【按：本月《堅離地報聯盟》選讀《The Diplomat》長文，分析美軍於2026年初在委內瑞拉發動軍事行動並俘虜馬杜羅背後的戰略邏輯。文章指出，這並非特朗普個人意志的突發行動，而是延續自小布什時代以來的「大戰略」構想：控制具關鍵能源資源的地區，以削弱中俄等對手的影響力。作者回溯美國從伊拉克到委內瑞拉的戰略思維，強調能源地理與長期全球競爭格局的連結。透過重新部署「馬歇爾式博弈思維」，美國意圖擴展其在西半球的行動自由，並削弱中國在全球能源網絡中的佈局。本文提醒讀者，地緣政治中的干預往往並非短期逐利，而是深植於美國國安菁英長達數十年的戰略慣性。】

The U.S. operation in Venezuela reflects a strategic logic designed by a group of George W. Bush’s advisers: to expand U.S. control over regions critical 21st century geopolitical competition. 

The U.S. military operation on January 3, which resulted in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, immediately generated polarized interpretations. Some framed it as a moral struggle between democracy and authoritarianism; others denounced it as a violation of international law by the hegemon; still others reduced it to immediate economic interests tied to Venezuelan oil. 

Each of these readings captures only part of the underlying logic and fails to explain the operation’s broader strategic rationale, as well as the persistent interest of successive U.S. administrations in regime change in Venezuela. The main limitation lies in dissociating the Caracas operation, and more generally the Trump administration, from the strategic ideas that have guided U.S. statecraft since the late 1990s. When detached from that longer arc, the decision appears either irrational or merely economically opportunistic. Viewed through the lens of grand strategy, however, it appears instead as the activation of a preexisting strategic grammar.

The Framework of Grand Strategy

In U.S. policy practice, the use of force is rarely intelligible in isolation. Major interventions – most notably the 2003 Iraq War – were rooted in strategic diagnoses formulated years earlier, often before the administrations that eventually implemented them came to power. These diagnoses tend to persist across presidencies, gradually advancing through bureaucratic routines, military planning, and policy coordination. Understanding this continuity requires moving beyond the surface of day-to-day foreign policy and toward the more integrated framework of grand strategy.

Unlike ordinary foreign policy, a grand strategy involves the long-term coordination of military, economic, diplomatic, and technological instruments to shape future strategic environments. It is also, by nature, a deliberately opaque phenomenon. Decision-makers have a structural interest in secrecy when dealing with the highest questions of state, which means that grand strategy tends to be masked by insincere rhetoric, calculated silence, and scarce public documentation. For that reason, it manifests itself in fragments of elite thinking and in recurring policy-aim patterns that survive changes in leadership and ideology.

The grand strategic logic is fundamentally anticipatory. As Andrew Marshall, the long-time director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, has suggested, a strategic approach resembles a game of high-level chess: the objective is not to capture a piece or claim a victory at every move, but to control key positions on the board and gradually expand one’s freedom of action while limiting that of a rival. It is a patient competitive game measured in decades, not in years, and its outcomes often become visible only retrospectively.

Oil and Iraq

After the Cold War, this way of thinking was expressed in the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), whose leaked drafts revealed a preoccupation with preventing the emergence of new hegemonic rivals, especially in critical regions. A small group of Pentagon strategists – among them Marshall, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Zalmay Khalilzad – developed this new strategic grammar to replace the logic of the Cold War.

By the mid-1990s, Khalilzad had defined a critical region as one containing resources such that a power controlling it “would possess a military potential roughly equal to, or greater than, that of the United States.” By the late 1990s, the critical region considered vulnerable for these strategists was the world’s energy powerhouse: the Persian Gulf. As Khalilzad argued at the time, after the Cold War the Persian Gulf became even more strategically significant: “The Gulf contains 60 percent of the world’s proven reserves of crude oil… One key new development will be the increasingly likely Chinese dependence on oil from the region – with economic and geopolitical consequences.”

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, isolated but geographically central, emerged as a focal point of strategic concern. During the Clinton administration, the 1992 DPG strategists and their allies formed The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a lobby group that openly advocated regime change in Baghdad. Once in power under George W. Bush, they translated those ideas into policy, culminating in the 2003 invasion.

Publicly, the Iraq War was justified in moral and security terms, on the grounds of democracy promotion, counterterrorism, and Iraq’s alleged possessions of weapons of mass destruction. Internal Pentagon discussions, however, emphasized postwar basing, regional leverage, and long-term power projection. 

As then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote in mid-2001: “If Saddam’s regime were ousted, we would have a much-improved position in the region and elsewhere.” For Rumsfeld and other Bush advisers, Iraq was strategic: “Unlike in Afghanistan, [it was] important to have ideas in advance about who would rule afterwards.” Iraq mattered for what controlling it would enable.

Oil and Venezuela

The comparison to early-2000s Iraq illuminates the Trump administration’s recent actions against Venezuela, which occupies a comparable position in the Western Hemisphere. It holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves and significant mineral wealth, including gold and coltan.

Since the rise of Chavismo in the late 1990s, Caracas has steadily distanced itself from Washington and aligned more closely with Russia and China. In response, successive U.S. administrations pursued regime change through a combination of sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and covert pressure. The National Security Strategies (NSS) documents of 2006, 2015, 2017, and 2022 all revealed an explicit or implicit interest in regime change in Venezuela. 

