Guns, Drugs, and Oil: How Close is Venezuela to Boiling Over?

ANALYSIS by Austin Lee

Stand on any hill in Caracas at night and you can see the glow of the flares from Lake Maracaibo’s oil fields. Where there are 300 billion barrels of the heaviest, sweetest crude on the planet. That glow is why Washington has never been able to look away, no matter how ugly the politics get in the region.

My first boss used the saying “location, location, location” a lot when describing the perfect place to open up a bicycle shop. This applies also to geopolitical strategy. Control the right chokepoints, resources, and borders, and the rest tends to follow.

Oil field flaring

Venezuela is 1,200 nautical miles from Miami, closer than Honolulu. The same Gulf of Mexico loop current that carries oil to Houston refineries also carries cocaine, illicit drugs, migrants, and (if Moscow or Beijing ever decide to get cute) more than just narco submarines. Lose Venezuela and you give up the southern gateway to the Caribbean. Keep it friendly and you have leverage on the hemisphere’s energy valve.

The Short, Unhappy History of Who’s Running the Place  

– 1958–1998: A stable, if corrupt, two-party system that happily sold us cheap heavy crude.  

– 1999: Hugo Chávez, ex-paratrooper and failed coup leader, wins a real election and immediately starts rewriting the rules.  

– 2002: He gets kidnapped for 48 hours in a coup everyone in Langley pretends they didn’t see coming. Big shocker, he comes back meaner. 

– 2006–2013: Oil tops $100/bbl, Chávez buys loyalty with Cuban doctors, Russian rifles, and Iranian tractors.  

– 2013: Cancer takes him. Nicolás Maduro – former bus driver, union tough, and with zero charisma – inherits the throne.  

– 2015–today: The money runs out, the lights go out, 7.8 million people walk out. Maduro survives by turning the military into a cartel (Cartel de los Soles) and mortgaging the future to the likes of Russia and China.

Why the U.S. keeps trying to “fix” it 

Oil is only half the answer. The other half is that every time Caracas flips us the bird, someone else gets a new naval base or rare-earth concession. Russian successor firms still control pieces of Venezuela’s oil patch, Beijing gets first dibs on the new fields, and Iranian ghost flights land at night with spare parts for drones that look suspiciously like the ones buzzing over the Red Sea right now.

November 2025 Snapshot  

– USS Gerald R. Ford is prowling east of Barbados with two destroyer squadrons and a very quiet Virginia-class shadow.  

– 2,200 Marines are training in Puerto Rico, close enough to hit Venezuelan beaches in one night helo hop.  

– Russian successor firms still control pieces of Venezuela’s oil patch, Beijing gets first dibs on the new fields, and Iranian ghost flights land at night with spare parts for drones that look suspiciously like the ones buzzing over the Red Sea right now.

 – President Donald Trump ordered the airspace closed above and around Venezuela on Saturday – the same playbook we used before Panama ’89 and Iraq ’03.  

– Maduro answers with parades of rusty T-72’s and militia waving AK’s on TikTok, while Russian warships linger “for maintenance” in La Guaira.

Could we actually invade?  

Of course we could. The real question is what happens on day 31.  

This isn’t desert; it’s mountains, jungle, and a city of seven million people who’ve been told for 25 years that the yanquis eat babies. The regime has spent a decade handing out rifles to neighborhood gangs and telling them this moment is coming. Think Fallujah, but with triple-canopy rainforest and a Caracas favela stacked on top.

More likely play: 

Keep the carrier glowing on the horizon, squeeze the finances until the military decides Maduro is more trouble than he’s worth, then fly in with a couple of MC-130’s full of lawyers and new hundred-dollar bills. Worked in Panama, kinda worked in Honduras, might work again. Regime change is never pretty.

Bottom line  

Venezuela is still the biggest pile of oil well within reach of the biggest navy on Earth. Sooner or later something has to give. Whether it’s a quiet palace deal at 3 a.m. or a very loud night over Caracas, the strategic math hasn’t changed since Teddy Roosevelt sent in his gunboats.This one is too close, too rich, and too chaotic to ignore.

With the way things are shaping up in recent months and days, my money’s on sooner rather than later.

Austin Lee is the proprietor of Galilhub, and is a gunsmith and a competitive shooter. He writes frequently for Soldier of Fortune.