US Raid on Venezuela - Exploring the actual reasons behind the audacious move

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 US administrations in regime change in Venezuela. It should actually be seen through the lens of China-US competition. The United States sees Venezuela not only as a regional outlier, but as a node in China's expanding energy-security architecture in the Western Hemisphere.

In a move that stunned the world, the United States bombed Venezuela, on Jan. 3, and abducted its President Nicolas Maduro. President Trump praised the operation to seize Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, as one of the “most stunning, effective and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history”. Although Trump has accused Maduro of "emptying his prisons and insane asylums" and "forcing" its inmates to migrate to the US, and also of shipping drugs to the US, analysts believe that the actual reasons are beyond such accusations.

The first instinct in moments like these is to zoom in—to count barrels, trace shipping routes or tally sanctions. That is a mistake. What is unfolding around Venezuela needs to be viewed from 30,000 feet, from the kind of altitude where individual data points fade and larger structures come into focus. From that height, the oil grab story, or for that matter that the US has gone into Venezuela for its gold, minerals and other reserves, seems myopic. We are still living in a long, violent extension of the Cold War – to borrow from Hal Brands' work, The Eurasian Century. In essence, the events we are seeing and the developments that will follow should be considered a continuation of an older, unfinished story: the long struggle between systems of capitalism and state-led control, maritime power and continental power, liberal order and revisionist ambition. In that sense, Venezuela is not an exception; it is just a node. And the lens that helps make sense of it is Cold War logic, updated for the 21st century.