Venezuela’s Crisis Is No Accident: How Oil and Intervention Shaped a State

Long before Nicolás Maduro was captured on January 3, 2026, the United States had been laying the rhetorical and strategic groundwork for escalation. Under Donald Trump’s second presidency, Venezuela was increasingly framed as a security threat rather than a diplomatic challenge.

Public warnings intensified, sanctions were recalibrated rather than eased and senior officials repeatedly hinted that containment had failed. By 2024–25, the language of inevitability had entered policy discourse: Venezuela was no longer a question of negotiation, but of resolution.

The operation that followed was therefore not sudden, but the endpoint of deliberate signaling that normalized, once again, force as foreign policy.

Chávez and the domestic rupture that reshaped Venezuela

Hugo Chávez’s ascent to power in 1998 was rooted in domestic collapse rather than ideological novelty. His victory reflected the exhaustion of Venezuela’s political system, entrenched inequality and the social consequences of economic reforms that had delivered growth without inclusion.

Chávez channeled popular anger into a project that promised redistribution, dignity and political voice for sectors long excluded from power. Backed by oil revenues, the Bolivarian project initially delivered measurable social gains and redefined the relationship between state and citizen.

Yet, the foundations were fragile. Oil rents replaced taxation, weakening accountability and hollowing out institutions. Power became increasingly centralized, opposition marginalized and loyalty rewarded over competence. Chávez transformed political participation, but failed to build institutions resilient enough to survive economic downturns or leadership transition.

Chávez and Washington: From cautious engagement to open hostility

U.S. attitudes towards Chávez evolved from initial caution to overt antagonism, shaped by ideological discomfort and strategic anxiety. During the final years of the Clinton administration, Chávez was treated largely as a populist anomaly rather than a strategic threat.

Diplomatic engagement continued, with Washington prioritizing oil stability over political alignment, even as concerns mounted over constitutional reform and executive concentration of power.

Relations deteriorated sharply under George W. Bush. Chávez’s opposition to the Iraq war, his embrace of anti-imperialist rhetoric and his deepening ties with Cuba and non-aligned powers placed Venezuela outside Washington’s acceptable ideological perimeter.

The 2002 coup attempt, widely perceived across Latin America as tacitly encouraged by the United States, marked a decisive rupture. Although direct involvement was denied, the rapid recognition of the short-lived interim government irreparably damaged trust and reinforced Chávez’s narrative of external aggression.

Under Barack Obama, the tone softened but the substance remained largely unchanged. While there were gestures towards regional recalibration, sanctions expanded and Venezuela continued to be framed as a destabilizing actor.

Chávez’s death in 2013 briefly opened space for reassessment, but suspicion endured. Donald Trump’s first presidency removed any remaining ambiguity, recasting Venezuela as a criminal state and openly discussing regime change.

Joe Biden largely preserved this architecture. Trump’s return to office completed the arc: from caution to containment to direct action.

Chávez’s foreign policy: Autonomy through confrontation

Chávez’s foreign policy emerged directly from this adversarial relationship. He positioned Venezuela as a challenger to U.S. dominance, framing sovereignty as both political and symbolic.

Regional integration initiatives such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), close alignment with Cuba and strategic partnerships with Russia, China and Iran were designed to diversify dependence and reduce U.S. leverage.

This approach was not isolationist. Venezuela continued exporting oil to the United States and engaging multilaterally when advantageous. The strategy combined confrontation with pragmatism, embedding Venezuela within global markets while resisting political subordination.

This duality — dependence paired with defiance — made Venezuela both strategically relevant and persistently contentious for Washington.

Maduro and the collapse of domestic legitimacy

Hugo Chávez died on March 5, 2013 after a prolonged battle with cancer. His death removed the charismatic authority that had masked Venezuela’s institutional weakness and overreliance on oil rents.

His chosen successor, Nicolás Maduro, narrowly won the presidential election of April 14, 2013. He assumed office without Chávez’s popular mandate, political skill or capacity to arbitrate internal power struggles.

What followed was not genuine continuity but accelerated decay. As oil prices fell and mismanagement deepened, Maduro responded by centralizing authority, politicizing the armed forces and hollowing out electoral competition rather than reforming the economic model.