In July 2001, Rumsfeld instructed his staff to keep close watch on oil-rich states, including Venezuela, as part of a comprehensive review of U.S. global posture: “We ought to have on our radar screen the subject of oil – Venezuela, the Caucauses [sic], Indonesia – anywhere we think it may exist and how it fits into our strategies,” he wrote, as revealed by documents declassified by the National Security Archive. 

Rumsfeld’s characterization was revealing. It signaled how Venezuela was being conceptualized in U.S. policymaking circles – not primarily as a political problem as expressed in traditional diplomatic rhetoric, but as a subset of “the subject of oil.” Venezuela, in other words, was seen as a strategic energy asset embedded in security competition.

Shortly after Rumsfeld’s memo, in April 2002, a coup attempt, quickly recognized by the White House, temporarily overthrew the Hugo Chavez government. The attempt involved Venezuelan opposition figures with direct ties to members of the Bush team, like Elliot Abrams, another participant in the PNAC. 

During the first Trump administration, Abrams returned as special representative for Venezuela, when he pushed consistently for tougher measures to undermine Maduro, reinforcing the continuity of personnel and ideas across administrations.

Venezuela and China

By the mid-2010s, Venezuela’s significance – and the importance of its oil – was increasingly seen through the lens of China-U.S. competition. Beijing had become a major financial and energy partner of Caracas, treating Venezuelan oil as part of a broader strategy to diversify supply and reduce vulnerability to U.S. pressure. From Washington’s perspective, Venezuela appeared not only as a regional outlier, but as a node in China’s expanding energy-security architecture in the Western Hemisphere.

In this new international context, the election of a Republican president allowed greater institutional space for the methods and the strategic ideas previously expressed by advisers in the Bush administration. In the 2017 NSS, the Trump administration diagnosed the situation as follows: “Competitors have found operating space in the hemisphere. China seeks to pull the region into its orbit through state-led investments and loans… Both China and Russia support the dictatorship in Venezuela and are seeking to expand military linkages and arms sales across the region.”

Years later, with Trump back in office for a second term, the 2025 NSS offered the prescription for the threat: “We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.” These words foreshadowed the operation of January 3, 2026. 

Despite indicating fragments of Washington’s strategic logic, Trump’s NSS documents omit explicit mentions of Venezuelan oil, a decision consistent with the opacity characteristic of grand strategy.

From a structural perspective, any durable regime realignment in Caracas would complicate China’s long-term energy diversification strategy, particularly in a context of intensifying great-power rivalry. Recognizing this, China and Russia had shielded the Maduro administration from multilateral pressure for years. The U.S. effectively bypassed this by forgoing any pretense at multilateralism.  

Prevailing Over the Strategic Future

Oil may no longer occupy the same central place it did in the 1990s, but it remains a critical variable in global power competition, particularly for warfare, industrial production, and the international reserve currency. Venezuela’s abundance of oil and minerals, combined with its ties to Russia and especially China, gave it a strategic significance comparable to that of Iraq two decades earlier.

The Marshallian logic underlying regime change in Caracas thus resembles that applied to Baghdad: the expansion of U.S. influence and freedom of action at the expense of rival powers, particularly China with its long-term energy needs. In Rumsfeld’s style, “if the Maduro regime were ousted, we would have a much-improved position in the region and elsewhere.”

The world’s largest oil reserves are concentrated in seven key nations: Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Canada, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait. By consolidating an aligned regime in Caracas, Washington is positioned to expand its strategic leverage in global energy networks to over six of these seven energy powerhouses. This logic neither eliminates the agency of regional actors nor guarantees outcomes, but it reflects how U.S. strategists have historically conceptualized energy geography within long-term competition.

The successful regime change in Caracas, then, expands China’s long-term energy vulnerability, a situation that could become critical if the United States achieves in the future a partnership with Russia, currently a major oil provider for China. Decades before Trump’s flirtations with Putin, Bush advisers had suggested the tactical partnership between Washington and Moscow against Beijing.

Washington’s Strategic Coherence

Seen from this perspective, the new regime change attempt in Venezuela was not the product of presidential irrationality, but a decision consistent with long-term strategic reasoning. Beneath shifting rhetoric and partisan change lies a foundation of consistent ideas about controlling critical regions, like Iraq or Venezuela, whose interest to the United States lies entirely in their oil wealth. 

Two decades of once-classified documents and public statements reveal a coherent framework through which Washington defines its interests, its rivals, and the available means it can employ to maintain its primacy decades ahead. If China is often credited with the capacity for long-term grand strategy, a careful analysis of U.S. behavior since the late 1990s suggests that Washington has operated according to a similarly durable – if less openly acknowledged – strategic logic.

Authors

Guest Author

Mateus de Paula Narciso Rocha

Mateus de Paula Narciso Rocha is an associate researcher at the National Institute of Science and Technology for Studies on the United States (INCT-INEU) and at the Intelligence Research Center (NUPI) of the Brazilian School of Intelligence. He holds a Ph.D. in Social Sciences and wrote his thesis about the U.S. pivot toward China.