The US military operation to capture Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro was executed to serve the American energy dominance agenda and reconstruct an ideology that views Latin America as a sphere of influence—one where international law only applies where it serves the current US administration. The New York Post called it the “Donroe Doctrine,” and indeed, US President Donald Trump relates its foreign policy to the legacy of the historical Monroe Doctrine (1823). At its inception, however, it was an anti-imperialist policy against European recolonization of America’s young nations. Trump’s 2026 version has fully embraced imperialism with aspirations to exert control over natural resources from Venezuela to Greenland.

But with no clear plan beyond ordering American executives to pump Venezuela’s oil, it’s hard to see how Trump can reach his declared goals. Influence and power in the 21st century depend on significantly different factors than in the 20th and 19th centuries—and current US energy policy is now designed for the latter. This is because its enactors are beneficiaries of the old system and rose to power not least through massive political donations from fossil fuel companies.

Whereas in past centuries, spheres of influence were largely defined territorially, in the interconnected world of today, influence is increasingly projected through digital means, with narratives and ideology reaching far-away populations and even labor no longer strictly tied to geographical location. Economically, technologies like oil pumps and resources like coal fields will not define wealth and power in the coming decades. These will come from another set of technologies, and critical raw materials. China is aggressively pursuing dominance in these fields, by subsidizing renewable energy, energy efficiency, and green technologies—and by tightly controlling the respective supply chains. As the whole world moves to heat pumps and electric vehicles, freeing its societies from deadly smog and trade dependencies, the question arises: What does the United States need all this oil for?

The Trump agenda is coherent in its attempt to dictate global energy policy. It has managed to ­destroy the international consensus to move away from plastics, which are petroleum-based. Furthermore, it used outright blackmail to postpone a decision on reduction and pricing of shipping emissions at the International Maritime Organization net-zero framework negotiations. It abandoned the Paris Agreement, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Accounts of attempts to take down and even destroy US data on environmental change speak of an authoritarian push to conceal evidence of the negative externalities of oil and gas burning. But the latest European Copernicus data shows that global warming crossed the 1.5 degree Celsius limit in the three consecutive years from 2023 to 2025. The remaining carbon budget to limit warming to modest risk levels is dwindling. Increasing Venezuelan oil production could push the planet into crossing dangerous tipping points.

Venezuelan oil reserves are vast and only a small portion of them is developed; much of the infrastructure has been abandoned as a result of the years of Maduro’s corrupt mismanagement and US sanctions. Already, the local environmental consequences of the drilling are dire, with pollution rampant in the Venezuelan Orinoco belt and the highly ecologically diverse Lake Maracaibo. Even discounting the reason for transitioning to renewables because of the frightening signals of a rapidly changing climate, industrial and technological transformation is no longer reversible. Many clean technologies bear wide-ranging benefits, from efficiency to cost reductions and increased autonomy. Outcompeting the dinosaur technologies, their eventual adoption is unquestionable even without global consensus on emissions reductions. European policymakers and business leaders who are now using the US return to fossil fuels as an excuse to water down their own climate and energy goals should think twice. The Americans may be winning a battle not worth fighting.

Kira Vinke is deputy research director and head of the Center for Climate and Foreign Policy at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP).