Donald Trump is not being subtle about why he decided to launch a military attack against Venezuela and spirit away their country's leader, Nicolás Maduro. Instead of Trump's previous attempts to cloak his naked power grab with some sort of justification, he now just flat-out admits "it's about the oil." Venezuela has a lot of oil in the ground -- more than any other country on the planet, in fact. Trump wants it for the U.S. So he's going to force them to allow American companies to go in and take it, one way or another.

All previous pretexts now have to be seen as null and void. In fact, Trump himself provided a jaw-dropping amount of irony to each of them, making them completely laughable even before he began just flat-out admitting that it's just all about the oil. First, he cast himself in the role of the mighty drug warrior, who was stopping the flow of dangerous drugs into the United States. Except that Venezuela does not actually ship fentanyl (the most dangerous illegal drug around) to America, and most of the cocaine it does smuggle out actually heads for places like Europe, not the U.S. The rationale was thin from the get-go, as was Trump's declaration that somehow the drug cartels were "at war" with us (which was the justification for the U.S. military to just blow up boats in international waters on a whim). Then Trump completely and utterly shredded any sort of drug warrior image of himself by pardoning a former leader of Honduras who had been tried in a U.S. court of law and found guilty by a jury and sentenced to a whopping 45 years in prison for smuggling over 400 tons of cocaine to America. So much for being Mr. Tough Guy on the drug kingpins, eh? That "narco-terrorist" (as Trump likes to call them) is now a free man, because of Trump.

Trump also would speak of how the president of Venezuela wasn't their real president because he didn't honor an election result. The irony of this one is pretty thick, you've got to admit, since Trump is not exactly very respectful of election results he doesn't like (and that's putting it mildly). He obliterated this rationale immediately after the military raid on Venezuela by dismissing both the winner of that election as well as the woman who wasn't allowed to even run in it (the winner was a sort of candidate-by-proxy for her) -- the same woman who won last year's Nobel Peace Prize and dedicated it to Trump (to butter him up). Trump said he wouldn't be supporting either one of them taking power (he talked about both of them rudely and dismissively, in fact), which undermined all that talk of respecting elections and democracy. Instead, Trump will either (1) allow the Venezuelan vice president to take control (as long as she knuckles under and hands over all the oil to us), or (2) go in himself and "run" the country. That latter one is completely without details, it appears to be one of those braggy things Trump likes to say while speaking to the press that his team later has to walk back with some hare-brained: "Oh, but what he really meant was..." attempt at bending Trump's words to actual reality.

But putting the concept of Marco Rubio "running" Venezuela aside (Rubio certainly wasn't backing up Trump's claim in Sunday morning interviews yesterday), what this means is that the Venezuelan regime is still in place and still in charge. We snatched away the president, but his administration is still intact -- and Trump seems fine with them running things, at least as long as they give up all their oil to us.

Trump has long been fascinated with the way wars are fought these days, and he longs for the way wars used to be fought -- way back before World War I. He wants to see a return of the imperialism of the late 19th century, plain and simple. He wants "gunboat diplomacy" to make a comeback (he even announced we're going to build a new "battleship," even though it really isn't a battleship, since he likes to watch World War II battleships on television).

What this means is that when a colonial state beats a much smaller country militarily, then the big country gets to rape the smaller country of all its natural resources. He was quite open about this view of how things should work when talking about Iraq, in fact, ever since he entered politics. "We should get all their oil," he would state. After all, we beat them in a war, so of course we should just be able to take all their oil, right? To the victor go the spoils! Trump is using exactly the same logic on Venezuela right now.

Trump is making it plain that the only outcome he cares about in Venezuela is American companies getting access to the country's oil reserves. Trump doesn't care about a stolen election. He doesn't care who runs the country. He doesn't care how they run the country either -- as long as the oil is accessible to us. He doesn't care about the drug smuggling. He doesn't care if their economy slips into hyperinflation or if the country descends into warlords ruling different parts of it. Donald Trump could care less about the people of Venezuela and their future. All he cares about -- which he is now freely admitting -- is the oil.

