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Wednesday, February 11, 2026
Opinion | Bad Bunny’s Halftime Show - The New York Times
Which Bad Bunny Halftime Show Did You See?
By Petra R. Rivera-Rideau and Vanessa Díaz
"Drs. Rivera-Rideau and Díaz are the authors of “P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance.”
Bad Bunny made history at the Super Bowl on Sunday, giving voice to Puerto Rican history and culture, and doing so in Spanish at a time when that alone could get you picked up by masked immigration agents. Though Bad Bunny did not yell “ICE out” or otherwise call out the Trump administration directly, his performance was unapologetically political.
And you know what? It was a party, too, complete with live salsa, perreo dancing and even a wedding. You didn’t have to understand Spanish or know anything of what he was talking about to enjoy it. But if you do speak Spanish, it was so much more.
We knew he would probably use the show to make a statement, but even we weren’t prepared for the emotional roller coaster Bad Bunny, a.k.a. Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, took us on. It felt subversive to see this display of joy, pride and resistance. It often felt as though there were two different shows unfolding — one for America and one for América.
His 13-minute set opened with a man dressed in white, guitar in hand and wearing a pava, the classic straw hat worn by the Puerto Rican jíbaro, or small farmer, a contradictory symbol who is the embodiment of Puerto Rican national culture. “Que rico es ser Latino,” he said, holding his guitar. “How wonderful it is to be Latino.” That line tugged on the heartstrings of Latinos, immigrants and others who, like Bad Bunny, have been told they don’t belong here.
At times Bad Bunny looked into the camera and spoke to us directly — in Spanish, telling us to believe in ourselves, that we are so much more than we think we are. He sang, “Este es P.R.” — “This is P.R.” — and winked through the camera to those of us at home. And of course there were the white plastic chairsthat have come to symbolize the displacement addressed in his recent album and that sit in and on patios, porches and marquesinas, or carports, all over the Americas.
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People magazine described the performance as a “fun-filled dance party” that largely abandoned politics in favor of sexiness, joy and tropical flavor. A friend texted to say she was especially annoyed when one media outlet referred to the plants onstage as “shrubbery,” oblivious to how those sugar cane fields recalled a long history of chattel slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean.
During the set, Bad Bunny performed “El Apagón,” a searing critique of Puerto Rico’s failing electrical grid and the long legacy of colonialism behind it. The jíbaros were recast as electrical workers, evoking the ingenuity of Puerto Ricans rebuilding after Hurricane Maria amid federal negligence. Where some viewers may have seen only electrical poles, we saw an acknowledgment of one of the most painful chapters in Puerto Rico’s recent history. And yet, the workers and Bad Bunny still danced, still partied, still lived.
Our friends in Los Angeles cheered when they saw the popular Villa’s Tacos stand, while those in Brooklyn lit up when Toñita of Williamsburg’s Caribbean Social Club handed Bad Bunny a drink. Nearly halfway through the show, the music stopped, and the camera cut to a real couple — two fans who had originally invited Bad Bunny to their wedding — being pronounced husband and wife during the performance.
In the reception scene that followed, the sight of a child dozing across the chairs reminded us of family parties and the endless waiting for our parents to call it a night. We saw ourselves in the little girl Bad Bunny spun around — memories of itchy puffy dresses at family gatherings, dancing with uncles, weaving between grown-ups to chase cousins. “Baila sin miedo, ama sin miedo,” Bad Bunny shouted. “Dance without fear. Love without fear.”
But there was more than feel-good nostalgia wrapped up in that halftime show. In one particularly poignant moment, Ricky Martin appeared sitting on a white chair in the Puerto Rican countryside to sing “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii,” one of Bad Bunny’s most explicit pro-independence anthems. In the song, Bad Bunny urges Puerto Ricans to hold onto their culture and their land in the face of gentrification and displacement.
Mr. Martin crossed over into the English-language market during the 1990s, helping usher in the Latin pop boom. To do so, he embodied many of the stereotypes associated with Latinos. Many likely remember him as the happy-go-lucky, hip-thrusting Latin lover who urged you to “shake your bon-bon.” Since then, he has come out as gay and become a vocal advocate for Puerto Rican sovereignty, joining Bad Bunny at the 2019 protests that led to the ouster of the governor at the time, Ricardo Rosselló.
