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Over the weekend, U.S. forces arrested Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on drug trafficking charges, with Trump claiming the U.S. would “run” the country and take over the country’s nationalized oil reserves.

“American dominance in the western hemisphere will never be questioned again. Won’t happen,” Trump said on Saturday, while explicitly endorsing the “Donroe doctrine,” a social media meme/portmanteau that describes the retro-nostalgic version of imperial authority increasingly on display in his second term. The Monroe Doctrine meets the Donald.

The move follows a series of deadly strikes on Venezuelan boats supposedly carrying drugs, attacks widely considered to be illegal. The United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, the body’s top official, called Trump’s ousting of Maduro a violation of the UN’s charter. 

Home to the world’s largest oil reserves, Venezuela reached its output peak in the 1970s, producing more than 3.5 million barrels of oil daily, though production has significantly tapered off to about 1 million barrels daily. Analysts have high hopes that oil companies entering Venezuela can tap back into the country’s black gold. JPMorgan predicted that with control of Venezuela’s oil, the U.S. could hold 30% of the world’s oil reserves. Other analysts said the country could double or triple its current output, returning it to its highs from 50 years ago, quite quickly.

But experts warn that the path to dominance, at least as far as oil is concerned, will be an uphill battle following decades of mismanagement and sanctions. State-owned oil giant Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA) collapsed in the mid-2010s following the loss of  foreign financial support, as well as skilled workers to maintain pipelines. In 2017, the first Trump administration escalated oil sanctions on Venezuela, restricting the country’s access to U.S. markets.

Small war, big questions

According to Helima Croft, head of global commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, oil companies’ efforts to grow production, such as rebuilding infrastructure, would take about a decade. She wrote in a note to investors on Saturday that according to oil executives, these efforts will cost $10 billion annually, bringing total investments over the next 10 years to about $100 billion.

Part of those steep rebuilding costs are also a result of the need to extract and refine heavy crude oil, which makes up about 75% of Venezuela’s reserve, most of which is in the Orinoco Belt. Venezuela’s oil boom of yesteryear was also a result of light crude oil found in the oilfields of western Venezuela, which was easy to access and therefore were depleted quickly. While heavy crude oil is what is predominantly being drilled for today, its viscous consistency and high levels of metals and sulfur mean extracting and refining this product is significantly more costly than its light crude counterpart.

The mass undertaking to restore the Venezuelan oil industry to its peak means oil prices are unlikely to budge anytime soon, said Miguel Tinker Salas, a professor emeritus of history at Paloma College and author of The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela. It’s a hit to Trump’s “drill baby, drill” vision and, according to the historian, the president’s hope of gaining momentum ahead of the midterm elections.

“The notion that Venezuela has the largest reserves of oil in the world—303 billion barrels of oil [in reserve]—may be a stimulant in trying to get the price of oil to drop for potentially his own electoral purposes,” Tinker Salas told Fortune. “Although [Trump] is grossly mistaken if he thinks that Venezuelan oil comes online tomorrow and will affect prices of oil before the election.”

Several other analysts see more than a little bit of midterm maneuvering behind the U.S. strike on Venezuela, given the offyear rout that Republicans suffered in 2025 and Trump’s dismal poll ratings. Macquarie’s global analysts Viktor Shvets and Kyle Liu noted that their 2026 outlook included “start a small war” as one policy the Republicans could pursue to avoid a “meltdown” in the midterms. Maduro’s capture is about oil and the Monroe Doctrine, they added, but it also strengthens the Republican Party’s “tough on crime and drugs” image. 

Elsewhere, UBS chief economist Paul Donovan argued in a Monday podcast that perceptions of “affordability” seem to have shaped U.S. administration policy over the past few weeks. He noted two tariff decisions in particular: a delay on a furniture levy, and a cut on planned fees for tariffs on Italian pasta. 

“The weekend’s action in Venezuela also raises fiscal questions,” he wrote. “It is not clear how, if at all, the US intends to ‘run’ Venezuela but military adventures carry a fiscal cost. Despite the noise of social media warriors, geopolitical considerations are likely to concern investors less.”

Risks of political instability

The factors influencing U.S. oil companies go beyond just the infrastructure challenges plaguing the industry in Venezuela. According to RBC Capital Markets’ Croft, increasing oil production will hinge on companies feeling confident about the safety of setting up shop in Venezuela. That begins with who will be leading the country moving forward.

That individual will likely not be Nobel Peace Prize winner and opposition leader María Corina Machado, whom Trump said lacked support to fill the role; nor will it be Edmundo González, who ran against Maduro in the 2024 election, which was considered to be the fair winner of the election. González is in a self-imposed exile in Spain. Delcy Rodriguez, Maduro’s vice president, was sworn in as Venezuela’s interim president on Monday.

“We don’t really know who’s in charge, who is going to be running Venezuela,” Croft told CNBC on Monday. 

The U.S. will also have to learn from its past efforts to build up authority in the oil-rich countries of Iraq and Libya. Both endeavors included attempts to depose the countries’ respective leaders that led to political collapse and civil unrest.

“We thought Libya was going to be an easy turnaround, post-[former Libyan Prime Minister Muammar] Gaddafi,” Croft said. “So the question is, What’s our template for a rapid recovery of an oil sector that has suffered decades of decline and mismanagement?”

Tinker Salas argued that other factors, including an improvement in technology to extract low crude oil, could expedite production, but until there’s evidence that companies can thrive in Venezuela, there will likely be few efforts to escalate drilling.

“I don’t think any large U.S. major company is going to want to invest without a series of guarantees, because you’re talking about billions of dollars of investment,” Tinker Salas said. “This is an investment for the long term, not for the short term.”

Macquarie’s Shvets and Liu added an ominous warning for the long term of U.S. foreign policy, writing, that this is “another nail in the coffin of [the] global rules-based order,” marginalizing the UN “similar to the League of Nations circa 1930s.” The League of Nations was the forerunner to the UN and is famous among historians for its formation after the wreckage of World War I and its almost immediate failure to prevent the rise of authoritarianism in the 1930s that gave way to World War II.

This could also signal that the Church Committee rules may be “obsolete,” the Macquarie analysts wrote, referring to the regulations in place since 1975 to address abuses intelligence revealed during the Vietnam era. The CIA reportedly played a critical role in ensuring the success of this military action in Venezuela, after all.

A strong Republican midterm showing would reinforce the “unitary system of governance,” on the one hand, but Macquarie argued that it would likely further erode the “few remaining semi-independent agencies (principally the Fed).” Right on cue, a new Federal Reserve chairman is expected to be selected in the coming days.

The UK saw over 210 billion annual streams of audio music tracks in 2025 – but year-on-year growth significantly decelerated.

That’s according to new annual data from recorded music trade group BPI, showing the volume of music consumption in the UK last year.

The BPI’s report on UK music consumption shows music streaming crossed the 200 billion-stream mark for the first time in 2025, growing 5.5% year-over-year to 210.3 billion streams.

In numerical terms, that represented YoY volume growth of 10.7 billion streams vs. the 199.6 billion streams seen in 2024.

For comparison: 2024’s audio stream volume (199.6B) was up 11.0% YoY in percentage terms (vs. 2023), and up by 20.0 billion YoY in terms of annual stream volume growth (see below).

Streaming accounted for a record 89.3% of music consumption in the UK, according to the BPI – which bases that calculation on its own formula for ‘Album Equivalent Sales’, which in turn is broadly in line with trade value.

The BPI measures one album ‘equivalent’ sale as 1,000 track streams through a premium (paid) service, or 6,000 streams from a free (ad-supported) tier. The body also counts 10 sales/downloads of individual tracks from a single LP as one album ‘equivalent’.

Under this formula,

Physical music sales rose 1.4%, with sales of vinyl growing 13.3% YoY to 7.6 million, marking their 18th consecutive year of growth. CD sales fell 7.6% to 9.7 million.

“We have been watching this consistent growth in demand for vinyl for a long time,” said Neil Gibbons, COO of Key Production Group, the UK’s largest physical music manufacturing agency.

“The core audience has shifted even beyond Gen Z now as fans build deeper connections with artists by listening to whole albums and collecting multiple formats.”

And the success of vinyl isn’t limited to catalog sales; six of the 10 biggest-selling vinyls during the years were released in the previous two years, including the top-selling vinyl album in the UK in 2025, Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, which sold more than 147,000 units, the most vinyl albums sold in data going back to 1994.

BPI’s data measured the 52 weeks ending on December 25, 2025. The trade group is planning to release recorded music sales numbers for 2025 in Q1 or Q2 of this year.

While consumption hit new all-time records in 2025, the rate of growth was slower than in previous years. This year’s growth in overall consumption was little more than half the 9.7% YoY growth rate seen in 2024. Streaming growth also slowed from the 11% YoY growth seen in 2024 and 12.8% YoY growth in 2023.

“From Olivia Dean and Lola Young to Sleep Token and Sam Fender, new British talent are now chart-topping sensations at home and are making their presence felt in key markets around the world.”

Dr. Jo Twist OBE, BPI

The BPI says the UK saw a “surging” recorded music industry in 2025, propelled by both domestic and international sales and driven in particular by breakthrough female acts. The BPI singled out Brit School alumnus Lola Young, who had 2025’s second-biggest UK single with Messy, and Olivia Dean, who became the first female in UK chart history to achieve a No. 1 album and single in the same week.

It was overall “another exceptional year for women,” the BPI said, with Taylor Swift setting a new UK album record by becoming the first artist in nearly 50 years to have the biggest album in two consecutive years with different releases (2024’s The Tortured Poets Department and 2025’s The Life of a Showgirl). Swift also became the first artist to debut simultaneously in the top three positions on the UK’s Official Singles Chart, with The Fate Of Ophelia, Opalite and Elizabeth Taylor,  in that order.

The BPI also gave shout-outs to Skye Newman (the first British female artist in over a decade to have both of her first two singles place in the Top 20 singles charts), PinkPantheress (shortlisted for a 2025 Mercury Prize for mixtape Fancy That), as well as Chappell Roan, Gracie Abrams, and Huntr/X, the fictional girl group from Kpop Demon Hunters.

“2025 saw UK talent break through domestically and globally, an impressive feat given more acts than ever are vying for audience attention,” BPI Chief Executive Dr. Jo Twist OBE said in a statement.

“From Olivia Dean and Lola Young to Sleep Token and Sam Fender, new British talent are now chart-topping sensations at home and are making their presence felt in key markets around the world, while the likes of Ed Sheeran continue to reinforce their icon status.”

She added: “This is testament to the diverse, exceptional talent that exists throughout the UK, and to the vital role labels play in supporting artists to long-term success. This impact should be a powerful reminder that British music is a global headline act, and one of the crown jewels of the UK’s creative industries.”

The BPI’s boosting of the British music industry comes at a time when the UK and other English-language music markets are seeing their share of global music streaming shrink amid a boom in the popularity of regional and local music. Music from the US, UK and Canada accounted for 56.2% of global streams in 2024, down from 57.5% in 2023, continuing a long, slow decline.

Ensuring the UK music industry’s continued success “should be high on the government’s agenda in 2026,” Twist said. “We need the commitment of policy makers, the continued protection of the UK’s gold-standard copyright framework, and a business environment which supports direct licensing between music and tech companies in order for labels to continue to discover, nurture and promote the global stars of tomorrow.”Music Business Worldwide