that are old school versions of the need to plan for the next steps. None of that has happened, and none of it will happen.
And the choices of the Administration are also constrained by domestic opinion. The MAGA coalition that elected Trump is already under strain.
(Source: CBS News/ YouGov)
Post-attack polling found it to be fairly popular when it’s positioned as being about restricting drugs coming into the United States, but a lot less so when it’s positioned as being about oil. Among the public in general, there’s strong opposition to anything that involves American troops going into Venezuela.
The US Senate has also shown signs of a spine, with five Republican Senators voting with Democrats to advance a vote on the War Powers Act. This would require Trump to seek Congress’s approval before conducting any further uniliteral military offensives in Venezuela. Voters are also in favour of this.
And I draw some conclusions from all of this. The first is that this attack, the way it was carried out, and the limited outcomes it has achieved, is a sign not of strength from the White House, but of weakness. The second, given the Trumpian bluster this week about Greenland, is that Greenland can’t be positioned as a source of drugs coming into the United States, and is not under the control of an authoritarian ruler, and therefore offers little opportunity for so-called “policing” operations. Any attack on it would tank Trump’s ratings further. But third, given that the Epstein Files aren’t likely to go away, we’ll continue to see spectacle from the White House that is designed as distraction. As with the Gaza war and Netahanyu’s corruption charges, never underestimate the dangerous unpredictability of an autocrat who finds themselves in a corner.
(Thanks to John Holland for the meme)
2: Music: Folk Albums of the Year, 2025
Over the holiday break I listened to the nine records that have been shortlisted for the inaugural “Folk Album of the Year Awards”, and wrote about them for Salut! Folk, the modest folk music site of which I am deputy editor.
The awards are for folk or roots albums released in 2025 in Britain and Ireland, and the shortlist includes three Irish performers, from North and South, three performers from England, one from each of Scotland and Wales, and one by a Zimbabwean singer now based in England. The Awards are organised by the folk music promotion organisation Sound Roots in conjunction with the folk music podcast Folk on Foot.
The selection of the shortlisted records was made by an impressive jury that includes performers, broadcasters and writers, and although I try to follow the folk music scene reasonably attentively, there were excellent records here by people I hadn’t heard of. And who knew that ‘Goth folk’ was a thing?
Listening to the records that had made the short-list, I think I detected a bit of a pattern. The jury definitely liked music with a strong sense of place, and they also liked performers who took the traditional structures of folk songs and folk music and stretched them a bit. At least half of these records managed to combine both of these.
I wrote up all nine records in three articles on Salut Folk. The first article covered the Welsh performer, cynefin, the English group the Gigspanner Big Band, and the Irish singer Barry Kerr:
https://salutfolk.com/2025/12/27/2025-folk-albums-of-the-year/
Article two was about Ireland’s Poor Creature, the English duo Spafford Campbell, and the Scottish musician Grace Skinner-Stewart:
https://salutfolk.com/2025/12/29/goth-folk-folk-noir-scots-sounds/
And the final piece covered Peggy Seeger—her final record at the age of 90–as well as the Irish singer Josh Burnside, and Zimbabwean-born but British-based Edith WeUtonga:
https://salutfolk.com/2025/12/31/peggy-seeger-joshua-burnside-edith-weutonga-folk-awards/
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Tariq Ali expands on this on the New Left Review’s Sidecar blog: “Delta Force, the US state-terrorist special forces team that abducted the Venezuelan president, is itself widely regarded as operating a drug-trafficking network within the United States. The investigative journalist Seth Harp’s The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces (2025) documents murder and narcotics trafficking committed in and around the US Army installation outside of Fayetteville, North Carolina. Harp’s book made it onto the New York Times bestseller list and reviewers have largely accepted its findings. So this criminal US operation was carried out by its own drug cartel.”
As John Ganz writes: “Historians now think domestic political worries about Bush’s image as a wimp contributed more than some grand strategic plot. As [historian Greg] Grandin’s piece points out, it was a confluence of factors that pulled the administration towards intervention in Panama. Even the actors didn’t understand it in retrospect. Grandin: “Referring to the process by which Noriega, in less than a year, would become America’s most wanted autocrat, Bush’s National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft said: “I can’t really describe the course of events that led us this way... Noriega, was he running drugs and stuff? Sure, but so were a lot of other people. Was he thumbing his nose at the United States? Yeah, yeah.””
The Mexican President, Claudia Sheinbaum, attracted Trump’s ire after the attack by posting the Spanish-language version of United Nations Article 2 on Twitter/X.
Trump backed down on Petro after he had a call with him, as he often does.