He's likely to be disappointed even on that front, for a number of reasons. Even if all the oil fields were offered up as a tribute to Trump by Venezuela, it's not a matter of just flicking a switch and the oil starts plentifully flowing (and American companies start reaping in the profits). Here are a few of the reasons why, from someone who used to work at Chevron -- the only American oil company still in Venezuela right now:

"Not many companies are going to rush to go into an environment where there's not stability," said Ali Moshiri, who oversaw Chevron's operations in Venezuela until 2017 and now runs a private oil company that has interests in the country.

Chevron, the largest private oil producer in Venezuela, and smaller operators could potentially help increase the country's oil output to as much as 1.5 million barrels a day within 18 months, Mr. Moshiri said. That would cost up to $7 billion, assuming an estimated current level of around one million barrels a day, he said.

Still, that would leave Venezuela producing little more than 1 percent of the oil the world uses and less than half of what it was pumping in the late 1990s.

Further expansion most likely would take years. That is because a lot of Venezuela's oil infrastructure is in disrepair, and even if producers express interest in returning, it would take time for them to negotiate contracts and reestablish a footprint in the country.

Oil companies plan for the future using a timeline of decades. They have to -- the money they invest in equipment and infrastructure won't turn a profit for a long time. And right now, the oil companies aren't making a whole lot of investments anywhere, because the price of oil has fallen to the point where they can't make a profit on drilling new wells right now. This price slump is predicted to continue throughout 2026, so it's hard to see oil companies lining up to invest in Venezuelan drilling right now.

Oil companies aren't just concerned about price, either. They highly value the concept of stability, since they're making decades-long investment decisions. But "stability" is a word that nobody is using to describe Venezuela right now, and the country's future looks increasingly unstable, after Trump's military foray. Will the government survive all of this? Nobody knows. Will American troops be required? Trump seems open to the idea of "boots on the ground," but that's probably just him spouting off for reporters, one assumes. If the Venezuelan government collapsed, would American troops go in on a nation-building mission? Or would our troops just be naked mercenaries, guarding the oil facilities while the rest of the country collapses into chaos? Nobody knows the answer, and those are rather important questions.

As I said, Trump doesn't really care what happens, as long as the oil flows. But he might be forced to care -- as many have been pointing out, the old "if you break it, you own it" rule might apply even over Trump's reluctance.

Trump and Rubio are going to continue to do everything they can to halt all shipments of oil out of Venezuela (including seizing tankers), as leverage to force their government to open their oil fields to more American companies. If they don't, however, then Venezuela's economy could go into free-fall. And if the economy collapses, then the chance of a coup happening dramatically increases. Venezuela could quite easily descend into absolute chaos -- which is not a recipe for the stability oil companies need in order to make new investments.

Donald Trump, when planning his military adventure, seems not to have made any sort of plan for what happens next. This all seems to be nothing short of "making it up as we go along."

That is frightening, but what is even more frightening is the fact that Trump might just get carried away with using the U.S. military to accomplish a few other things he wants (without much regard to the consequences):

Even more alarming is that there appears to be more to come. Mr. Trump and his team have recently threatened military strikes on at least three other countries in the Americas: Colombia, Mexico and Cuba. Possible territorial grabs in Greenland and Panama, which used to produce eye rolls from people like us, who considered it too absurd to take seriously, can no longer be easily dismissed.

After all, the Trump administration is now breathtakingly open about why it attacked Venezuela and captured Mr. Maduro. Mr. Trump has largely dropped the pretext of stopping the flow of drugs or restoring democracy and is brazen about his goal of seizing control of the country's oil. It has suggested similar rationales for Panama (canal access) and Greenland (minerals and strategic geography). "We do need Greenland, absolutely," Trump reiterated yesterday.

Trump's complete lack of a plan for the day after in Venezuela means that if he does attempt any of these, he will probably likewise have no plan in place for "What happens next?" Greenland, for instance, would be pathetically easy for us to conquer militarily. There just aren't that many people there, and there is no military to speak of. The U.S. Marines could invest and occupy the place within a day or two, without even really breaking a sweat. But then what happens next? NATO goes to war with the United States?

Military adventurism is a dangerous thing in general. But when coupled with a complete lack of day-after planning, it becomes exponentially more dangerous.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant