Venezuela
The US National Security Strategy, and the Crisis of Responsible Statehood
When does permissible strategic competition become illegitimate coercion, and when does state power begin to resemble organised crime? What is the Trump administration’s logic in pardoning former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández while indicting the sitting Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro on similar allegations of drug trafficking? This article examines the recent US escalation from maritime interdiction in the Gulf of Mexico to the use of armed force against Venezuela as an unfolding crisis of responsible statehood.
There is a recurring instinct in American strategic culture when it comes to power, resources, and order. In some contexts it prefers management to mess, contracts to conquest, and leverage to occupation. The ideal outcome is not formal control but compliance so that oil flows, markets stabilise, rivals are excluded, and all of it happens through arrangements that appear legal and technical. Power, at its most comfortable, does not look like domination at all.
Yet Venezuela exposes the limits of that instinct. Because when consent is not forthcoming, contracts fail, when sanctions do not compel compliance, and when leverage runs out, power does not dissolve, but rather it escalates according to the dominant strategic culture of the time. What emerges is a movement from managerial control to coercive authority that is neither accidental nor aberrational. It is anticipated, structured, and in many respects brazenly and openly articulated in the 2025 US National Security Strategy (NSS). Venezuela is not a deviation from American strategic culture, but very much demonstrative of its extremities.
What makes this moment significant is not simply the possibility of intervention or resource seizure. It is what the transition from contracts to coercion reveals about the nature of contemporary state power, its relationship to legality, and the fragility of statehood as a normative project in a world increasingly crowded with alternative, often brutal, forms of governance.
The managerial model of power
For decades, in certain places and at certain times, US power has been exercised primarily through indirect means. Control has rarely required installation of puppet regimes, annexation or formal occupation. Instead, it has been embedded in contracts, finance, sanctions regimes, supply chains, insurance markets, export controls, licensing frameworks, security partnerships, and dispute resolution through multilateral bodies. Oil, in particular, is ideally suited to this model. It is capital-intensive, infrastructure-bound, globally traded, and deeply entangled with finance and insurance. Whoever controls the rules of access can often control the resource without deploying a single soldier.
This is the world imagined by the NSS. Strategy is defined as the disciplined alignment of ends and means in pursuit of core national interests. The language is blunt and stripped of universalist aspiration. The purpose of foreign policy is not global transformation but the protection of American power, prosperity, and security. Markets, alliances, and institutions are tools, not ends in themselves.
As articulated by Madeleine Albright during her time as US Secretary of State in the Clinton administration.
“We will act multilaterally when we can, and unilaterally when we must.”
“If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.”
Within this framework, sovereignty is tolerated so long as it behaves. States are free to govern, provided they do not disrupt strategic supply chains, invite rival powers into sensitive regions, or challenge the economic architecture that underpins American pre-eminence. When they do, sovereignty becomes conditional. It is no longer a shield but an obstacle to be overcome through the unilateral exercise of raw power.
The Western Hemisphere as a zone of enforced order
Nowhere is this logic clearer than in the NSS’s treatment of the Western Hemisphere. The Strategy explicitly commits the United States to reasserting and enforcing a renewed Monroe Doctrine, framed as a “Trump Corollary,” or more recently as the “Donroe Doctrine.” Here, the Western Hemisphere is described not as a community of equal sovereigns, but as a zone whose stability, governance, and asset ownership must align with American interests.
The NSS is unusually explicit. The United States will deny non-hemispheric competitors control over strategically vital assets. It will condition aid, trade, and cooperation on alignment. It will discourage regional governments from collaborating with rival powers, such as China or Russia. And it will use financial, technological, and security, including military leverage to ensure compliance.
This is managerial imperialism in its purest form. The preferred tools are commercial diplomacy, private-sector coordination, and institutional leverage. The aim is not occupation but alignment. Yet the Strategy makes clear that this preference is conditional. When indirect instruments fail, and consent is not forthcoming, escalation is not ruled out, force is threatened, and used. Practices that might once have been labelled gunboat diplomacy or colonial intervention are instead normalised as law enforcement, perhaps to shield from future accountability.
