Venezuela and the wars for land
War, that cursed impulse that has characterized humanity for centuries, has a threefold dimension today: military war, cultural war, and trade war. This last dimension is expressed today in the form of a global and blatant war on geology. Covert and almost invisible to the public for many years, today we no longer have any doubt that it is the true driving force behind the other two forms of war that make headlines: missile wars and, above all, symbolic wars.
We can see this in the first major geopolitical chapter of 2026, the military attack on Venezuela, something unprecedented in the last forty years on American soil. The American ideological artillery entrusted its histrionic leader with the responsibility of communicating the news and displaying the most sought-after image—proof of Maduro's life—through his own social network, Social Truth, a gesture that seeks in 2026 the prize it failed to win in the year that just ended. But if we look at the map of conflicts in which the West is involved as an aggressor, always with the United States at the forefront or as an ally—Venezuela and Gaza—or as the victim—Ukraine and Greenland—the common denominator is the natural resources at stake. In light of this, the rhetoric of narcoterrorism as an argument against Maduro and Chavismo becomes even less credible after the invasion. Control over oil and other resources is no longer hidden as the main cause of a conflict that seeks to impose sovereignty over natural wealth in Latin America, a sovereignty that Chinese state capitalism has already achieved in Asia and Africa. "The oil will flow again as it should," Trump said bluntly on Saturday. His announcement that the US will dictate the course of an independent and sovereign country like Venezuela represents a blatant violation of international law, something unprecedented in the history of diplomacy for decades, and is being done for commercial reasons with a geological motivation.
Thus, the trial against Maduro for drug and arms trafficking offenses in New York, announced by the US Attorney General, opens a new war of legitimacy between the United States and the international community: the permanence of the ius ad bellum agreed upon by the United Nations in 1945, which prohibits the use of armed force in the territory of sovereign states, or a new law of the strongest that imposes the violent unilateralism of the Trump administration for commercial reasons. It is indirectly an attack by American isolationism against European multilateralism, which is why the warnings from Greenland and Ukraine must be taken seriously.
In a world suffering from the depletion of traditional natural resources caused by the productive voracity of capitalism, those that are scarce become the most precious commodity. If the 20th century was the century of ideological wars, in which the conquest of land was the metaphor for expansion on the geographical map, the 21st is the century of the battles of a new stage of capitalism—which the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz recently defined in this publication as "the modern industrial age"—for the remaining wealth of a depleted Earth.
Paradoxically, the extreme technologization of the world may lead us to collapse, because we have almost completely abandoned the biological extraction of nature (food, water, timber, etc.) to focus on the fossil and mineral extraction of the Earth, and we are resources. Meanwhile, we read about wars as they were a century ago, absorbed by the spectacularization of images and the rhetoric of seeking justice against the oppression of despotic and aggressive leaders.
But the acceleration of the Earth's natural depletion is the true driving force behind contemporary war. The commercial drift spearheaded by Trump—from Venezuela to Ukraine, from Greenland to Gaza—is not new, but rather a multi-pronged re-edition of the same extractive drive with which—in the name of democracy—the Iraq War was waged twenty years ago and which, thirty-five years ago, initiated the war in Kuwait. And if oil was the central cause of the wars of that time, now it is only partly so. The crusades of the present seek to secure the materials of the future: it is the great trade war, the technological one, which the West is losing to China. From scandium to yttrium, or the fifteen lanthanide elements, all these minerals are today the goose that lays the golden eggs. This is what is happening in the Ukrainian equation, where Trump's interest in an anti-European agreement has a single objective: to divide with Russia the spoils of the mineral power of a country that possesses more than twenty minerals defined as "critical," and 5% of its reserves. The remaining 80% is in China and especially in Africa, in the hands of a Chinese diplomacy built on investments and seduction in a continent that in the past was colonized by Europe for precisely the same reasons: foreign natural resources as a source of wealth for the developed world.
