The U.S. war on Venezuela escalated rapidly — from lethal strikes on small boats in late 2025 to the Jan. 3, 2026, assault aimed at paralyzing Venezuela’s leadership and command structure — amid growing fears of a Gaza-style campaign of genocidal bombardment.
Beginning in early September 2025, the U.S. military under President Donald Trump initiated a campaign of airstrikes on small civilian vessels in and near Venezuelan waters. Over the following months, at least 40 such strikes across the Caribbean and eastern Pacific resulted in at least 124 deaths. The operations formed part of “Operation Southern Spear,” under U.S. Southern Command, which is continuing.
In parallel, Washington deployed a substantial naval and air presence into the Caribbean — an aircraft carrier, destroyers and cruisers, along with B-1B bombers and a fleet of drones — the largest U.S. military posture in the region since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
In the early hours of Jan. 3, 2026, the U.S. launched Operation Absolute Resolve, a coordinated assault targeting Venezuela’s air defenses, military bases, and critical communications infrastructure across the north of the country. Reports indicate that more than 150 U.S. aircraft were involved in suppressing Venezuelan air defenses and striking military facilities. The objective was to rapidly degrade the Venezuelan state’s ability to respond, echoing the U.S. “shock and awe” doctrine used in earlier wars.
U.S. special operations forces — identified in media reports as elements of Delta Force working with CIA intelligence — stormed Nicolás Maduro’s home in Caracas. President Maduro and Cilia Flores, a longtime Chavista leader and National Assembly deputy, were seized and flown to New York, where Washington is holding them.
Trump has made the motive explicit. He has repeatedly said a core objective was to “keep the oil,” and declared the United States is now “in charge” of Venezuela — tying the war to plans to reopen the country’s oil sector under U.S. dominance.
Since Jan. 3, U.S. officials have said operations will continue until Venezuela is “stabilized” — language designed to make the mission open-ended. In that framework, “stabilization” does not mean peace. It means control: controlling airspace, ports, fuel supply, communications, and the movement of money.
Trump and allied voices have held up Israel’s war on Gaza not as a warning, but as a method — relentless pressure, punishment from the air, and siege conditions imposed on an entire population until resistance breaks.
Venezuela’s hydrocarbons law
Venezuela’s oil was never just an industry. It was the country’s central battleground over who lives like a human being and who lives like labor on a plantation. For generations, the wealth under the ground was treated as a Rockefeller-led oil plunder — Jersey Standard (Standard Oil of New Jersey, today ExxonMobil), Shell, Gulf Oil, and their local partners controlling concessions and profits — while millions in the barrios lived without secure housing, decent schools, or reliable health care. The Bolivarian Revolution set out to end that extraction regime and put oil revenue to work for the people.
PDVSA was created with the 1970s nationalization, when Venezuela formally took over its oil industry and foreign companies were compensated. But nationalization on paper did not automatically mean oil wealth served the poor. The Bolivarian process — powered by mass organization and repeated popular mobilizations — fought to make oil revenue a public weapon: to fund housing, schools, clinics, and social programs, and to defend national sovereignty against foreign control.
That fight took legal form in the 2001 Hydrocarbons Law under Hugo Chávez. It raised royalties and taxes and required majority state ownership in new projects and joint ventures — tightening public control over who gets to drill, who gets paid, and where the revenue goes. This is the baseline. Any “opening” of the sector is not a technical adjustment. It is a shift in the class and sovereignty settlement the revolution fought for.
The starting point for understanding Venezuela’s Jan. 29 Hydrocarbons Law change is the Jan. 3 invasion. With Venezuelan President Maduro kidnapped and the state’s command structure thrown into crisis, the remaining leadership governed in emergency conditions while Washington tightened a chokehold on the oil lifelines. The U.S. controlled what could be exported, whether payments could clear, whether ships could be insured — and whether PDVSA could obtain the imports needed to keep heavy crude moving.
Revolutionary governments have made severe concessions under military pressure before — from the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk to Cuba’s Special Period. Lenin gave up territory to keep the revolution alive. Cuba opened space for foreign tourism and dollar inflows to survive the loss of the Soviet Union. In every case, the measure is political, not moral: When terms are imposed by force, do the people who made the revolution still have the capacity to organize, resist, and maneuver to defend their gains — and, when the balance shifts, roll back what was conceded?
The new oil policy operates inside a cage Washington built. While Delcy Rodríguez is the acting president (Maduro is still the president), the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is effectively the shadow Ministry of Finance. U.S. Treasury licenses decide which contracts can proceed, which companies can operate, and where the money can go. The question is not what Caracas chose, but what Washington left it able to choose from.
