Why Venezuela? Oil,power,and ideology

Abstract

This article examines why Venezuela has emerged as a central target of renewed US imperial intervention in the Western Hemisphere. It advances three interrelated explanations. First, it argues that US policy toward Venezuela is driven by the strategic imperative to consolidate and diversify control over global oil and critical mineral supplies in order to sustain the accumulation strategies of US-based energy and mining corporations and, more importantly, to reinforce the material foundations of the US dollar as world money. Second, it situates the assault on Venezuela within a broader effort to reassert US hemispheric dominance under conditions of growing multipolarity, particularly by countering China’s expanding economic and financial presence in Latin America. Finally, the article contends that US intervention reflects a longer-standing project through which American political and economic elites have sought to suppress alternative ideological and developmental trajectories that challenge the US-led world capitalist order. In this context, left-wing governments and redistributive political projects in Latin America have been treated as structural obstacles requiring containment, destabilization, and, when economic coercion proves insufficient, direct intervention.