In Mr. Martin’s autobiography, he wrote that he feared that acknowledging he was gay would ruin his career. He didn’t publicly come out until he was in his late 30s. As he sang, our minds flashed back to a scene moments earlier, where two male dancers grinded together as they stared at each other, sin miedo. It was a quiet yet defiant statement about queerness, visibility and Latin identity.
Bad Bunny showed us that when he said “We are Americans” at the Grammys, he wasn’t merely referring to citizenship status. He was challenging this country’s ever-narrowing definitions of who is — and is not — American.
Through a celebration of wedding, family, joy and community, he created a showcase in which many Latinos, especially Puerto Ricans, felt seen, heard and represented at every turn, with millions dancing along at home, even if they didn’t know exactly what was going on. He invited us all to join the party. And that might just be the biggest form of resistance for all.
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 11, 2026, Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: Which Bad Bunny Performance Did You See?"
Tuesday, February 10, 2026
A Campaign to Revoke the Endangerment Finding Appears Near ‘Total Victory’ - The New York Times
Trump Allies Near ‘Total Victory’ in Wiping Out U.S. Climate Regulation
"A small group of conservative activists has worked for 16 years to stop all government efforts to fight climate change. Their efforts seem poised to pay off.
In the summer of 2022, Democrats in Congress were racing to pass the biggest climate law in the country’s history and President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was declaring that global warming posed a “clear and present danger” to the United States.
But behind the scenes, four Trump administration veterans were plotting to obliterate federal climate efforts once Republicans regained control in Washington, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with the matter.
Two of them, Russell T. Vought and Jeffrey B. Clark, were high-profile allies of Donald Trump. Mr. Vought, who has railed against “climate alarmism,” and Mr. Clark, who has called climate rules a “Leninistic” plot to seize control of the economy, drafted executive orders for the next Republican president to dismantle climate initiatives.
The other two, Mandy Gunasekara and Jonathan Brightbill, were lesser-known conservative attorneys with long histories of fighting climate initiatives. Ms. Gunasekara, a onetime aide to the most vocal global warming denialist in the Senate, and Mr. Brightbill, who had argued in court against Obama-era climate regulations, collected an “arsenal of information” to chip away at the scientific consensus that the planet is warming, documents show.
Their efforts are now paying off. In the coming days, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to revoke a determination that has underpinned the federal government’s ability to fight global warming since 2009.
That scientific conclusion, known as the endangerment finding, determined that carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases are supercharging storms, wildfires, drought, heat waves and sea level rise, and are therefore threatening public health and welfare. It required the federal government to regulate these gases, which result from the burning of oil, gas and coal.
In revoking that determination, the Trump administration would erase limits on greenhouse gases from cars, power plants and industries that generate the planet-warming pollution.
Unlike the swings in federal policy that have become routine when administrations change hands, getting rid of the endangerment finding could hamstring any future administration’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
“We are pretty close to total victory,” said Myron Ebell, who helped the first Trump administration set up its operations at the E.P.A. and has been attacking climate science and policies for nearly three decades.
Mr. Ebell said that dozens of conservative activists, lawyers, scientists and others had worked for years to prepare the case against the endangerment finding. But he singled out Mr. Vought, Mr. Clark, Mr. Brightbill and Ms. Gunasekara as the ones who drafted detailed plans of attack that the second Trump administration has largely followed.
“No amount of outside public support would have done anything if there hadn’t been those four people: Russ and Jeff and John and Mandy,” he said.
Funding an ‘Arsenal’
When the E.P.A. issued the endangerment finding under President Barack Obama, conservative groups and businesses immediately fought to dismantle it.
But as they lost legal challenges and public concern about global warming began to grow, many corporations withdrew from the battle. By 2017, when Mr. Trump first took office, hundreds of U.S. companies, including oil giants and major manufacturers, had accepted the reality of climate change.
Even Mr. Trump’s top advisers at the time rejected the most extreme demands of those who wanted to challenge the science. Days before Mr. Trump left office in January 2021, his E.P.A. denied a petition from Mr. Ebell’s group to reconsider the endangerment finding.
“There just wasn’t an appetite among any of the institutional crowd,” said Michael McKenna, who worked in the White House on energy issues during Mr. Trump’s first term.
Still, some conservative activists who insisted that the threat of climate change was overblown kept up the fight during the Biden years.