The contested succession thus marked the moment when Venezuela’s structural vulnerabilities — personalist rule, oil dependency and weakened institutions — converged into a sustained political and economic collapse.

Nicolás Maduro inherited a system already weakened by institutional erosion and oil dependence. Under his leadership, economic mismanagement, collapsing production and hyperinflation accelerated decline.

Rather than reform, the government increasingly relied on repression. Elections held in 2018 and again in 2024–25 were widely contested, marked by disqualified candidates, constrained opposition parties, arrests of political leaders and systematic violations of opposition political rights.

By the mid-2020s, elections no longer functioned as mechanisms of democratic renewal. Media access was restricted, campaigning obstructed and electoral authorities openly politicized. This hollowing out of domestic legitimacy did not merely weaken the state internally, it provided external actors with justification — however selective — for coercive intervention.

A rupture that is also a return

The January 3, 2026 operation marked a rupture with recent diplomatic restraint, but also a return to familiar patterns of U.S. power. The capture of Maduro resurrected interventionist habits embedded in 20th-century hemispheric policy: unilateral action, regime change framed as enforcement and the sidelining of regional consensus.

Rather than reinforcing democratic norms, the operation reactivated Latin America’s historical memory of external control, repression and intervention.

The broader regional history of U.S. interference

Venezuela’s trajectory cannot be separated from the broader regional history of U.S. interference. Through the School of the Americas, U.S. institutions trained military officers later implicated in coups and repression. Operation Condor coordinated state terror across Argentina, Chile and neighboring countries.

Dirty wars in Argentina and Chile, counterinsurgency campaigns in El Salvador and Guatemala, the invasion of Panama and sustained destabilization in Nicaragua demonstrate a consistent willingness to subordinate democratic outcomes to strategic alignment with U.S. wider foreign policy objectives.

These interventions were not deviations but instruments of a chosen and deliberate U.S. foreign policy. They shaped a regional understanding that U.S. commitments to democracy are conditional and reversible.

January 3, 2026 and the problem of international law

The capture of Maduro was framed as a law-enforcement action linked to narcotics indictments. Yet under international law, the extraterritorial use of force against a sitting head of state without UN authorization or self-defense justification is deeply problematic.

No new congressional mandate was issued, nor was regional approval sought. The operation rests on power rather than legality, weakening already fragile international norms.

The U.S. capacity to act without consequence is structural. Permanent Security Council membership, dominance over financial systems, alliance leverage and narrative control allow Washington to neutralize accountability.

Framing intervention as counter-narcotics or counter-terrorism further blunts resistance. Illegality is not erased; it is obscured by asymmetry. Legal standards are selectively applied, enforcement is discretionary and accountability remains elusive when power is concentrated in the hands of those who claim to defend order.

In this imbalance, norms are not upheld through consent but imposed through capacity, rendering international law conditional rather than universal.

Oil as strategic prize and structural curse

Venezuela’s oil reserves remain central to its geopolitical relevance. Yet decades of mismanagement have rendered production fragile. External interest in Venezuelan oil is inseparable from the temptation to reorder governance around extraction rather than reconstruction, a path historically associated with instability, resentment and renewed dependency.

Control over oil has long shaped Venezuela’s political economy, structuring its relations with external powers and distorting domestic governance. When access to energy resources becomes the organizing principle of foreign engagement, political legitimacy is subordinated to supply security and short-term stabilization is prioritized over institutional rebuilding.

The absence of social consensus

The result is a familiar pattern in resource-rich states: extraction proceeds in the absence of social consensus, revenues bypass accountability mechanisms and sovereignty is incrementally eroded in the name of efficiency and security.

For the United States, energy considerations have consistently shaped the boundaries of engagement, determining when democratic norms are emphasized, selectively enforced or quietly set aside.

Stability of supply has often outweighed the legitimacy of governance, producing a foreign policy that oscillates between moral language and transactional practice. In this context, Venezuela is approached less as a political society to be reconstructed than as an energy geography to be managed.

Lessons ignored: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya — and Syria

Iraq demonstrated how dismantling institutions without political settlement fuels fragmentation. Afghanistan exposed the limits of externally imposed governance sustained by force. Libya showed how regime removal without post-conflict planning can collapse a state entirely.

