Energy Dominance: The Coercion Doctrine

I. The Mask Off

On January 3, 2026, in a predawn raid codenamed Operation Absolute Resolve, U.S. forces seized the president of Venezuela from his residence in Caracas and flew him to the United States to stand trial.^[1] Two days later Nicolás Maduro pleaded not guilty in a federal courtroom in Manhattan; his trial is set for the summer.^[2] Within the same fortnight the United States began marketing Venezuela’s oil itself — seizing tankers carrying sanctioned crude, announcing the sale of cargoes worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and depositing the proceeds into U.S.-controlled accounts before releasing a portion to a new government in Caracas.^[3] Vice President J.D. Vance described the arrangement without ornament: “we control the purse strings, we control the energy resources, and we tell the regime you’re allowed to sell the oil so long as you serve America’s national interest.”^[4]

This is energy dominance with the mask off. The phrase is usually spoken in the register of prosperity — American jobs, abundant supply, lower prices, allies unhooked from adversaries. In Caracas in January 2026 it meant a captured head of state, a seized national oil company, and a sitting Vice President stating, as policy, that the United States now decides who may sell the world’s largest proven petroleum reserve and on what terms. The naked version is not an aberration from the doctrine. It is the doctrine, arrived at its destination.

What follows is how it got there. The destination was never in doubt, because the route was the same one the United States has taken, under both parties, every time energy and a rival have met: not the cooperative path, but the coercive one.

II. Coercion Over Diplomacy

“Energy dominance” is generally read as a description of a fact — that the United States, after the shale revolution, produces more oil and gas than any nation in history and sells the surplus to friends. That reading is incomplete in a way that matters. The fact is real; the doctrine built on it is not a marketing posture but a method. American energy dominance is a coercive, cross-administration program: confronted with a choice between cooperative energy diplomacy and the coercive instrument — sanction, supply-denial, infrastructure-denial, market-capture — the apparatus has selected the coercive instrument, consistently, across three administrations that otherwise present themselves as opposites. It is the same escalation-over-diplomacy filter that the Arctic record reveals, operating here in the register of fuel. Its institutional home is a cabinet-level council created for the purpose; its proof is not in any single document but in a pattern that repeats wherever the instrument is available.

The pattern runs from Caracas to the Baltic to Hormuz to the Arctic seabed. In Venezuela the motive is spoken on the record and the instrument escalates from a sanctions dial to a naval blockade to a captured president; in Europe a rival’s pipeline was destroyed and its market absorbed; in LNG policy a change of party changed the costume and nothing else; in the Iran war the doctrine met its forced test; in the Arctic the commodity changes and the method does not. A cabinet council coordinates the program, a Senate hearing presented as improvisation ratified it, and the cost lands on populations no court has been asked to weigh.

III. The Energy Weapon

The concept has a lineage. The 1973 Arab oil embargo gave the West the phrase “the oil weapon”; Russia’s gas disputes with Ukraine and Europe between 2006 and 2022 revived it; and Jason Bordoff and Meghan O’Sullivan’s “The Return of the Energy Weapon” made the revival a thesis — energy coercion, dormant through roughly fifty years of market-based trade, has returned as a feature of great-power competition.^[5] They treat Russian and American energy coercion as parallel phenomena. On the American side it is something more specific: a hand on the weapon that is institutionalized, continuous across administrations, and structurally biased against the cooperative alternative.

The deeper structural reading belongs to Helen Thompson, who treats energy not as a sector of the economy but as the substrate of geopolitical order itself, and who reads the shale revolution as a strategic event — the moment American surplus production became, for Russia, “a geopolitical nightmare.”^[6] Thompson explains why a dominance doctrine became available; she works at the level of structure. The conversion of that structural surplus into a deployable instrument happened at the level of policy, and its blueprint was written in advance: Robert Blackwill and Jennifer Harris’s War by Other Means urged the United States to treat its emerging energy power as a geoeconomic lever rather than a commodity — to do, prescriptively, what the dominance doctrine then did.^[7] Daniel Yergin mapped the resulting competition, reading U.S. LNG as entering European markets “head-to-head with Russian gas,” though he treated the contest as market dynamics rather than directed policy.^[8]

