United States and Venezuela: Another Example of a Geopolitical Dispute over Resources, Sovereignty, and International Influence

Luis Augusto Medeiros Rutledge

The century-long relationship between Venezuela and its main external partners has been marked by recurring cycles of cooperation and confrontation, reflecting structural shifts in the international energy system. Over this period, the country evolved from an oil colony in the early twentieth century to a central actor in the reorganization of production power by mid-century, culminating in the early twenty-first century as a symbol of resource nationalism.

This trajectory underpins a pattern of high geopolitical volatility, the strategic use of the energy sector as an instrument of foreign policy, and recurrent tension in international relations.

Venezuela holds the largest proven oil reserves in the world, estimated at 303 billion barrels—equivalent to 17–20% of global reserves—along with natural gas reserves exceeding 200 trillion cubic feet and strategic mineral resources. Added to this is its location in the Caribbean basin, close to the U.S. coast and to vital maritime routes, which confers significant geopolitical importance.

The current U.S. administration has consistently made explicit its perception of Venezuela as an opportunistically aligned actor posing substantial geopolitical risk. In this context of systemic rivalry, Venezuela operates as an actor that adjusts its foreign and energy policies according to tensions between the United States and its strategic adversaries—Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.

Caracas has consistently exploited geopolitical fissures to mitigate isolation imposed by sanctions and to secure financing, technology, and alternative channels for oil exports—at the cost of deepening its dependence on politically aligned but economically asymmetric partners. This pattern has increased the risk of diplomatic volatility, reinforced the instrumentalization of the energy sector as a geopolitical tool, and further heightened exposure to shocks, sanctions, and strategic alignment with China, Russia, and Iran.

Today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, what is unfolding in Venezuela represents both a revisiting of the past and a forecast of the future. The process began in Iraq, was resumed in Venezuela, and Iran remains the unfinished model.

We are not witnessing a war on drugs, but rather a straightforward dispute in which the initial prize is control over oil, followed by the restoration of U.S. geopolitical influence in Latin America. Military blockade is the tool, oil is the objective, and geopolitical remodeling is the final outcome—a brief reminder of the era of Henry Kissinger.

The U.S. escalation against Nicolás Maduro has never been a dispute with a specific Venezuelan government, but rather with a geographically proximate country seeking to operate outside the sphere of influence of the Trump administration. Geopolitical presence is vital to Washington. The U.S. interpretation of the American continent is also economic: without oil, critical minerals, and even Latin America’s labor force, it cannot sustain itself. It requires territorial bases and access to extract regional resources for its own economy.

Global geopolitics is now heating up amid an economic, political, and military crisis in the Western Hemisphere. Recalling the first Trump administration, the United States and ten countries in the hemisphere called on President Nicolás Maduro to resign from office. Additionally, during his first term, Trump reversed Obama’s openings toward Cuba and intensified the blockade against the island. Today, this policy has been reinstated.

Returning to Venezuela, relations between Washington and Caracas have indeed deteriorated gradually, and over the past 20 years U.S. imports of Venezuelan oil have fallen by more than half, despite oil remaining an indispensable source of hard currency for a country on the brink of collapse.

Within the historical context of energy geopolitics, Venezuela has played a fundamental role in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). However, since the early twentieth century, the global energy landscape has been shaped by complex negotiations, conflicts, and competing interests among states and international oil companies.

The often tense relationship between Venezuela and international oil companies is key to understanding the evolution of the oil industry in the Americas, which for a long time provided the basic energy source for much of the region. Venezuela has long claimed leadership within South America’s oil industry. The size of its reserves shaped the continent’s total oil production and exports throughout much of the twentieth century.

Until the 1970s, the flow of Venezuelan oil to the U.S. market depended heavily on tanker fleets operated by major oil companies active in the United States, as well as access to the technologically advanced refineries of the Texas–Louisiana Gulf Coast, which were essential for processing Venezuelan crude into refined products.

This integration gave Venezuelan oil a unique strategic role in the operations of international oil companies (IOCs) headquartered in the United States and the United Kingdom, extending its relevance into the foreign policy calculations of their respective governments.

Throughout the mid-twentieth century, in an effort to preserve access to Venezuela’s conventional reserves, IOCs adopted a strategy of technological waiting, anticipating advances that would make commercially viable both the vast heavy oil reserves of the Orinoco Basin and the country’s significant natural gas volumes. This trajectory consolidated a relationship of structural interdependence that would later amplify the geopolitical costs of a rupture between Caracas and Washington.

The roots of tension between Washington and Caracas date back to the late 1990s, with the rise of then-President Hugo Chávez, who embraced an ambitious socialist project grounded in economic independence and national sovereignty, in opposition to what he perceived as American hegemony over the continent’s wealth.

With each step toward oil nationalization and wealth redistribution, relations with the United States grew more strained, as Washington viewed Chávez’s policies as a break with the liberal economic order it had established in the Western Hemisphere since the Cold War.

From that point onward, relations between the United States and Venezuela became severely strained, reaching unprecedented levels of U.S. pressure on the Venezuelan government. At no time did Washington conceal its regime-change efforts in Caracas, imposing harsh economic sanctions on the government of President Nicolás Maduro.

Naturally, in recent years Venezuelan oil has been increasingly redirected toward Asian markets—particularly China—through opaque logistics chains, the use of parallel fleets (also known as a shadow fleet), and structural price discounts, further intensifying geopolitical risks.

What does Washington want from Venezuela? Control over the world’s largest oil reserves? To counter Russian and Chinese influence? To combat drug trafficking?

Against this backdrop, Washington seeks to recover its regional influence, control energy reserves, curb large-scale migration, and ensure national security. We begin our analysis of the geopolitical scenario for 2026.

Luis Augusto Medeiros Rutledge is a Petroleum Engineer and Energy Geopolitics Analyst. He holds an Executive MBA in Oil and Gas Economics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and a postgraduate degree in International Relations and Diplomacy from IBMEC. He works as a researcher at UFRJ, is a Consulting Member of the Observatory of the Islamic World of Portugal, a Consultant to the Center for Foreign Trade Studies Foundation (FUNCEX), a columnist for Mente Mundo Relações Internacionais, and the author of numerous published articles on the energy sector.