Are We Going to Make Venezuela a U.S. Territory?
What Just Happened
On January 4, 2026, Nicolás Maduro was apprehended following a U.S. operation, and President Donald Trump said plainly that the United States is going to “run” Venezuela. Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed that position, stressing that no elaborate regime-building effort is planned — the objective is simply to remove Maduro and take control of the situation. The administration insists this is not a nation-building exercise, just management.
As for the Nobel Peace Prize winner, María Corina Machado — the Venezuelan opposition leader who, on paper, might seem like the obvious replacement — Trump has shown no interest. He said she “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country.” The Nobel Peace Prize is, after all, the same prize he thinks should have been his for “ending seven wars” or whatever the number is this week.
Are We Headed for Nation-Building — or Something Else?
I started to write this article when the first alleged drug ship was bombed, and while most of it has aged well, I was reticent to sound like I was pushing for what seems to be the inevitable now.
There are some points here. Venezuela has been a problem child for ages now. Putting someone in charge that is just going to get overthrown by the military or in the next election cycle is not the solution either. And Trump views Venezuela — and much of the Western Hemisphere — as one large underperforming asset, which, uncomfortable as it is, contains some truth.
But nation-building from a distance does not work. It worked after World War 2 and has never worked since then. Beginner’s luck can be a curse.
What we have been successful at, more or less, is managing territories. And I think this is where we are headed.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: we can control a country if we want to. We’ve done it before. The question was never capability — it was cost-benefit. Iraq and Afghanistan failed because the costs were enormous and the benefits were abstract: democracy, stability, counterterrorism. You can’t put those on a spreadsheet. Venezuela changes the math. Oil revenues. Reduced immigration costs. Drug interdiction savings.
Suddenly there’s a profit motive.
An interesting sidebar, not to get distracted here: we make brown people territories — Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands — and ask Caucasian places like Canada or Greenland to become states.
The only way the oil business can realistically be rebuilt is by making Venezuela a U.S. territory. Then we can guarantee the stability and longevity that investment would require.
And as far as creating legislation, creating a territory isn’t hard — it requires nothing more than a simple majority in both houses of Congress and a presidential signature.
The International Rules-Based Order
This is certainly not allowed. You are not supposed to apprehend the leader of a sovereign country and announce you’re going to run it. The rules-based international order is clear on that. And certainly not declare another country to be a territory of yours.
But I also can’t say there is no justification. Some neighbors don’t just fail internally — they create external problems for the United States. Allowing them to remain “independent” satisfies the moral principle of self-determination, but often helps nobody except the dictators and bad actors who run them.
What we end up with are drug exporters, immigration crises, and instability that spills outward while the people living there remain miserable. Sovereignty becomes a shield for corruption, not a benefit to citizens. And we have the additional problem of Russia, China, and Cuba having a foothold there.
The rules-based order doesn’t offer a solution for that scenario. It just tells you what you’re not allowed to do.
The Trump Pattern
There’s a pattern here that’s easy to see. Trump never finishes anything. He does flashy sendoffs but never thinks anything through. His spectacular list of business failures is an attestation to that. I’ve written about this before in A Man Who Never Finishes Anything and How an Arms Deal Became Normalized as a Peace Proposal: The Abraham Accords .
He fails to answer the question “and then what?” and to put in the hard work to complete the task.
Is This Trump’s “Affordable Care Act”?
By that I mean: is this going to be one of those things that roughly 50.5% of the Congress supports, that never fully resolves, and that becomes a thorn in the government for the next 20 years?
Trump may be there long enough to make Venezuela a territory. But succeeding administrations will be the ones arguing about it. They won’t be debating whether it was a good idea — they’ll be debating what to do with something they inherited and can’t easily undo.
This is how these issues calcify. Not because they work, but because reversing them is harder than continuing them.
Process of Elimination
I keep coming back to the territorial question because I can’t find another option that survives contact with reality.
Install a puppet government? It gets overthrown in two years, maybe less, and we’re back here again. Permanent military occupation with no legal status? No American president can sustain that politically, and no oil company will invest billions into a legal gray zone. Some novel international arrangement? That requires congressional approval, treaty ratification, and cooperation from countries who will use this as leverage against us forever. None of that is happening.
The Constitution gives us two options for governing places that aren’t foreign countries: states and territories. Venezuela isn’t becoming a state. That leaves one door.
This isn’t advocacy. I’m not saying it’s good. I’m saying it’s what’s left after you rule out everything that doesn’t work. The question isn’t whether we’re comfortable with it. The question is whether anyone has a better idea that actually functions.
I haven’t heard one yet.
The Longer Game
Trump starts things. He doesn’t finish them. But if Vance follows him you have someone who might.
Vance is younger, more ideological, and more patient. If he gets eight years after Trump’s four, that’s twelve years of continuous policy direction. Enough time to normalize what started as an emergency. Enough time to build the bureaucratic infrastructure that makes territorial administration routine rather than exceptional.
And if Venezuela works — if the oil flows, if the refugees stop coming, if the chaos stabilizes into something manageable — the template exists for everywhere else. Venezuela is not the only South American basket case.
And what about our northern neighbors?
Greenland becomes a state. It’s small, it’s white, it’s strategic, it might voluntarily join, and Denmark can’t defend it anyway. That’s the easy one.
Canada is a stretch — too big, too proud, too functional. But “too functional” is relative. If the U.S. economy continues to outperform, if Canadian healthcare and housing keep deteriorating, if we make it economically painful enough to stay independent and economically attractive enough to join — maybe not in twelve years, but in twenty? Stranger things have happened. Economic gravity is real, and it only pulls one direction.
None of this is inevitable. But none of it is unthinkable anymore either. That’s the shift. A year ago this was fringe speculation. Now it’s scenario planning.