Beyond the Oil Myth: The Real Reason Maduro and Flores Were Taken

By Adrian Khodavardar

The recent, high–stakes extraction of Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from Caracas by United States special forces has marked a decisive inflection point in contemporary geopolitics. Early commentary has been quick to frame the operation as a crude 'oil grab' or a revival of 20th century interventionism. Such readings, however, are analytically shallow. They mistake motive for material and overlook the strategic environment in which the operation occurred. This was not an intervention born of energy scarcity. The United States today produces more than 13 million barrels of oil per day output that exceeds Venezuela’s by an order of magnitude. The strategic value of Venezuelan oil to Washington therefore lies not in its volume, but in its geopolitical function. The capture of Maduro and Flores should instead be understood as a targeted strike against a critical node in China’s emerging parallel economic architecture: a deliberate effort to dismantle a regional bridgehead through which Beijing had extended influence into the Western Hemisphere.

To see why the 'resource scarcity' argument collapses under serious scrutiny, one must begin with the empirical realities of the 2020s. The United States is no longer the energy–constrained hegemon of the 1970s; it has consolidated its position as the world’s largest crude oil producer. As a result, the strategic significance of Venezuelan oil to Washington does not derive from its volume, but from its destination and political alignment. For more than a decade, the Maduro government functioned as a critical energy conduit for Beijing, supplying oil at steep discounts through opaque loans–for–oil arrangements. These mechanisms enabled China to secure long–term supply while circumventing traditional, dollar–denominated energy markets. In doing so, Venezuelan crude became an instrument through which Beijing reduced exposure to global price volatility and incrementally expanded the international role of yuan–denominated energy trade. The true strategic objective of the Caracas operation was therefore not Venezuela itself, but the growing risk of a bipolar international system in which China could leverage South American resources to partially decouple from U.S. dominated financial and energy networks. For Beijing, Venezuelan crude functioned less as a commercial commodity than as a strategic subsidy providing predictable, politically aligned supply that underwrote its manufacturing economy and reduced vulnerability to external pressure. By removing Maduro alongside the politically formidable Cilia Flores, who acted as both an institutional anchor and a key legal architect of the regime the United States did more than depose an authoritarian leader. It disrupted a central artery of China’s expanding economic footprint in Latin America, weakening a model through which Beijing had translated financial leverage into long–term resource security. Functionally, the operation resembles a 21st century revival of hemispheric exclusion: a signal that the Western Hemisphere is no longer permissive terrain for non–regional powers seeking to consolidate control over strategically vital assets proximate to U.S. shores.

The true strategic objective of the Caracas operation was therefore not Venezuela itself, but the growing risk of a bipolar international system in which China could leverage South American resources to partially decouple from U.S. dominated financial and energy networks.

The detention of Flores is particularly instructive. Unlike the ceremonial spouses common to authoritarian systems, she was a central decision–maker and former president of the National Assembly with deep influence over judicial and party structures. Her removal was not incidental but strategic, ensuring that the Chavista power architecture could not simply reconstitute itself around a successor figure committed to the same external alignments. While U.S. authorities have relied on narco–terrorism indictments as the formal legal basis for this action, the timing and scope of the operation suggest these instruments were deployed as tools of statecraft addressing a broader concern about the emergence of a Chinese–aligned stronghold in the Caribbean basin.

As the international community confronts a renewed era of unapologetic Realpolitik, the implications for international law are substantial. The Westphalian principle of sovereign inviolability already strained by economic coercion and extraterritorial sanctions appears increasingly vulnerable when energy flows are treated as instruments of strategic denial. The Caracas operation may thus mark an inflection point in a new form of great–power competition, one in which the central contest is not territorial control or even resource possession, but the durability of the global financial and energy order itself. Viewed through this lens, the capture of Maduro and Flores functions less as a regional intervention than as a systemic signal. It suggests that the United States is prepared to subordinate established legal norms to the perceived imperative of preventing strategic rivals from converting subsidized energy access into long–term geopolitical leverage. Whether this approach ultimately stabilises the existing order or accelerates its fragmentation remains an open question but the message is unmistakable: in an era of intensifying competition, even 'cheap oil' has become inseparable from the struggle over global power.

Image: Heute