Washington Courts Big Oil for Post-Maduro Venezuela Rebuild

Great-power tussles over Caribbean oil have echoes of the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary era, when Washington justified multiple interventions—e.g., the 1915 occupation of Haiti—to keep European creditors out of its ‘backyard.’ This 2026 gambit also rhymes with the 1953 Anglo-American coup in Iran that traded regime change for resource leverage. The long arc shows two converging trends: (1) the U.S. re-asserting Monroe Doctrine prerogatives to deny China, Russia and Iran strategic footholds in Latin America, and (2) hydrocarbons remaining a tool of statecraft even as talk of energy transition grows. If successful, control over the world’s largest crude reserves could lock in U.S. pricing power and hem in Beijing’s energy security for a generation; if it stalls, Washington may repeat the quagmires of Iraq 2003 or Libya 2011. Either way, this moment signals that, a century after Standard Oil’s heyday, barrels—real or stranded—still shape the geopolitical chessboard.