What imperialism extracts
The 1999 Constitution was the Bolivarian Revolution written into law — a popular mandate to treat oil and gas as national wealth, not a prize for foreign corporations. It asserts that Venezuela’s mineral and hydrocarbon deposits belong to the public and cannot be sold off, and it is designed to keep disputes over public-interest oil contracts under Venezuelan authority — so oil deals can’t be turned into foreign claims decided abroad instead of in Venezuela.
Venezuela’s long dispute with Guyana over the Essequibo is a living reminder of why that matters. In 1899, an arbitration tribunal sitting in Paris awarded most of the contested territory to Britain’s colony (then British Guiana, now Guyana) in a decision Venezuela has challenged ever since. The dispute is still active today, and now intersects directly with offshore oil claims — exactly the kind of high-stakes sovereignty fight Venezuela’s constitution is designed to keep from being decided abroad.
But a constitution does not defend itself. It reflects a balance of class power — and it holds as long as that power can be organized and enforced. The 1999 Constitution codified the forces that brought the Bolivarian Revolution to power: organized workers, the urban poor, communal movements, and the sections of the armed forces that aligned with Chávez and the popular movement. Those forces have been battered by sanctions, crisis, and war, but they are not erased or defeated. They still exist as a living base — battered, but not broken — and they have repeatedly mobilized to defend the Bolivarian government under siege and the revolution’s gains, including control of oil wealth.
The Jan. 29 change reopens the ground on which the 1999 Constitution was written to defend because the U.S. war left Venezuela no normal room to govern. The change was not negotiated.
The Venezuelan government did not choose privatization freely. With leadership seized, infrastructure bombed, and escalation threatened, its options were narrow. The risk is that “temporary” concessions harden into permanent terms once monopolies backed by U.S. power lock them into contracts, equipment, and cash-flow channels.
Luis Britto García — a Venezuelan lawyer, National Prize for Literature laureate and a Council of State member appointed by Chávez — is no voice of the U.S.-backed opposition. A longtime defender of the Bolivarian Revolution, he opposes the Jan. 29 change to the hydrocarbons law and has denounced it as unconstitutional, arguing it shifts oil disputes out of Venezuelan courts and gives the executive room to cut the public share of oil revenue project by project — in conflict with the constitution the revolution wrote.
But it won’t be settled on paper alone: Under war and economic strangulation, the decisive issue is which forces can enforce sovereignty in practice — over contracts, cash flow, and the oil fields themselves.
The constitution’s words remain; the balance of forces behind them has been worn down by years of sanctions and blockade. The winners are easy to name — Chevron, BP, Shell, Repsol, Eni, and their peers. ExxonMobil, which exited Venezuela after the expropriation fights, remains on the sidelines pursuing compensation claims rather than operating under the current licenses.
The balance of forces
Venezuela’s oil won’t be decided by fine print in a law or a U.S. license. It will be decided by the balance of forces — who has the power to enforce their terms, and what forces exist to resist and reverse them.
China is Venezuela’s largest crude buyer, and Chinese state firms hold joint ventures with Venezuela that sit on vast reserves. But Venezuelan crude is a small fraction of China’s total supply, and Beijing has shown it will condemn an attack without moving toward material confrontation. China still lacks a sanctions-proof channel to move Venezuelan oil money at scale outside Washington’s reach. Washington’s licensing power, therefore, functions as a veto over China-Venezuela trade regardless of what either government wants.
BRICS is building alternatives to the dollar system, but they aren’t ready to handle the kind of oil revenue flows Venezuela depends on. For Venezuela today, there is still no dependable way to sell oil and clear payments in volume outside Washington’s reach — which is exactly how the OFAC licensing cage works.
Inside Venezuela, the Bolivarian Revolution built real structures of popular power — communal councils, communes, cooperative enterprises — but they are under enormous strain. Years of crisis created by U.S. sanctions drove millions to emigrate. PDVSA has hemorrhaged skilled workers, and production has fallen sharply from its late-1990s level.
Trump’s declaration that Venezuelan oil revenue “will be controlled by me” is imperialism dropping the mask — and six days later, Executive Order 14373 made it operational, routing Venezuelan oil revenue into U.S. Treasury-controlled accounts. That clarity, however brutal, is useful. It strips away the pretense of humanitarian intervention, drug enforcement, and democracy promotion. It names the game for what it is: resource plunder backed by military force.
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