On January 3, 2026, Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were forcibly apprehended following a United States (U.S.) intervention in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. The operation was accompanied by air and military operations affecting civilian and strategic sites and resulted in at least eighty deaths of local defenders and inhabitants. The stated justification was the enforcement of narcotics-related charges against Maduro and Flores in U.S. courts, with judicial proceedings initiated in New York (Security Council Report 2026). 

The intervention was swiftly condemned by several countries, including Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay, and Spain, because it violated fundamental principles of international law. These states argued that the operation breached the prohibition on the use or threat of force and undermined respect for state sovereignty and territorial integrity as enshrined in the United Nations (UN) Charter. They further warned that such actions establish a dangerous precedent for regional peace and security and pose serious risks to civilian populations (Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores del Gobierno de Chile 2026a).

Although framed as a law-enforcement operation, the January 3 intervention was preceded by a marked escalation of U.S. military activity in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific throughout the second half of 2025. Under the banner of “combating drug cartels,” U.S. forces destroyed at least thirty-four vessels across twenty-eight incidents in international waters after September 2, 2025, despite the absence of publicly available evidence substantiating links to narcotics trafficking. These operations resulted in at least 110 deaths, occurring without judicial processes or a formal declaration of war by the U.S. Congress (Zegarra et al. 2025).

Tensions further intensified on December 16, 2025, when the U.S. president unilaterally imposed a “total blockade” on Venezuelan oil tankers entering or departing international routes. During that same month, at least two vessels were seized by U.S. forces on the grounds of alleged “illegal operations” (Ali et al. 2025; Matza 2025). This sequence of events marked a notable shift in the public narrative surrounding the Venezuelan-U.S. crisis, revealing that the central concern was less about narcotics control than about oil and energy security.

The Venezuelan episode of January 3, together with the expanding U.S. military presence in the Caribbean, thus points to a broader transformation in U.S. geopolitical strategy. Energy security renewed great-power competition, and the revival of interventionist doctrines increasingly converges in “strategic” areas of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Recent signals within the U.S. National Security Strategy suggest that these actions are embedded in a broader effort to reassert hemispheric dominance in a region that has become progressively permeated by Chinese economic and political influence (Seal of the President of the United States 2025). This raises critical questions: Does Venezuela illustrate the extent of U.S. anxiety over its waning control in the Western Hemisphere? Furthermore, to what degree could similar dynamics unfold around other strategic energy and mineral resources across the LAC region?

This brief article argues that the assault on Venezuela represents a pivotal moment in the contemporary energy geopolitics of LAC. Energy geopolitics encompasses analysing the spatial distribution of supply and demand as well as the political tactics used to secure access to affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy. It emphasises the interactions between political entities and physical landscapes (Blondeel et al. 2024). By situating the 3 January episode within the intersection of fossil fuel supply chains, geopolitical rivalry, and revived doctrines of hemispheric control, as well as the return of hard U.S. power application in LAC, this essay seeks to illuminate the broader implications of this crisis for the region’s futures.

The Return of Hard Power: The U.S. Strategy under the second Trump period

As documented by Long (2016), several authors in the mid-2010s, including Mark Eric Williams and Noam Chomsky, identified a relative decline in U.S. influence across LAC. In parallel, the regional geopolitical landscape increasingly reflected the resurgence of Russia, the rise of China, and the growing presence of other extra-regional actors such as Iran. Notably, the last direct U.S. military intervention in LAC occurred in Panama in 1989 (Wolfe 2026). In the decades that followed, U.S. influence in the region was primarily exercised through soft power. However, as McKenzie (2024) observes, the second Trump administration signalled a decisive shift toward the reassertion of hard power, facilitated by the reallocation of national resources toward military and security expenditures in a context marked by the erosion of traditional soft power instruments.

Anticipating the Venezuelan episode of January 3, 2026, the Trump administration published the U.S. National Security Strategy in November 2025 (Seal of the President of the United States 2025), which identified the development of a highly resilient, efficient, and innovative energy sector as a central national objective. Within this framework, energy is not merely a driver of domestic economic growth but a strategic export industry predominantly fossil fuel–based and nuclear, intended to support domestic reindustrialisation and advances in research and innovation. This orientation largely sidelines, and in some instances explicitly rejects, climate commitments and mitigation agendas. At the same time, the strategy reaffirms the U.S. determination to preserve military supremacy and to guarantee unrestricted access to strategic regions and global commercial routes, reinforcing the tight coupling between energy policy and geopolitical power projection.

The same document explicitly revives the Monroe Doctrine, framing it as a guiding principle to “restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere” and to prevent non-hemispheric competitors from deploying forces, threatening capabilities, or acquiring control over strategically significant assets within what is described as “our Hemisphere”(Seal of the President of the United States 2025).

Yet the renewed prominence of the Monroe Doctrine predates Trump’s second term. For instance, General (former) Laura J. Richardson, Commander........

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