With each passing day, Donald Trump & Company’s military assault on Venezuela – and the extractions of Pres. Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores – is considered less and less about the capture of a ”wanted criminal” but about one issue – the petrodollar.

Why did Trump & Company force regime change in Venezuela at this historical moment? Ever since the military intervention on January 3rd, Trump & his administrative puppets have made it clear that they have taken-over Venezuela without having to take it over. A violent show of force — in which U.S. military-judicial personal left 100 people dead, 32 of them Cubans – was sufficient to enforce regime change.

And regime change quickly turned into a (proposed) windfall plan by which 30-to-50 million barrels of Venezuela petroleum will be transported to oil refineries in the U.S. of A. How this is to be accomplished remains a mystery, well-hidden behind ceaseless claims of victory and that its all for the Venezuelan people.

Making Venezuela even more attractive, as Syeda Fizzah Shuja, a research associate at the Pakistan Navy War College, has pointed out, the “Orinoco Mining Arc” consists of approximately 12 per cent of the Venezuelan territory “that has gold, bauxite, coltan, diamonds, nickel, and potential rare earths estimated to be worth billions of dollars.”

Earlier this year, Daragh Cogley, in “The Petrodollar – The US-Saudi Deal that Ruined the World,” provides an excellent overview of the U.S.’s and world’s dependence on petroleum and the role of the “petrodollar.” Most pointedly, Cogley argues:

In essence, oil exports from Saudi Arabia (and later OPEC broadly) have been priced in U.S. dollars since the 1974, ensuring a constant global demand for the dollar and U.S. Treasury assets. This monetary system forms the hidden backbone of a web of consequences – from U.S. imperialism and geopolitical maneuvering to environmental degradation and extreme wealth accumulation.

The “petrodollar” anchors the global economy — and U.S. dollar anchors the global currency. The petrodollar is being challenged and so too the legitimacy of the U.S. dollar as the global economic standard.

Venezuela is a “petrostate.” The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) notes, “Petrostate is an informal term used to describe a country with several interrelated attributes:

• government income is deeply reliant on the export of oil and natural gas,

• economic and political power are highly concentrated in an elite minority, and

• political institutions are weak and unaccountable, and corruption is widespread.”

The CFR identified other petrostates, including Algeria, Ecuador, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Oman, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates,

The U.S.’s global economic hegemony is coming to an end. As John Mearsheimer has long argued, we are living through an historical transition from a “unipolar” to a ”multipolar” world economic order. In the post-WW-II era through the 1970s, the U.S. ruled.

The Atlantic Council warns that over the last half-century, the U.S.’s share of world gross domestic product has declined from 40 percent in 1960 to 25 percent in 2024. And the dollar’s share of the global reserves has declines from 71 percent in 1999 to 58.4 percent in 2024. Most pointedly, it notes, “the tariff measures recently announced by the Trump administration could lead to a decline in the global use of the dollar, especially if they were accompanied by a decline of trust in the United States as a safe and liquid destination for global financial assets.”

The U.S.’s economic hegemony, including the dollar, has faced serious challenges from what is known as “BRICS” – an association of what used to be known as “Third World Countries.” It includes 10 full member countries: the original five (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and five additional countries (Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia). The BRICS+ coalition now represents 45 percent of global population, 35 percent of global GDP (measured in purchasing power parity) and 30 percent of global oil production.

In December 2023, Russia and China announced their plans to abandon the U.S. dollar in their bilateral transactions, thus furthering what is known as “de-dollarization.” Reuters points out, “There are no official figures, but it is estimated that as much as 20% of the world’s crude trade is now priced in currencies other than the dollar, such as the euro or Chinese yuan.”

Since 2018, Venezuela has sought to “free itself from the dollar” and started accepting yuan, euros and rubles to replace U.S. dollars. However, in 2024, its application to BRICS was blocked by Brazil due to Venezuela’s disputed 2024 election.

Writing on Substack, Benjamin Kasper argues, “On the surface, American interest in this South American nation might seem driven by concerns about authoritarianism or humanitarian crisis. Dig deeper, and you’ll find something more fundamental: Venezuela represents an existential threat to the petrodollar system, and by extension, to American global power itself.”

Shuja concurs, insisting, “The fact that Venezuela was seeking alternative currencies and bilateral deals with China and Russia was not just an economic game but also a geostrategic threat to US hegemony in monetary affairs which only increased the perceived urgency of coercive action.”

In the U.S., the assault of Venezuela is compounded by a Christian nationalist, quasi-imperialist regime that seeks to recreate a pre-Civil War America of the 1820s and the Monroe Doctrine – now dubbed “the Don-Doctrine.”

Reuters fleshes out Trump’s approach: “It is promoting dollar-pegged ‘stablecoins’ to strengthen the dollar’s role in digital payments and global finance more broadly. It has also threatened to impose tariffs on countries seeking to develop alternatives to the dollar, most notably the BRICS group of developing nations.”

Going further, it warns: “Gaining a degree of control over the world’s largest proven oil reserves could be part of this effort, especially as it involves muscling out China and Russia — the Maduro regime’s allies — in the process.”

The Venezuela attack – and Trump’s alleged commitment to “run” the country for years to come – was a last-ditch effort to preserve faltering dollar-diplomacy.

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