What, asks Alma Guillermoprieto in the Review’s February 12 issue, is the United States doing in Venezuela?

“They stole our oil,” Trump told reporters…. Perhaps his most entrenched belief is that everything he wants—Greenland, the Nobel Prize, a woman—belongs to him, even if it is deep underground in a nation some thousand miles away. A gripping moment came when Trump made it clear that the invasion of a nonbellicose country had not much to do with human rights or freedom or anything else with no monetary value.

Would he see to it that the Maduro regime’s political prisoners were freed? “We’re going to take back the oil,” he said. “They stole our assets like we were babies.” Oil was always at the forefront. “We’re going to get the oil flowing the way it should be.” “We’ll be selling large amounts of oil to other countries.”

And while the success and feasibility of this venture are still very much in doubt—“Trump’s long-term plan for Venezuela has yet to be formulated,” Guillermoprieto drily observes—the president’s foreign policy has had at least one characteristic result: “An entire world order is in question, but there is nothing to fill the void.”

Below, alongside Guillermoprieto’s essay, are five articles from our archives about Venezuela’s modern history.

Alma Guillermoprieto
A More Pliant Chavista

President Trump’s decision to support Delcy Rodríguez as Venezuela’s new leader makes clear that oil, not democracy, is his main concern.

Rachel Nolan
‘There’s Nothing for Me Here’

What caused Venezuela’s collapse, and who is responsible? A recent memoir tells the story as so many families have lived it.

—May 29, 2025

William Neuman
Chavismo’s Chokehold

The party of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro maintains a strong hold on state institutions, but it has lost the people’s mandate. Will there be a transfer of power to the opposition candidate, Edmundo González—the true victor of this summer’s election?

—September 19, 2024

Nicholas Kenyon
The Triumph of a Musical Adventure

“Over the last forty years, through a succession of often controversial political regimes, Venezuela has become widely known for a highly developed system of orchestras and socially directed musical education that is now being adapted and much imitated.”

—September 24, 2015

Alma Guillermoprieto
The Last Caudillo

All these years later, it’s still hard to know whether Chavez’s Venezuela was a dictablanda (a soft dictatorship) or not. For all his anti-imperialist fulminations, the flow of Venezuelan oil to US ports was not interrupted for a single day. For all his socialist preaching, his country remained firmly capitalist.

—March 6, 2013

Norman Gall
Carnival in Caracas

The survival of Venezuelan democracy still remains in doubt because of the decline in popular support for the major parties. Both now compete for the backing of the large family firms and economic combines that have been using political pressure behind the scenes so as to accumulate huge fortunes that directly or indirectly are based on oil. Consequently, the two major presidential candidates this year are men of conservative views: AD’s man is Carlos Andrés Pérez, who as Betancourt’s Interior Minister was responsible for crushing the guerrilla uprising of the early 1960s, while COPEI’s candidate is Lorenzo Fernandez, formerly Caldera’s Interior Minister, a conventional Catholic lawyer and father of eleven children who implemented a “pacification” program of amnesty for defeated guerrillas that helped quiet the country down after the turbulence of the 1960s.

—November 15, 1973

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