Florida Conservative

What this administration is doing is internally consistent with how it thinks about power, legitimacy, and time—and it is not a continuation of the Bush-Obama era nation-building model that the media keeps dragging out of storage every time the United States acts abroad.

Venezuela’s oil crisis is not the result of a single policy failure or sanctions alone. It is the outcome of geology, economics, and governance colliding. Venezuela possesses enormous oil resources, but they are overwhelmingly extra-heavy, capital-intensive, and unforgiving of mismanagement. When the country nationalized its oil sector and expelled international oil companies (IOCs), it removed the only actors capable of operating such assets sustainably.

Venezuela’s oil is vast in volume but poor in quality, ruinously expensive to rehabilitate, and politically radioactive to invest in. The idea that the United States—or any rational actor—would pursue regime change purely for this oil ignores geology, engineering, finance, and history.

“Maduro NO es el presidente de Venezuela y su régimen NO es el gobierno legítimo”, publicó Rubio en X (antes Twitter) el 27 de julio. “Maduro es el jefe del Cartel de los Soles, una organización narco-terrorista que ha tomado posesión de un país. Y está acusado de introducir drogas en Estados Unidos.”