The mechanism has a name in the theoretical literature. Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman’s account of “weaponized interdependence” describes how a state that sits at the hub of a global network can exploit the “chokepoint effect” — denying rivals access to it.^[9] Their cases were financial and informational; the same logic applied to energy networks puts the United States at the hub — the largest LNG exporter and the authority behind dollar-denominated energy trade and OFAC sanctions. Against this stands a current of skeptics — Jen Schneider and Jennifer Peeples reading “energy dominance” as domestic coalition rhetoric, and Columbia’s Jonathan Elkind calling it a “deliberately vague concept” whose customers “do not seek to be ‘dominated’” but “are looking for our partnership.”^[10] The skeptics are right that the rhetoric outruns any literal market control. They are wrong that the rhetoric is therefore empty: it acquired a council, a sanctions architecture, and a permitting regime. Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay have shown that the “molecules of freedom” branding masked a market-capture politics that diverted cargoes from poorer importers to wealthier ones, and Adam Tooze has tracked how the 2022 scramble locked Europe into U.S. LNG dependency the United States then leveraged in trade talks.^[11] Together, these accounts describe what none names alone: a single institutional program, running across administrations, with a standing preference for coercion over diplomacy.

IV. The Dial: Venezuela

Venezuela holds the largest proven crude oil reserves on earth.^[12] That single fact reframes the decade of American pressure on it. From the energy-dominance vantage, Venezuela is not principally a democracy problem or a human-rights problem; it is a rival-supply problem — a reserve whose output, under Maduro, flowed to China, to Russia-linked traders, to Cuba and Iran, outside U.S.-approved channels. The program’s object was never only to raise American production. It was to control who else gets to produce and sell. Venezuela is where that object is least disguised.

It is also where the motive was stated aloud. On January 24, 2019 — the day after the United States recognized opposition figure Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate president — National Security Advisor John Bolton told Fox Business: “It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.” He added that the administration was “in conversation with major American companies now.”^[13] The recognition was four days old; the oil pitch was already explicit. Guaidó’s team arrived with the apparatus of capture pre-built — a ready-made hydrocarbons law and an opposition economist, Harvard’s Ricardo Hausmann, on the record that “we need to open up the oil industry to private investment.”^[14] The most valuable American-held Venezuelan asset, the refiner Citgo, was simultaneously sanctioned away from Maduro and shielded from its own creditors by OFAC license — preserved, in other words, not by market logic but as a policy asset for the U.S.-aligned government.

The instrument that ran from there is a dial, and the dial passed undamaged between the parties. The first Trump administration built it: financial-sector sanctions in 2017, the designation of the state oil company PDVSA in January 2019, the recognition of a parallel government.^[15] The Biden administration inherited the architecture and used it as a behavioral lever — issuing the Chevron license in November 2022, easing the whole oil sector for six months after the October 2023 Barbados Agreement, then revoking that relief in April 2024 when Maduro broke his electoral commitments.^[16] Relief offered for compliance, withdrawn for defiance: the same dial, turned to a different demand. The second Trump administration turned it the rest of the way — revoking the Chevron license in early 2025, then issuing Executive Order 14245, which imposed a 25 percent tariff on any country, anywhere, that bought Venezuelan oil, forcing the entire market into a binary choice between Venezuelan crude and access to the United States.^[17] By December 2025 the dial had become a blockade: a naval campaign, Operation Southern Spear, interdicting tankers in the Caribbean.^[18] By January 2026 it had become a capture. By March, with General License 52, the United States restored Venezuela’s oil to the market — now sold by U.S.-aligned operators, through U.S.-controlled accounts.^[19] In no phase, under either party, was Venezuelan oil permitted to flow freely to America’s rivals. The sanctions were the floor; the licenses were temporary departures from it.