One of them was Ms. Gunasekara, who served as E.P.A. chief of staff during Mr. Trump’s first term and wrote the E.P.A. chapter in Project 2025, the set of conservative policy recommendations for a second Trump term. Another was Mr. Brightbill, a partner at the law firm Winston & Strawn who had served in the Justice Department’s environment division during the first Trump administration.
Ms. Gunasekara is known in Washington for handing a snowball to James M. Inhofe, then a Republican senator from Oklahoma and her boss, on a cold February day in 2015. Mr. Inhofe held up the snowball in the well of the Senate as evidence that the planet could not be warming dangerously.
Mr. Brightbill, for his part, had gained some attention for prosecuting the owners of the Oklahoma zoo featured in the Netflix documentary series “Tiger King.” But his main focus as a federal attorney had been defending the first Trump administration’s repeal of Obama-era climate rules, including a landmark regulation aimed at curbing greenhouse gases from power plant smokestacks.
In the summer of 2022, as Mr. Biden and Democratic lawmakers were ramping up their climate efforts, Ms. Gunasekara and Mr. Brightbill sought $2 million for a secretive campaign to kill the endangerment finding, according to a funding pitch obtained by Fieldnotes, a watchdog group that investigates the oil and gas industry.
The two wanted funding to draft regulatory documents that a future administration could use to abandon the endangerment finding. They also planned to solicit white papers from favored scientists who did not accept the physics of climate change.
The endangerment finding had helped Democrats wage a “war on fossil fuels,” Ms. Gunasekara and Mr. Brightbill wrote in the funding pitch. Conservatives needed a comprehensive strategy for reversing the finding on “Day 1” of the next Republican administration, they wrote.
The campaign would operate in secret “to prevent media and other conflicted sources from shaming participants and undercutting the work before it is done,” they added.
The Heritage Foundation eventually agreed to fund some of this work, although it is unclear whether the group provided the full $2 million, according to two people familiar with the matter. A spokesman for the Heritage Foundation, where Ms. Gunasekara was a visiting fellow from September 2022 to December 2024, did not respond to questions.
Ms. Gunasekara said in a text message that she was “extremely proud of the work I and others produced at the Heritage Foundation to rebut junk science and expose the Green New Scam.” She said her work for the group had helped inform “Cooling the Climate Hysteria,” a collection of essays by scholars who reject mainstream climate science. It features a melting ice cube on its cover.
Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, where Mr. Brightbill is now the general counsel, declined to make Mr. Brightbill available for an interview but said in an email, “Jonathan Brightbill brings a deep understanding of energy and environmental issues that make him exceptionally qualified for his role.”
Clinching ‘Total Victory’
While many conservatives lined up against the endangerment finding when it was established, Mr. Clark started to fight its core principles many years earlier.
In 2005, as a 38-year-old Justice Department lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, Mr. Clark argued in federal court that the Clean Air Act did not give the E.P.A. the power to regulate greenhouse gases. The Supreme Court rejected that argument in a landmark 2007 case called Massachusetts v. E.P.A., clearing the way for the agency to issue the endangerment finding two years later.
It was a stinging defeat that Mr. Clark was determined to reverse, according to people familiar with the matter and his own remarks on podcasts, panels and other public forums.
His next opportunity came in 2022, when he joined a conservative research organization called the Center for Renewing America. Mr. Vought was running the center from an old rowhouse near the Capitol, where he complained of pigeons infesting the walls. From there, Mr. Vought drew up sweeping plans for a second Trump administration.
Under Mr. Vought’s supervision, Mr. Clark drafted executive orders that a future president could use to swiftly scrap Mr. Biden’s climate policies, according to two people familiar with the matter. He also brainstormed legal arguments that the future administration could use to repeal the endangerment finding, the people said.
Former colleagues of Mr. Clark’s said he was less concerned with reducing the costs to companies of complying with environmental laws than with fighting what he saw as government overreach in the form of climate policies.
Mr. Clark has called climate initiatives part of a plot to “control” Americans” and to undermine the U.S. economy. He has called environmentalists a “crazy climate cult” and compared them to the authoritarian pig characters in George Orwell’s dystopian novel “Animal Farm.”