Venezuela sits squarely within this logic. But the pattern is not unique. In the land domain, it is visible in Eastern Europe in relation to Russia’s imperial ambitions, and in East Asia in relation to China’s posture toward Taiwan. In the maritime domain, similar logics are evident in contested spaces ranging from the Gulf of Mexico to the South China Sea.
Across these contexts, managerial control gives way to coercive assertion where alignment cannot be secured, often at the cost of the very strategic interests such practices are said to protect, including stability and predictability, particularly those bound up with freedom of navigation, alliance credibility, and treaty-based regimes such as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
When consent to imperial interests is not forthcoming
The problem posed by Venezuela is not simply that it possesses oil. It is that it insists on controlling that oil outside the preferred frameworks. Sanctions, asset freezes, parallel recognition strategies, and financial isolation have all been deployed to compel realignment. These measures assume eventual compliance. They are designed to fracture elites, exhaust resources, and produce a government willing to play by the rules. But when compliance does not arrive, the managerial model reaches its limit.
At that point, power confronts an uncomfortable reality when markets, institutions, and sanctions fail to deliver outcomes, political control must replace economic leverage. What had been framed as governance becomes coercion. Influence gives way to domination. This shift is often presented as exceptional or reluctant, but historically it has been neither.
The turn from diplomatic and multilateral leverage within the rules based international order to coercive intervention outside this post 1945 international framework has appeared repeatedly across the Americas when governments pursued reforms that challenged US strategic or economic dominance, particularly over land, labour, and natural resources. A brief, non-exhaustive chronology illustrates the pattern:
Jacobo Árbenz (Guatemala, 1954): agrarian land reform targeting unused holdings of foreign corporations; US-backed covert operation and proxy invasion; president overthrown, reforms reversed, decades of instability followed.
João Goulart (Brazil, 1964): land reform, labour protections, limits on foreign profit remittances; military coup supported by US diplomatic and intelligence backing; long dictatorship installed.
Salvador Allende (Chile, 1970–73): nationalisation of copper and expansion of social programmes; economic pressure, destabilisation, and proxy support; military coup and installation of Augusto Pinochet.
Juan Bosch (Dominican Republic, 1965): constitutional reform and land redistribution; US military invasion; reformist government blocked from returning to power.
Omar Torrijos (Panama, 1970s): assertion of sovereignty over the Panama Canal; suspicious death in a plane crash widely alleged to involve US intelligence; leadership removed, reforms contained.
Manuel Noriega (Panama, 1989): refusal to remain compliant after prior cooperation; US invasion; leader captured and removed.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide (Haiti, 1991 and 2004): minimum-wage increases and resistance to IMF restructuring; overthrown twice; exiled; state left politically and economically weakened.
This pattern reflects a recurring structural logic, that when reforms threaten strategic assets, capital flows, or geopolitical interests, and when indirect pressure fails, escalation follows. Contracts and diplomatic pressure give way to coercion not because domination is preferred, but because compliance is demanded.
Venezuela, in this sense, has been resisting incorporation into a system that treats its resources as instruments of someone else’s security. The NSS does not deny this logic, it institutionalises it, emphasising the protection of strategic resources, the securing of supply chains, and the exclusion of rivals from key regions when necessary.
Strategic culture, staging, and the turn to coercion
What is striking is not simply that escalation occurs, but how predictably it is staged. This reflects long-standing tensions within American strategic culture itself, tensions that shape not only outcomes but the sequencing of tools. At one level, US power has often been exercised through a Hamiltonian logic of commercial governance, namely reliance on markets, finance, contracts, sanctions, and institutional leverage to secure influence while preserving the appearance of legality and consent. This is the managerial model the NSS still prefers in form.
Layered beneath it, however, is an older Monroe-style hemispheric logic, reinforced by more Jacksonian instincts when resistance persists. In this tradition, the Western Hemisphere is treated as a privileged security space, where external rivals are to be excluded, and recalcitrant governments are disciplined rather than accommodated. Law is instrumental rather than constitutive and it binds when useful and yields when it obstructs.
The 2025 NSS makes this layering unusually explicit. Sanctions are elevated from financial tools to core national-security instruments. Economic flows are framed as security threats. Maritime enforcement, interdiction, and exclusion are normalised as mechanisms of regional order. What begins in Hamiltonian language ends in Monroe-Jacksonian practice.
