Why did the USA kidnap Maduro?

by John Leach

 Image: Courtesy of Professor Vitor Santos, Lisbon Sch. of Economics & Management

(Quintal dos EUA = Backyard of the USA)

US forces attacked Venezuela on the 3^rd of January 2026 and kidnapped its President, Nicolás Maduro, and its First Lady.  They rendered the President and his wife to the US against their human rights and against international law; US Law Enforcement has charged him with various crimes against the US under the US legal system.  Trump will, no doubt, prevent President Maduro ever returning to power.

The immediate objective of the attack was not as claimed in early press releases.  It was not about stopping the drugs trade; the US DEA acknowledges that Venezuela does not produce fentanyl and only a tiny fraction of US-bound cocaine transits through Venezuela.  It was not about terrorism; there is no credible evidence, at least not in the public domain, that Maduro ran a "terror organisation".  It was not about projecting democracy into the dark corners of the world; for decades the US has supported some very unsavoury regimes (such as Saudi Arabia which is about as non-democratic as they come) and has toppled several democratic ones.  The immediate objective of the attack was to bring Venezuela’s huge oil reserves under US control.

We know this because Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff, said as much in a post on 17 December 2025: "American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property".  The US claims Venezuelan oil actually belongs to America because it was US companies that developed Venezuelan oil following World War I.  All it is doing, it says, is reclaiming what was stolen from it in 1976 when Venezuela nationalised its oil.

Whilst the immediate objective of the attack was to bring Venezuelan oil under US control, I believe there was a deeper strategic goal behind the operation.  This was to retard, if not stop, further de-dollarization.

To understand what de-dollarization is about, we need to go back to before 1974.  Back then, the US dollar was pegged against gold and many of the world’s main currencies were pegged against the dollar.  In 1974, US President Richard Nixon uncoupled the dollar from gold and set it free to float in value.  To prevent other countries uncoupling their currencies from the floating dollar, the US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, agreed a deal with Saudi Arabia (the anchor supplier in OPEC) that all oil traded internationally would be traded in US dollars.  When you see references to the “petrodollar”, this is what that means.

Since then the dollar has become the standard currency used for trading in all other commodities, not just oil.  It is also the global reserve currency, i.e. the base currency for the global financial system.  These together have created a global US dollar-denominated finance system that has kept America the globally-dominant economic power for the past 50 years.

Why does this matter?  It matters because of the enormous privileges this provides to the US economy, and to the US economy alone.  Having the dollar be the global reserve and trading currency means two things.  Firstly, it means that every country on earth needs to use US dollars to buy oil or any other globally-traded commodity.  Secondly, it means that every country that is a net exporter of goods to the world, whether of raw commodities or of manufactured goods (think Japan, China and Germany amongst others), ends up with an excess of dollars held by its central bank.

These two things create a global demand for US dollars and a global demand for somewhere safe that other countries can invest their excess US dollars in.  These together keep the exchange value of the US dollar artificially high (its exchange value is fully twice its PPP – purchasing power parity – value) and allow the US to sell trillions of dollars of debt (in the form of US Treasury bills) with which it funds its economy.

While every other nation in the world has to rein itself back, managing its economy carefully to deliver desired national spending whilst avoiding a loss of market confidence and runaway inflation, the US is able to run its economy at a gallop, funded largely through cheap deficit spending.  No other country can do that and remain economically viable for any length of time.  When ex UK Prime Minister, Liz Truss, indicated she wanted the UK to do that, the reaction of the global money markets saw her ousted from office within a few short weeks.

It is this ability to run its economy through essentially unlimited deficit-spending without consequence for decades that has resulted in the US economy being so exceptionally large and in its domination of global finance[1].  This makes the use of the dollar as the global reserve currency more important to sustaining the US’s economy and preeminent global power than all its aircraft carriers and its hundreds of military bases.

It is no surprise that other countries want to break up this system.  They resent the extraordinary privileges it gives to the US economy and they resent the way the US uses its extraordinary power against them.  De-dollarization is the move to do that.

But it is also no surprise that the US will fight hard to prevent de-dollarization.  It has shown several times that it is willing to go to any lengths to defend its privileges.

In 2000, Saddam Hussein announced that Iraq intended to sell its oil in Euros instead of dollars.  In 2003, with 9/11 setting the context, Iraq was invaded by the US and Sadam Hussein ended up dead.  Iraq's oil immediately switched back to being sold in dollars.  The WMDs were never found because they never existed.  And Iraq was left as a broken state.