Mr. Clark is “an ideologue with very, very strong views that E.P.A. shouldn’t regulate greenhouse gases,” said Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard Law School and the author of the book “The Rule of Five: Making Climate History at the Supreme Court,” in which Mr. Clark figures prominently.
“For the Russell Voughts, the Jeff Clarks, this has been a bee in their bonnet,” Mr. Lazarus said.
At the time that he was hired by Mr. Vought, Mr. Clark was facing a criminal investigation in connection with Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. President Trump preemptively pardoned Mr. Clark in November and the Georgia case was dismissed.
With Mr. Trump’s return to the White House last year, Mr. Clark became the government’s top regulatory official as the acting head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Mr. Vought is once again the White House budget director and Mr. Clark’s boss.
In their new roles, both men have focused on ridding the government of green initiatives. And Mr. Clark has pushed E.P.A. lawyers to strengthen their legal arguments for repealing the endangerment finding, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Allie McCandless, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Management and Budget, declined to make Mr. Clark available for an interview or respond to questions about his work. She said in a statement that Trump administration officials were “working in lock step to execute on the president’s deregulation agenda.”
Neil Chatterjee, a Republican who led the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in the first Trump administration, said conservative activists had helped sustain the fight against the endangerment finding even after businesses backed out.
“It’s not the corporate interests,” Mr. Chatterjee said, adding, “It’s the pure ideological activists who believe that climate change is a hoax, who believe that this was about transferring wealth and driving socialism and destroying renewable energy and promoting left-wing ideology.”
“This is their moment,” Mr. Chatterjee said.
Steven J. Milloy, a former Trump transition adviser who runs a website that promotes theories saying that climate change is not real, said the years of work of conservative activists might have gone nowhere if a different Republican had won the presidency. Instead, the activists found a receptive audience in Mr. Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” and a “con job.”
The next challenge is to ensure the repeal of the endangerment finding holds up in court, he said.
“We’ve kept the skepticism alive,” Mr. Milloy said, adding, “I hope we don’t blow it. I don’t know when or if this opportunity will come around again.”
Coral Davenport contributed reporting.
Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.
Maxine Joselow covers climate change and the environment for The Times from Washington."
Monday, February 09, 2026
Texas attorney general candidate says if he wins, he’d try to revoke Democratic leader Gene Wu’s citizenship
Texas attorney general candidate says if he wins, he’d try to revoke Democratic leader Gene Wu’s citizenship
“Texas Attorney General candidate Aaron Reitz suggested revoking the citizenship of Democratic leader Gene Wu, claiming Wu lied during his citizenship application. Reitz’s comments were made in response to a viral video clip of Wu discussing racial divisions and the potential for non-white communities to unite politically. Wu, who declined to comment, has faced similar accusations from Texas Republicans in the past.
Aaron Reitz, who is running for Texas attorney general, issued the threat after an interview of Wu was shared online of him discussing non-white voting strength.
Aaron Reitz, among the GOP candidates running to be Texas Attorney General, on Monday suggested without evidence that the leader of the Texas House Democrats, who is Asian, had lied during his citizenship application process and should have his citizenship revoked.
“As AG, I want to see [Rep. Gene Wu] de-naturalized,” he posted on X in a response to a 28-second clip of an interview of Wu talking years ago about racial divisions in the country.
The clipping, from a 2024 interview, instantly infuriated some Texas Republicans who accused Wu, a Houston Democrat, of being anti-White and racist, for his suggestion that non-white communities could come together to win elections in Texas once they realized “they share the same oppressor.”
Reitz is facing three others for the GOP nomination in the March 3 primary: state Sens. Joan Huffman of Houston and Mayes Middleton of Galveston as well as U.S. Rep. Chip Roy of Austin. He appeared to be the only candidate offering to take action against Wu for his comments.
“On what basis? He likely concealed his anti-American sentiment throughout his citizenship app process—the details of which are conspicuously absent from the public record,” Reitz wrote on social media. “Wu is a subversive whose citizenship should be revoked.”
Through a spokesperson, Wu declined to comment.
Denaturalizations are historically rare, and under federal law, can only occur if someone committed fraud while applying for citizenship. The federal government can also denaturalize someone if they become affiliated with the Communist Party, or a terrorist organization within a few years of becoming a citizen.
President Donald Trump has increasingly pointed to denaturalizations as a means to increase his crackdown on immigrants. Last year, the administration issued guidance to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field offices,issuing monthly quotas for offices to initiate denaturalization cases.
The video clipping that went viral shows Wu talking about relationships between different immigrant communities. The entire interview, nearly 40 minutes long, features a conversation about Texas’ GOP leadership, life in Texas for immigrants and Wu’s own life, from when he migrated as a child from China with his family to seeing the Asian American community in Houston flourish.
“I always tell people the day the Latino, African American, Asian and other communities realize that they share the same oppressor is the day we start winning,” Wu says in the short clipping circulating social media. “We have the ability to take over this country and to do what is needed for everyone and to make things fair. But the problem is our communities are divided.”
The video was posted Saturday evening by an X account with nearly 4 million followers. A few hours later it was reposted by LibsofTikTok, the right wing disinformation account with almost 5 million followers.
By Monday morning, numerous Texas Republicans were outraged at Wu.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz said the “Democrat party is built on bigotry.” Paxton calledWu a “radical racist who hates millions of Texans just because they’re white.”
Roy, in a heated primary contest against Reitz, said Wu should resign from his state House seat, a move other conservative influencers and commentators also encouraged.
“Unlike many Democrats, he admits his racism against white people and call to ‘take over this country,’” Roy wrote on social media. “He should resign or the TX House should strip him of any power.”
Bo French, the former Tarrant County GOP chair running for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, referred to Wu as a “commie,” even as Wu has shared personal stories of how his family was the victim of the Chinese communist party.
Texas Republicans in the Capitol and beyond have for years baselessly accused Wu of similar offenses, and questioned his loyalty to the state and country. The criticism reached a new peak last summer when Wu and other House Democrats left the state to delay the passage of a new congressional map aimed to max GOP gains in the U.S. House.
Two lawsuits seeking to remove Wu from office for breaking quorum remain pending before the state’s supreme court.
At one point in the interview where the viral clip came from, Wu talks about how he sees all the residents in his district as Americans, regardless of their legal status. The journalist host then asks Wu about his biggest fears for Houston’s undocumented population during Trump’s second term, secured with promises of a historic deportation effort.
“It’s not just the fate of undocumented people. It’s the fate of all immigrants,” Wu responds, pointing to the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. “People say I’m not worried. I’m a citizen. … When the mass deportation begins, I promise you it will not just be illegal immigrants who are affected. It will be Americans.”
Trump’s Oil Grab in Venezuela Shatters an American Taboo - The New York Times
Trump’s Oil Grab in Venezuela Shatters an American Taboo
"U.S. presidents have long been accused of plotting to control foreign oil. But President Trump has asserted a U.S. right to take it.
President George W. Bush said he was invading Iraq to keep America safe. But critics saw a hidden motive: oil.
“No blood for oil!” became a global rallying cry, and Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, accused Mr. Bush of seeking “to control the Middle East oil.”
The Bush administration rejected the charge and was determined to refute it. After invading and occupying Iraq in March 2003, Bush officials were careful to leave Iraqis in control of their oil industry, and they never sought special treatment for American firms.
As foreign investors moved in, the biggest winners by far were not U.S. companies but Chinese ones.
American presidents have long been accused of plotting to control foreign oil. But while the United States has built relationships and even intervened abroad for oil, it has never simply seized control of another country’s oil reserves.
“I can’t think of a military operation that the U.S. engaged in to actually take oil from anybody,” said Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security.
Until now.
Immediately after U.S. forces captured Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, in January, President Trump announced plans to take control of the country’s oil industry.
Since then, Mr. Trump has forced Venezuela’s government to begin “turning over” as many as 50 million barrels for sale by the United States and is pressuring American firms to start drilling in the country, which sits on the world’s largest proven oil reserves.
“The people of the United States are going to be big beneficiaries,” Mr. Trump said at the White House last month. (Mr. Trump says that some oil revenue will be returned to Venezuela, but not how much.)
Venezuela’s parliament passed legislation in late January opening the country’s mostly state-run oil sector to more foreign investment, a decision critics note was made as U.S. warships floated near Venezuela’s coast.
“You are taking their oil at gunpoint,” Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, told Secretary of State Marco Rubio at a hearing in late January. Mr. Trump is selling “stolen oil,” Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, has charged.
Mr. Trump’s fixation with Venezuelan crude is somewhat puzzling, given that global oil prices are relatively low, and that the United States is now a net energy exporter no longer dependent on foreign oil supplies.