This helps explain why escalation does not feel, internally, like a rupture. It is experienced instead as a shift between co-existing strategic cultures: from management to enforcement, from commerce to coercion, from law-as-framework to law-as-obstacle. The sequencing of influence from Chavez to Maduro illustrates this well.
The return of raw power, if it ever went away during the 1990 (Panama)—2025 (Venezuela) hiatus
The moment officials speak openly about restructuring Venezuelan oil production, ensuring American access, or taking control of operational arrangements, the language shifts. Partnership gives way to trusteeship, but not in a pure fiduciary sense. The assumption becomes that the resource is too important to be left in the “wrong” hands, and that external management is necessary for the greater good. This logic is not new. It once justified protectorates, mandates, and colonial administration. Today it is rebranded as stabilisation, responsible governance, or strategic protection. The vocabulary has changed but the logic has not.
Modern power is allergic to the word “occupation,” but not to the practice. Control is exercised without flags, governors, or formal annexation. Yet when foreign forces determine economic arrangements, override local consent, and impose governance outcomes, including private corporate control and ownership, the distinction becomes cosmetic. Control without consent remains control—the task now is to dress this up as being consensual.
The NSS anticipates this slippage. It affirms non-interventionist instincts, but only insofar as they do not conflict with core interests. Sovereignty is respected until it obstructs strategic objectives. At that point, intervention is reframed as necessity and folded into the language of law enforcement and self-defence when multilateral authorisation is not forthcoming. The deeper problem, however, is that, unlike George H. W. Bush, who sought to maintain a relatively coherent and restrained justificatory narrative during the invasion of Panama, Donald J. Trump repeatedly slips into an overtly 19th-century imperial register during his press conferences put on at his Mar-a-Lago Club.
The emergence of a criminal imperial strategy
This is where the movement from competition to coercion becomes not merely political, but unlawful and illegal.
Under the Charter of the United Nations, the prohibition on the use of force is clear. Force is lawful only in self-defence or with Security Council authorisation. Resource control, strategic pre-eminence, and supply-chain security do not constitute lawful justifications. If coercive control over Venezuelan territory, infrastructure, or oil production were imposed without valid consent, it would fall squarely within the prohibition on the use of force. The managerial language of “protection” and domestic law enforcement does not change the legal character of the act.
Nor does the analysis stop there. Under the laws and customs of war, the exploitation of natural resources in occupied territory is tightly constrained. Pillage, the appropriation of property without lawful justification or genuine consent, is prohibited, and may constitute a war crime. Modern international humanitarian law does not require looting by individual soldiers to establish pillage. Systematic extraction, enforced contractual arrangements, or resource exploitation carried out under coercive conditions by private corporations may meet the same threshold. It is therefore unsurprising that contemporary strategies emphasise avoiding the appearance of occupation, and instead seek to identify or install ostensibly consenting partners within Venezuelan political and military elites.
What appears politically as strategic necessity begins to look, legally, like a form of organised predation that engages frameworks of international humanitarian law and international criminal law. These frameworks are resilient in the sense that they lie beyond the control of any single system of autocratic legalism and are capable of bearing witness to violations even when immediate enforcement is politically foreclosed.
Until such time as political conditions permit implementation and accountability, the resilience of international law often lies in its declaratory and promotional functions (that is, its capacity to articulate legal standards, name violations, and connect concrete harms to broader ideologies and geopolitical strategies). Crucially, this work operates not only through the attribution of state responsibility under public international law and human rights law, but also through the preservation and articulation of individual criminal responsibility under international humanitarian law, even where prosecutions are delayed.
Arguably, it is precisely for this reason that coercive action is often reframed as law enforcement rather than warfare. Casting intervention as arrest, extradition, counter-narcotics enforcement, or sanctions implementation serves an important legal function. Namely, it seeks to situate the conduct outside the law on the use of force and outside the laws of armed conflict, thereby insulating decision-makers from exposure to war crimes, pillage, and universal jurisdiction doctrines. Law-enforcement paradigms invoke domestic criminal authority, consent by proxy, or transnational policing rationales, all of which dilute scrutiny under international humanitarian law. Yet this reclassification does not alter the underlying legal reality. Where force is used coercively against another state’s territory, leadership, or resources without valid consent or Security Council authorisation, the applicable legal framework is determined by objective facts, not the labels chosen by the intervening power. Dressing invasion and occupation in the language of law enforcement may seek plausible deniability, but it does not eliminate substantive justice.
Furthermore, framing coercive action as the domestic law enforcement of criminal charges against a sitting foreign head of state is not only unlawful, it is profoundly destabilising for the international system, and in no way aligned with American interests. Under customary international law, heads of state enjoy personal immunity and inviolability from foreign enforcement jurisdiction, regardless of recognition disputes or the quality of elections. This immunity reflects the principle of sovereign equality, not endorsement of conduct, of the type that Venezuela has been investigated for by the International Criminal Court. If states were permitted to project their own domestic criminal law extraterritorially against incumbent foreign leaders, the result would be systemic breakdown, such as reciprocal arrests, politicised prosecutions, and permanent escalation. International law draws a sharp line between collective accountability for international crimes, through international mechanisms, and unilateral enforcement of domestic law. Blurring that line does not strengthen legality, it dissolves it.
Raw parasitic power and criminal statecraft
This is where the concept of parasitism becomes analytically useful. Parasitic power does not invest in the long-term flourishing of the host. It extracts, drains, and moves on. It treats external resources as substitutes for internal reform. Rather than addressing structural fragility at home, financialisation, inequality, or energy dependence, it projects pressure outward. The NSS’s emphasis on energy dominance, supply-chain security, and resource protection reflects this tension. Energy is framed not only as an economic good, but as a tool of leverage and power projection. When access is threatened, escalation is justified.
At this point, statecraft begins to resemble organised criminal enterprise, not in the sense of chaos or lawlessness, but in structure, namely, the fusion of political authority, economic extraction, coercion, and impunity. The difference between “strategy” and “racketeering” narrows when rules apply only to others, and force is used to secure advantage.
The crisis of responsible statehood
The consequences of this obviously extend beyond Venezuela, and are deeply troubling for the maintenance of peace and security in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
We are living in a crowded marketplace of governance. States no longer compete only with one another in terms of commerce. They compete with alternative governance models, such as authoritarian capitalism, techno-surveillance regimes, theocratic movements, and violent non-state actors offering order, identity, dispute resolution, or protection. China, Russia, and various militant theocracies all present themselves as viable alternatives to what is presented as liberal statehood in its various forms.
The claim long made by liberal states is that responsible statehood, grounded in law, accountability, and restraint, is more effective, legitimate, and rewarding than these alternatives. But that claim depends on performance. When powerful states abandon legality in pursuit of advantage, when they treat sovereignty as conditional and resources as spoils, they undermine their own argument, and ultimately vital interests. They signal that statehood is merely a vehicle for extraction, not a framework for mutual benefit and restraint.
Worse still, they create space for organised criminal enterprises to flourish. Weak or coerced states become fertile ground for illicit economies, trafficking networks, and armed groups that thrive in the gaps between law and power. Parasitic statecraft breeds parasitic non-state actors, which may in turn serve as proxies for parasitic foreign powers.
Accountability or attrition, hegemony or survival
If states wish to promote responsible statehood as the preferred model of governance, they must be willing to hold one another accountable, not selectively or rhetorically, but substantively. That means insisting that strategic competition operates within legal bounds, even when inconvenient. It means recognising that legitimacy is not preserved by power alone. International civil society has a role to play, but it cannot substitute for state accountability. If states excuse their own violations while condemning others, the system erodes. The result is not stability, but attrition, a slow hollowing-out of the normative foundations of order, and in turn, peace, security, development, and human flourishing. In such a world, the appeal of alternative forms of governance grows, not because they are just, but because they are perceived as honest about power, predictable, and reliable.
Venezuela is not simply about oil. It is about whether the rules that states claim to uphold still bind them when the stakes are high. If they do not, the promise of responsible statehood rings hollow, and the future will belong to those who offer order without pretence, however brutal the cost. As the climate crisis rapidly narrows the safe and just space for humanity, the pursuit of hegemony must give way to survival. For under our current material conditions, where imperialism represents the latest stage of capitalism, there will be no winners.
Produced for ZNetwork
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