In 2009, Muammar Gaddafi proposed African countries return to using a gold-backed currency, a new "gold dinar", for their international trade rather than use the floating US dollar.  Hillary Clinton's own leaked emails confirm this was the primary reason behind the West’s intervention.  In 2011, Libya was attacked, Gaddafi was murdered and Libya was left broken.  His idea of a revived gold dinar died with him.

And now, in 2026, Venezuela.

Venezuela has 303 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the largest reserves on earth - 17% of the world’s entire known oil reserves and more than is held by Saudi Arabia.  But, since 2017 when Trump imposed sanctions on Venezuela and blocked it from selling its oil through dollar-denominated global trading systems, Venezuela has been selling its oil outside the dollar system.  As China is Venezuela’s largest oil customer, Venezuela has been selling most of its oil in Chinese yuan.

Venezuela has, also, been looking for other ways to break itself free from dependence on the dollar and reduce its exposure to the US’s “America First” hegemony.  It petitioned to join BRICS+ (though that was and remains, I believe, vetoed by Brazil).  It has signed up to China’s alternative to the SWIFT interbank settlement system (known as CIPS – the Cross-border Interbank Payments System, launched in 2015).  And, when it can, it trades with other countries through Chinese-sponsored systems that bypass the dollar and enable countries to trade in other currencies and settle trades instantly.

It has also deepened its international relationships with China, Russia and Iran, the three biggest countries the US has sanctioned and the main countries leading the campaign for global de-dollarization.  Venezuela joining the Chinese-sponsored system and bringing its 300 billion barrels of oil with it gave a major boost to that system, making it more attractive for other countries that do not want to be within the US orbit to join.

The US saw this as a significant threat to the global dollar-denominated finance system and the privileges it alone enjoys.

Ironically, the dollar system is coming under threat largely because of the US’s use of economic sanctions and military force against states it does not like.  Militarily-small states such as Iraq, Libya, Iran and now Venezuela, the US is prepared to attack militarily.  For militarily-large states like Russia and China, it resorts to using economic sanctions.  But economic sanctions are not an effective form of coercion.  Since its 2014 annexation of Crimea, US-sanctioned Russia has had no difficulty selling its oil in rubles and yuan and sanctions have had no significant effect on its international behaviour.  China has been under a myriad of embargoes and sanctions since Tiananmen Square (1989).  The Russian economy is much smaller than the US’s; China’s, however, is not.  US sanctions have given China a clear interest in creating an alternative global financial system that is not controlled by the US.  And China has the economic size to be the anchor economy for a global non-USD system.

China’s CIPS now has over 4,900 banks across 189 countries signed up to it.  China announced in January 2025 that it will no longer buy US Treasury Bonds.  Doing that will, over a decade or two, reduce China’s vulnerability to any future collapse of the US dollar.  China knows it cannot force other countries to leave the US-controlled dollar-based global system and transition across to the systems it sponsors but it knows that all it needs to do is create those alternative systems and leave it for the US to provide the incentives.  Which is exactly what the US has done, again, with its kidnapping of President Maduro.

If de-dollarization were to accelerate and the US dollar were to lose its extraordinary privileges, both the dollar and the US economy would crash.  Yes, the global economy would suffer catastrophically and that would harm everyone, but in the world that emerged afterwards, the US would no longer be in sole control.  It is a risk China seems willing to take, and every other country has to decide which side of this divide it wants to be on.  The Cold War came to a halt with the fall of the Berlin Wall.  But it did not end there, it mutated.  It now takes the form of de-dollarization.

The problem for the US is that Trump’s attitude to international relations is as likely to accelerate global de-dollarization as it is to stop it.  His attack on Venezuela is a clear display that America’s policy is not just “America First” but “America First, Last and Only”.  When the US has to attack countries and kidnap or kill its leaders to keep the world using its currency, its currency has already lost its lustre.  The US attack against Venezuela isn't going to bring about the beginning of de-dollarization; that is already under way. But it might lead to a dash to complete it.

[1] just imagine how great it would be if the UK could spend an extra £100 billion a year on the NHS, year after year, without having to worry a jot about the size of its national debt.

John Leach left Cambridge University with a double Masters in Maths and Natural Sciences and then did a Ph.D in theoretical Solar Physics at Stanford University. Returning to the UK in 1983 with a wife and a child, he was one of the first in the UK to be involved in cyber security, eventually becoming a leading commercial IT security consultant. After retiring in 2022 he became a Liberal Democrat councillor in Bath & North East Somerset. He is considering whether to run again when his first term expires next year.