Despite that, analysts say that Mr. Trump is confirming some of the worst suspicions about U.S. motives worldwide. He also risks infuriating ordinary Venezuelans, who could oppose American efforts to drill their oil — possibly with violence — and resist a political alignment with Washington.
“One lesson that emerged from Iraq,” said Meghan O’Sullivan, a former Bush administration official who worked closely on Iraq policy, “was how toxic the oil narrative can be — and how potent it can be in fomenting anti-Americanism.”
Critics say Mr. Trump’s plan revives bitter memories of colonial exploitation and flagrantly violates international law, including a 1974 United Nations resolution that asserts that every country has full rights to “all its wealth, natural resources and economic activities.”
In China, a foreign ministry spokeswoman said last month that Mr. Trump was “bullying” Venezuela to give up its oil. Spain joined with five Latin American countries, including Mexico and Brazil, in denouncing “the external appropriation” of Venezuela’s natural resources as illegal.
Mr. Trump has sought to turn the tables, charging that Venezuela “took our oil away from us” and “stole our assets” in 2007 when it increased state control over its oil industry and forced two of the three U.S. companies operating in the country to abandon their projects at considerable expense.
Whether that is Mr. Trump’s true motivation is unclear. He has asserted a U.S. right to “take the oil” from other countries, from Iraq to Syria to Libya, although he has not previously done so.
That is a sharp break from decades of precedent, Ms. O’Sullivan said.
“America has, by and large, focused on ensuring access to oil and the smooth functioning of global oil markets — which is different from physical control of oil,” she said.
Oil has shaped U.S. foreign policy at least since 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt imposed an oil embargo on imperial Japan to check its aggression in Asia. Japan responded by attacking Pearl Harbor, which dragged the United States into World War II.
The war’s industrial nature showed that national security depended on access to oil. By 1946, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff were warning about the risk of “an oil-starved war” should the United States lose access to Middle East supplies. That mind-set gave birth to America’s courtship of Saudi Arabia, where huge oil reserves were discovered in 1938.
Iran also emerged at the time as a major Western oil supplier. But a crisis erupted in 1951 when Iran’s new prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, nationalized his country’s oil industry. Worried that Mr. Mossadegh could cut off the West and “deny Iranian oil to the free world,” as a National Security Council policy memo later put it, the Eisenhower administration joined with Britain, which had lost a major oil stake in Iran, in fomenting a 1953 coup that overthrew the Iranian leader.
The United States did not try to seize control of Iranian oil, however. The N.S.C. memo, written a few months after the coup, said the U.S. government should help Iran remain an “independent” nation, in part by supporting the development of its oil industry.
It was a case where national interest and profit motive overlapped. American and British oil companies would profit handsomely after the coup from doing business with Iran’s pro-Western shah, as noted by critics who cite the episode as proof of American greed and treachery.
After decades of official U.S. denials, the C.I.A. in 2013 finally admitted its role in toppling Mr. Mossadegh.
Blood for Oil
In his 1980 State of the Union address, President Jimmy Carter made a dramatic declaration: America would fight a war for oil.
“Our excessive dependence on foreign oil is a clear and present danger to our nation’s security,” Mr. Carter explained. Thus, any attempt by an outside power to control the Persian Gulf and its oil “will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America,” and would “be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
The Carter Doctrine, as that position came to be known, was prompted by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan months earlier. U.S. officials worried that Soviet troops might continue west, into the oil fields of neighboring Iran.
That did not happen. But a decade later, the United States would launch its first oil war.
In August 1990, Iraq invaded its oil-rich neighbor Kuwait. President George H.W. Bush quickly decided to respond with force. He argued that it was vital to defend global order. But he did not hide his economic motive to free Kuwait’s oil fields from Mr. Hussein’s control. “We cannot permit a resource so vital to be dominated by one so ruthless,” Mr. Bush said.
His secretary of state, James A. Baker, explained why: “If you want to sum it up in one word, it’s ‘jobs.’”
After U.S. forces liberated Kuwait, Mr. Bush made no effort to take control of any oil. He even declined grateful Kuwaiti offers of preferential treatment for American oil companies.
“The U.S. could have commandeered Iraqi or Kuwaiti oil and didn’t,” Mr. Fontaine said.
