From 'The Logic of Politics' to the Struggle in Venezuela

Raising the intensity: It is precisely in the United States that politicians constitute a uniquely powerful and privileged segment of the national population more conspicuously than anywhere else. There, each of the two major parties—alternately holding power—is manipulated by individuals who have turned politics into a lucrative business: speculating on seats in the U.S. Congress and state legislatures, earning livelihoods as party propagandists, and securing official posts as rewards upon their party’s electoral victory. The U.S. does have a Communist Party—but after the purges and repression of the McCarthy era in the 1950s, it has become utterly devoid of influence. Now consider Venezuela: Although international opinion remains divided on whether Venezuela qualifies as a socialist country, on the surface it practices presidential elections (Hugo Chávez was elected in 1998). In reality, since Chávez’s election in 1998, his party—the Movement for the Fifth Republic, later reorganized and renamed the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV)—has held uninterrupted power. The PSUV advocates opposition to capitalism and imperialism, upholds socialism, and defends the interests of the working class and the people. Since the 2000s, Chávez and later Nicolás Maduro have promoted and implemented numerous socialist policies—including nationalization, wealth redistribution, expanded social welfare, and strengthened state control over key sectors of the economy. Since the 2010s, the PSUV has officially declared its commitment to building “21st-century socialism.” Thus, both ideologically and programmatically, the Venezuelan government can be regarded as one representing the interests of the proletariat. Origins of the conflict: Venezuela possesses the world’s largest proven oil reserves and is one of the five founding members of OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries). As the saying goes, “An ordinary man bears no guilt—but possessing a jade disc invites calamity.” Regrettably, oil is the very reason Venezuela—and Middle Eastern countries—can never attain lasting peace. A brief chronological outline follows: As early as the 1910s–1920s, lacking domestic technical capacity, Venezuela’s oil industry was monopolized by U.S. and British petroleum companies—such as Mobil, Gulf Oil, and Shell—with the Venezuelan government receiving only a meager share of revenues. In 1943, after repeated struggles against foreign enterprises, Venezuela enacted its first Petroleum Law, raising the profit-sharing ratio from 16.7% to 50%. In 1976, the state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) was established, successfully nationalizing foreign-controlled oil operations. Oil revenue became the dominant source of Venezuela’s national budget (accounting for 90%), fueling economic prosperity and enabling the government to launch large-scale social welfare, education, and industrialization programs—making Venezuela one of South America’s more developed nations. During the 1990s, global oil prices remained persistently low, exacerbating Venezuela’s debt crisis—as with other Latin American countries—and turning Venezuela into one of the principal debtor nations in the “Latin American debt crisis.” At this juncture, Western countries championed neoliberal economics, using institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank to push market-oriented reforms and privatization (so-called Structural Adjustment Programs). Consequently, Western corporations—including Chevron, BP, and Total—seized new opportunities to regain de facto control over Venezuela’s oil sector. This deepened socioeconomic inequality and increased poverty—directly paving the way for Chávez’s rise to power.

U.S. Comprehensive Control over Venezuela’s Petroleum Economy

As a resource-rich nation ranking among the world’s top holders of proven oil reserves, Venezuela’s petroleum industry constitutes the absolute pillar of its national economy. Oil export revenues have long accounted for over 95% of its foreign exchange earnings and roughly one-third of its GDP. Over the past several years, the Trump administration imposed maximum-energy sanctions, financial blockades, and trade bans on Venezuela—directly causing Venezuela’s oil infrastructure to deteriorate and fall into disrepair, triggering a precipitous collapse in production capacity, prompting the complete withdrawal of international capital, and blocking crude oil export channels. As a result, Venezuela’s national economy has suffered prolonged paralysis and spiraled into hyperinflation. These sustained, high-intensity sanctions serve not only as a political tool for pressuring Venezuela’s traditional regime but also as an economic prelude—designed to enable subsequent low-cost acquisition of energy assets and monopolization of market share. Since 2026, the Trump administration has adjusted its strategy toward Venezuela—from “comprehensive blockade and suppression” to “controlled opening and extraction”—with Energy Secretary Chris Wright serving as the core executor and operational leader of this strategic shift, effectively becoming the central figure controlling Venezuela’s energy economy. On February 11, 2026, Wright launched a pivotal official visit to Venezuela—the first in-depth U.S. engagement with Venezuela’s energy affairs by a senior American official in many years. Highly targeted in nature, this trip featured high-level talks between Wright and Venezuela’s Acting President Delcy Rodríguez, yielding preliminary consensus on core economic issues including energy cooperation, foreign investment access, industrial reconstruction, and revenue distribution. Wright also conducted on-site inspections of Venezuela’s key oil-and-gas producing regions and aging petroleum facilities, comprehensively assessing local hydrocarbon reserve volumes, equipment degradation levels, production recovery potential, and market gaps—gathering first-hand data essential for formulating precise U.S. investment, operation, and oversight plans. This high-level visit was not an isolated diplomatic gesture but rather a forward-looking deployment within a comprehensive U.S. energy-economic strategy. Around the time of Wright’s visit, the Trump administration formally initiated a policy of targeted relaxation of sanctions against Venezuela’s energy sector—abandoning the previous “blanket ban” model in favor of a differentiated openness framework: “U.S. firms first, allied nations admitted, others excluded.” This opened a policy window for Western oil giants to return to the Venezuelan market. On February 13, 2026, the U.S. Department of the Treasury issued two landmark economic instruments: General Licenses No. 49 and No. 50—establishing the institutional bedrock for reshaping Venezuela’s petroleum economy. These licenses explicitly lifted multiple restrictions on energy trade and investment, permitting leading Western energy firms—including Chevron, BP, Eni, Shell, and Repsol—to fully resume end-to-end operations in Venezuela: exploration, extraction, refining, storage, transportation, and sales. More crucially, the licenses authorized new U.S.-led investments, project expansions, and technological upgrades across Venezuela’s oil-and-gas industry—ending, once and for all, the multi-year capital freeze imposed on Venezuela’s energy sector. Notably, this easing of sanctions exhibits strong exclusivity and instrumentalism. The U.S. did not open Venezuela’s energy market comprehensively; instead, it erected entry barriers via the licensing system—explicitly excluding Chinese and Russian enterprises, which had previously maintained longstanding cooperative ties with Venezuela, thereby eliminating entirely both their existing operations and future growth prospects in the country. This precise set of policy measures rapidly restructured market access in Venezuela’s energy sector, establishing an exclusive institutional framework for hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars in U.S.-led capital inflows—and formally cementing Wright’s position as the central authority overseeing Venezuela’s energy-economic governance. It thus substantiates Trump’s core assertion: “Wright is leading Venezuela.”

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