Syria adds a further warning. There, selective intervention, proxy warfare and competing external agendas prolonged conflict rather than resolved it. Diplomacy was hollowed out, authoritarian survival entrenched and humanitarian catastrophe normalized.

Together, these cases reveal a consistent pattern: Force may remove leaders, but it does not manufacture legitimacy nor rebuild institutions, build functional states or spontaneously creates democracy.

Bombing states without multilateral legitimacy

Bombing states without multilateral legitimacy corrodes the legal and moral foundations of international order. When democracies resort to unilateral force, they weaken the institutions designed to constrain power and protect smaller states. Diplomatic pathways narrow, trust erodes and the political costs of managing future crises rise sharply.

Capturing foreign leaders and subjecting them to politicized prosecutions further degrades the rule of law. Trials perceived as victor justice do not heal societies; they deepen grievances and delegitimize legal institutions. Law becomes an instrument of power rather than a constraint upon it.

Most damagingly, democracies that adopt coercive tactics lose credibility when advocating human rights and legality elsewhere. Selective adherence to norms invites reciprocal violations, accelerating the global drift from rule-based order to raw capability.

The vacuum that follows

Removing a head of state creates not clarity but contestation. In Venezuela’s case, institutional decay, fragmented opposition movements and an uncertain military posture mean the aftermath is likely to be unstable. Interim authorities may lack legitimacy, civilian governments may lack capacity and prolonged uncertainty may empower criminal and armed networks.

Humanitarian consequences

Humanitarian consequences are highly probable. Displacement, disrupted aid flows and economic dislocation will intensify regional pressures and invite further external involvement. Without a carefully designed, Venezuelan-led transition architecture, intervention risks producing a prolonged emergency rather than democratic renewal.

The experience of Afghanistan is instructive. There, the removal of a regime without a credible, locally anchored transition framework produced two decades of dependency, institutional fragility and eventual collapse.

Similar patterns emerged in Iraq and Libya, where externally driven political engineering failed to generate legitimacy and instead fragmented authority, militarized politics and displaced instability across borders.

Reverberations across Colombia, Brazil, the Caribbean and beyond

Applied to Venezuela, such an outcome would not remain contained: mass displacement, illicit economies, armed non-state actors and political polarization would reverberate across Colombia, Brazil, the Caribbean and beyond. Intervention absent a Venezuelan-led settlement risks transforming a national crisis into a regional one, exporting disorder rather than resolving it.

Durable recovery demands three shifts. First, abandon the illusion that force substitutes for politics; military action must be the last resort, not the shortcut.

Second, construct a Venezuelan-led transition with credible guarantees, including security-sector reform, neutral electoral oversight and phased sanctions relief tied to verifiable benchmarks.

Third, prioritize reconstruction and institutional rebuilding over rapid oil extraction, ensuring transparency, social protection and long-term governance reform.

Experience suggests these conditions are unlikely to be met. In previous U.S.-led interventions, strategic impatience, domestic political pressures and the primacy of security and resource interests have repeatedly crowded out long-term institution-building, leaving transitions underfunded, externally steered and politically hollow.

Conclusion

Venezuela’s crisis also intersects with broader tensions between the United States and Iran. Over the past decade, Caracas and Tehran developed pragmatic ties rooted less in ideological affinity than in shared isolation under U.S. sanctions, encompassing energy cooperation, fuel exchanges and symbolic diplomatic alignment.

For Washington, disrupting Venezuela’s political order therefore carries secondary signaling value: It weakens one of Iran’s remaining extra-regional partners and reinforces a wider strategy of constraining sanctioned states through pressure rather than accommodation.

Yet this logic risks overextension. When local political crises are subsumed into global rivalries, resolution becomes hostage to deterrence posturing and domestic settlement is deferred in favor of geopolitical messaging — a pattern that has repeatedly prolonged conflict rather than resolved it.

The capture of Maduro may project strength, but it does not produce legitimacy. Regime change by force has never resolved Venezuela’s political crisis, and it will not do so now.

When power is mistaken for policy, institutions collapse, law erodes and societies pay the price. History is unambiguous: Politics abandoned today returns tomorrow as instability, resentment and conflict — and Venezuela will not be the last case to prove it.