Iraq: W.M.D. or Oil?
Even so, when Mr. Bush’s son George W. invaded Iraq in 2003, many skeptics dismissed his main rationale — a false claim that Mr. Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction — as a cover story for the secret goal of controlling Iraq’s oil.
Fueling the suspicion was Mr. Bush’s past as a former Texas oil man; his vice president, Dick Cheney, had run the energy giant Halliburton.
Bush officials disputed the charge. “That’s just not what the United States does,” Mr. Bush’s defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, told an interviewer shortly before the invasion. “We never have, and we never will.”
A litany of shifting explanations and misstatements from Bush administration officials invited doubts about their motives. But experts say there is extensive evidence showing that U.S. officials never tried to commandeer Iraq’s oil or win special treatment for American firms, and actually took steps to limit their own role in the country’s postwar oil industry.
“This idea that the war was meant to be a permanent oil grab is false,” said Emily Meierding, an assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and the author of “The Oil Wars Myth: Petroleum and the Causes of International Conflict.”
Before the invasion, she said, a team of White House officials drew up plans for Iraq’s oil industry. “They were very clear that Iraq’s resources belonged to the people of Iraq, that oil production should belong to the Iraqis and that the U.S. should transfer control to the Iraqi people as soon as possible,” Ms. Meierding said, noting that she was speaking only for herself and not her institution.
American companies including Exxon Mobil did sign early contracts with the country’s new government. But high risks and disappointing results caused them to retreat. (Exxon Mobil recently signed a deal to return to Iraq.)
But their Chinese rivals moved aggressively, and the dominant player in Iraq’s oil sector today is the China National Petroleum Corporation.
A Lesson for Venezuela
The mere perception that America was stealing Iraq’s oil inflicted severe damage there, Ms. O’Sullivan said, helping to fuel a bloody insurgency against American forces and undermining public trust in Iraq’s U.S.-backed government.
That might be a cautionary lesson for Mr. Trump. U.S. oil executives already say the risks and costs of doing business in Venezuela are daunting. Those obstacles could grow if Mr. Trump’s approach angers Venezuelans who might otherwise be sympathetic to the United States.
The Venezuelan people “are extremely sensitive to any perception of foreign exploitation,” Ms. Meierding said. “So they’re going to want their industry to revive, and they know they’ll need foreign investment. But they are not going to accept direct U.S. control, at least for the long term.”
Ms. Meierding suggested what may be the main reason countries do not wage wars for oil more often.
“People will resist an occupation for their resources, and resist forcefully,” she said.
Michael Crowley covers the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The Times. He has reported from nearly three dozen countries and often travels with the secretary of state.
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 8, 2026, Section A, Page 10 of the New York editionwith the headline: Trump, in Seizure of Venezuela’s Oil, Goes Beyond Iran Coup and Iraq War. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
More on the U.S. Involvement in Venezuela
On January 3, the U.S. military seized Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife in a strike on Caracas, the culmination of a campaign to oust Maduro from power.
Opposition Figures: Hours after at least 35 political prisoners were released, one of the most prominent, Juan Pablo Guanipa, was apparently back in custody, raising doubts about the government’s direction and control.
Latest Boat Strike: A U.S. military strike blew up a boat suspected of moving drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing two people, the U.S. Southern Command said. The strikes have claimed 128 lives, according to a tracker maintained by The New York Times.
Maduro Allies Targeted by the U.S.: Venezuelan security agents have questioned two prominent businessmen who have faced money laundering charges in the United States, according to five Venezuelans and a U.S. official. The move against the men, with ties to the deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, signaled a deepening cooperation between the two countries.
A Mini-Caracas: Generations of migrants from a village on the coast of southern Italy found a better life in Venezuela. Many came back and turned their town into a slice of Caracas flourishing in an unlikely spot.
Computer Warfare: The United States used cyberweapons in Venezuela to take power offline, turn off radar and disrupt hand-held radios, all to help U.S. military forces slip into the country unnoticed early this month, part of a renewed effort to integrate computer warfare into real-world operations.
Wrongful Death Lawsuit: Relatives of two Trinidadian men the U.S. military apparently killed in a boat strike filed a wrongful-death lawsuit, bringing the first legal challenge in an American court to President Trump’s policy of targeting vessels suspected of smuggling drugs at sea."
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