His recent actions have their roots in Dick Cheney’s plans for the post-Cold War world
Seymour Hersh
January 8, 2026
Seymour Hersh
January 8, 2026
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is seen in handcuffs after landing at a Manhattan helipad, escorted by federal agents as they make their way to a courthouse on Monday. / Photo by XNY/Star Max/GC Images.
America and the world are trying to figure out what’s really been going on under the headlines and why President Donald Trump attacked Venezuela and apprehended—or kidnapped—its president and his wife on Saturday.
Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff and Homeland Security adviser, left his friendly Fox News perch on Monday to explain on CNN that what went down in Venezuela was all very appropriate and logical: “We’re a superpower,” he told Jake Tapper, “and under President Trump we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower. It is absurd that we would allow a nation in our own backyard to become the supplier of resources to our adversaries but not to us.
“We are in charge because we have the United States military stationed outside the country. We set the terms and conditions. We have a complete embargo on all of their oil and their ability to do commerce.”
US Ambassador to the United Nations Michael Waltz made the same point on Monday when he told the Security Council: “You cannot continue to have the largest energy reserves in the world under the control of adversaries of the United States.”
Their bluster and crude language transfixed the world’s media, but they also diverted attention from an opportunistic Trump plan whose goal was not only to unseat the corrupt President Nicolás Maduro, but also, crucially, to cut off China, America’s economic rival, from its ongoing purchases of Venezuela’s cheap heavy crude oil. The next target, I have been told, will be Iran, another purveyor to China whose crude oil reserves are the world’s fourth largest.
Iran’s religious leadership is already under political pressure, stemming from a shortage of water and the public’s lack of access to a variety of essential goods. The protests come months after the bombing raids conducted last June by the US and Israel. The primary targets of the raids were sites connected to Iran’s nuclear program but they also destroyed the core of Iran’s anti-aircraft ballistic missile defense system and struck vital government offices and housing in the capital Tehran.
Recently, I’ve been reminded by a major player in the international oil community that the imperatives of the current American intervention in Venezuela were first set down by a secret task force that was put together soon after the 2000 election of George W. Bush. Vice President Dick Cheney, a former Republican congressman and the former CEO of Halliburton, one of the world’s largest energy-supply companies, quickly became known for his strong ideas about the need for American independence in oil and gas supply.
Within days of taking office, Cheney convened the secret group of oil executives and energy experts, officially known as the National Energy Policy Developmental Group, later to be known as the Cheney Energy Task Force. The existence of the group was public, but Cheney, in a trademark maneuver, refused to make anything about it public, including its members, despite intense public pressure to do so. I would later learn that one of Cheney’s goals, shared by members of the task force, was to find a way to cut off the flow of oil from Russia to consumers in Central and Eastern Europe and to slow what would become major sales to China. (Russia’s pipelines to Europe have been a source of political concern to US governments since the early days of the Kennedy administration.)
That group made its report in March 2001 and was not heard from again after 9/11. Cheney remained determined, nonetheless, as a few of his close colleagues understood, to keep his hands “around the neck”—the precise words of one aide—of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.
I was a correspondent in Washington for the New Yorker at the time and was aware of some of this, but there was a war on against Islamic terrorism and Russia’s oil needs weren’t at issue in that conflict. The Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.
And so today, in the view of some international oil men, the ultimate target of the attack on Venezuela was not Maduro himself but his willingness to sell oil to China, long seen by the US military and many in the political world as a once and future enemy.
“The big game is the United States versus China,” one oil expert told me. “China is the biggest importer of oil in the world, and the real deep state is the one run by Trump.”
Look out, Tehran. He’s coming to destroy your oil industry and perhaps overthrow your clerical government, with the support and intelligence, once again, of Israel, and there is no one in American political life ready to stop him.
Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff and Homeland Security adviser, left his friendly Fox News perch on Monday to explain on CNN that what went down in Venezuela was all very appropriate and logical: “We’re a superpower,” he told Jake Tapper, “and under President Trump we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower. It is absurd that we would allow a nation in our own backyard to become the supplier of resources to our adversaries but not to us.
“We are in charge because we have the United States military stationed outside the country. We set the terms and conditions. We have a complete embargo on all of their oil and their ability to do commerce.”
US Ambassador to the United Nations Michael Waltz made the same point on Monday when he told the Security Council: “You cannot continue to have the largest energy reserves in the world under the control of adversaries of the United States.”
Their bluster and crude language transfixed the world’s media, but they also diverted attention from an opportunistic Trump plan whose goal was not only to unseat the corrupt President Nicolás Maduro, but also, crucially, to cut off China, America’s economic rival, from its ongoing purchases of Venezuela’s cheap heavy crude oil. The next target, I have been told, will be Iran, another purveyor to China whose crude oil reserves are the world’s fourth largest.
Iran’s religious leadership is already under political pressure, stemming from a shortage of water and the public’s lack of access to a variety of essential goods. The protests come months after the bombing raids conducted last June by the US and Israel. The primary targets of the raids were sites connected to Iran’s nuclear program but they also destroyed the core of Iran’s anti-aircraft ballistic missile defense system and struck vital government offices and housing in the capital Tehran.
Recently, I’ve been reminded by a major player in the international oil community that the imperatives of the current American intervention in Venezuela were first set down by a secret task force that was put together soon after the 2000 election of George W. Bush. Vice President Dick Cheney, a former Republican congressman and the former CEO of Halliburton, one of the world’s largest energy-supply companies, quickly became known for his strong ideas about the need for American independence in oil and gas supply.
Within days of taking office, Cheney convened the secret group of oil executives and energy experts, officially known as the National Energy Policy Developmental Group, later to be known as the Cheney Energy Task Force. The existence of the group was public, but Cheney, in a trademark maneuver, refused to make anything about it public, including its members, despite intense public pressure to do so. I would later learn that one of Cheney’s goals, shared by members of the task force, was to find a way to cut off the flow of oil from Russia to consumers in Central and Eastern Europe and to slow what would become major sales to China. (Russia’s pipelines to Europe have been a source of political concern to US governments since the early days of the Kennedy administration.)
That group made its report in March 2001 and was not heard from again after 9/11. Cheney remained determined, nonetheless, as a few of his close colleagues understood, to keep his hands “around the neck”—the precise words of one aide—of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.
I was a correspondent in Washington for the New Yorker at the time and was aware of some of this, but there was a war on against Islamic terrorism and Russia’s oil needs weren’t at issue in that conflict. The Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.
And so today, in the view of some international oil men, the ultimate target of the attack on Venezuela was not Maduro himself but his willingness to sell oil to China, long seen by the US military and many in the political world as a once and future enemy.
“The big game is the United States versus China,” one oil expert told me. “China is the biggest importer of oil in the world, and the real deep state is the one run by Trump.”
Look out, Tehran. He’s coming to destroy your oil industry and perhaps overthrow your clerical government, with the support and intelligence, once again, of Israel, and there is no one in American political life ready to stop him.