Today, Professor Miguel Tinker Salas explains how oil transformed Venezuela from a fractured agricultural economy into a nation vulnerable to foreign manipulation—and how the U.S. just attempted regime change “on the cheap.”

In our conversation, Professor Tinker Salas traces Venezuela’s history from 1922, when a gusher shot oil 200 feet into the air and American companies rushed in to write the country’s petroleum laws, through the “gentlemanly” nationalization of 1976 (which left former oil executives in charge), to Hugo Chávez’s attempts to redirect oil wealth toward social programs. His argument? That Venezuela’s century-long dependence on oil made it uniquely vulnerable to economic warfare. When the Trump administration imposed sanctions and the Biden administration continued them, they targeted the country’s singular weakness. And when the U.S. kidnapped Nicolás Maduro on January 3rd, 2025, it was an attempt at “nation-building from afar”—empire on the cheap, without boots on the ground. But as Professor Tinker Salas warns, you can’t reimagine a national project with a gun or by kidnapping a leader. That has to be done by Venezuelans themselves.

Professor Tinker Salas is an emeritus professor of history at Pomona College and one of the foremost experts on Venezuelan history. He’s the author of Venezuela: What Everyone Needs to Know and The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture and Society in Venezuela, among other books.

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