Why is America Beefing with Venezuela?

Venezuela has been in the news of late. The United States is, in effect, enforcing a naval quarantine of the country, even seizing sanctioned oil tankers leaving the oil-rich country. Multiple small boats have been blown out of the water by the American Navy, killing several people. The boats are ostensibly operated by drug smugglers. One big story from this, according to the Washington Post, is a secondary attack on the survivors of a blown up boat after someone gave an order to "kill 'em all," an obvious crime if true.

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So … why Venezuela, and why now?

The seemingly obvious, if cynical, answer is oil. But the United States is largely energy independent in 2025 and, in fact, is one of the world's largest producers of oil. And the forces that the US has gathered near Venezuela is not nearly enough for some kind of military occupation of the country – so that likely means not enough troops to directly overthrow the governing regime of Nicolás Maduro. That doesn't mean that regime change isn't a goal. The Maduro regime is hostile to the US, and that hostility dates to the election of Hugo Chavez in 1999. Chavez led Venezuela until his death in 2013, and Maduro – his Vice President – ascended to the presidency.

That's more than 25 years of authoritarian Venezuelan rule and hostility to the US, which the US has mostly (but not entirely) ignored. Venezuela was never really seen as a threat to the US or its allies.

So what's changed?

A lot, actually – but most of it is not directly related to Venezuela. Over the years, the Chavez-Maduro regime had the unfortunate insight to align itself with Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and Cuba. America had the luxury of ignoring this so-called alliance. Individually, each country posed no threat to the US for the better part of the last quarter century. Russia and China were largely regional powers, each focused on their own border regions. Same for Iran. Cuba isn't even a regional power. Ditto for North Korea, though they do have a small nuclear arsenal.

All of the members of this alliance are authoritarian states and are mistrustful of others, including each other. To call it an alliance is laughable.

Today, China is approaching peer-power status with the US – but its focus is largely on the Western Pacific. Russia and Iran have been greatly weakened in recent years: first, with Russia's failed invasion of Ukraine, and second, Iran's disastrous decision to strike at Israel through its proxies Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis following the horrendous October 7, 2023, Gazan invasion and wanton pillaging of southern Israel. That indiscriminate attack killed over one thousand Israeli civilians and was the largest assault on Jews since the Holocaust.

Then there is the American election of Donald Trump. The Trump Administration is wary of American overextension across the world, especially given the ascendancy of China in the Western Pacific. Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, much of Western Europe has been in a panic. They fear Russian aggression and have rallied to Ukraine's defense by supplying weapons and resources. But nearly all of them with the exception of Poland and the Baltic States have still not raised their defense spending relative to GDP as the Trump Administration has demanded since 2017. The European Union combined has a large nominal GDP, larger than China's and second only to the United States. Yet it still relies on the United States for its military defense – a situation that the Trump Administration views as unsustainable and, frankly, stupid on America's part to continue to play along as if it was 1947. Europe is not the devastated continent it was back then. It is an advanced economy, and in some ways even more advanced than the United States. In the Trump Administration's view, if Russia is a problem in 2025 or 2026 – and its failure to defeat Ukraine in four years of war suggests that it isn't – then it is a problem for Europe, but not America. America's major challenge is in the Pacific, not Eastern Europe.

The Trump Administration released its National Security Strategy earlier this month. In that document, the US is keen to focus once again on its traditional defensive base: the Western Hemisphere. By shoring up the Western Hemisphere, the US would be in a strong strategic position to act as a bulwark against any foe emanating from Eurasia. That means cutting off Venezuela – and by extension, Cuba – from any alliances with American foes abroad. And by focusing on Venezuela, it can also choke off the oil that Cuba needs.

There is an economic development component as well, and this is where the drug cartels come in. Drug cartels are a destabilizing force throughout Latin America, primarily in Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, and – Venezuela. If the US could help break the cartels' hold on political and civil society in the Americas, then their economies would surge. So the theory goes, anyway.

By initiating gunboat diplomacy on Venezuela, the US hopes to kill two birds with one stone: Venezuela and Cuba. Neither governments are particularly popular at home, and by cutting them off from their far-flung "allies" and severing links between them, both regimes stand to fall. I suspect that the US and its neighbors will be standing by with economic incentives to rebuild their economies and shore up democracies.

Finally, all of this begs the question of why if Venezuela and Cuba were never really considered to be threats to the USA, at least since the breakup of the Soviet Union. One has to remember that during the Cold War, Cuba was indeed seen as a direct threat to America. Cuba's geographic situation is at the foot of the Florida Keys and alongside the sea lanes leading out of the Mississippi River and Galveston Bay. To reach the open waters of the Atlantic Ocean, or through the Panama Canal to the Pacific Ocean, ships must sail past Cuba. Hence, Cuba was seen as such a strategic threat following the Castro revolution in 1959 that the US actively planned a military invasion of the island country. It was during preparations for an invasion that the US discovered Soviet nuclear missiles stationed there, sparking the Cuban Missile Crisis. That crisis was arguably the closest the world had ever come to a full-fledged nuclear war between great powers.

Given the weakness of Russia and Iran following their recent ill-advised military adventures, the Trump Administration may believe that the time is right to ramp up the pressure on Venezuela and Cuba.

But also the oil.