The legal costume for all of this was a charge — and the charge is where the program’s instrumentalism shows most clearly. Maduro was pursued as the head of the “Cartel de los Soles.” The name is real and old: the Venezuelan press coined it in 1993 (the soles, or suns, are the epaulette insignia of Venezuelan generals) for an investigation into two anti-narcotics National Guard generals, one of whom was himself entangled in a CIA-supervised cocaine operation.^[20] Venezuelan military involvement in trafficking is real and documented. What is contested — and not only by sympathizers — is the structure the charge imputes: that this is a hierarchical cartel with Maduro as its kingpin. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s own National Drug Threat Assessment has never listed it; neither has the United Nations World Drug Report; analysts describe it not as an organization but as shorthand for diffuse military-political corruption.^[21] The contradiction became visible in the documents. On November 24, 2025, the State Department designated “Cartel de los Soles” a Foreign Terrorist Organization “headed by Nicolás Maduro” — the legal-political predicate for the military campaign and the capture.^[22] Six weeks later, the indictment that would actually have to survive a courtroom quietly walked the characterization back: where the 2020 charge named the cartel as a “drug trafficking organization” thirty-two times, the 2026 superseding indictment mentioned it twice, downgrading it to “a patronage system run by those at the top.”^[23][24] The cartel is a terrorist army when the task is justifying force and a “patronage system” when the task is persuading a jury — indispensable to the war, disposable at the trial. The narco-charge supplied the justification; the motive was the one Bolton had stated on the record six years earlier — oil.

V. The Pipe and the Market

If Venezuela shows the dial, Nord Stream shows the other half of the instrument: deny the rival’s infrastructure, then capture the market it served. On September 26, 2022, underwater explosions destroyed three of the four strings of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines carrying Russian gas to Germany; investigators in three countries agreed the blasts were deliberate sabotage, using military-grade explosives.^[25] Attribution remains genuinely open. The most substantiated public thread is a German criminal investigation pointing to a Ukrainian-directed operation, with a suspect extradited and held into 2026; the competing claim of U.S. Navy involvement, advanced by the journalist Seymour Hersh, rests on a single unnamed source and has been denied by every named official and corroborated by no investigation.^[26] The point that survives any version is structural, and it does not require knowing whose hand placed the charges.

For the destruction of Nord Stream advanced American energy dominance regardless of who did it — and the political program around it was unmistakably bipartisan. The first Trump administration sanctioned the pipeline toward a standstill in 2019 under the Protecting Europe’s Energy Security Act.^[27] President Biden, three weeks before the Russian invasion, promised at a White House podium: “If Russia invades… there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” Asked how, given that the pipeline was German, he answered: “I promise you, we will be able to do it.”^[28] The pipeline was then destroyed during a war the United States was arming one side of. What followed was capture. Russian pipeline gas to Europe fell from roughly 140 billion cubic meters in 2021 to about 28 in 2023; the vacated market was absorbed not by other pipelines but by American LNG, which went from supplying 27 percent of Europe’s LNG imports in 2021 to more than half by 2024, making the United States both Europe’s dominant supplier and the world’s largest LNG exporter.^[29] Germany — the country most dependent on Russian gas, most invested in Nord Stream — built new terminals specifically to receive American gas. Infrastructure-denial and market-capture, in one motion, executed across an administration that called the previous one a threat to democracy.

VI. Continuity in the Costume of Reversal

The clearest test of whether energy dominance is a doctrine or a partisan slogan is what happened to it when the party changed. The answer is that the costume changed and the body did not. The doctrine was christened in the first Trump administration — “energy dominance” entered the lexicon at a June 2017 “Energy Week,” where Energy Secretary Rick Perry defined an energy-dominant America as one “free from the geopolitical turmoil of other nations who seek to use energy as an economic weapon,” exporting “to markets around the world, increasing our global leadership and our influence.”^[30] In 2019 his department, authorizing exports from a Texas terminal, called the product “freedom gas” and “molecules of U.S. freedom.”^[31] Export-as-leverage was present at the creation.

Then came the apparent reversal. In January 2024 the Biden administration paused approvals of new LNG exports to non-treaty countries, pending environmental and economic review — read, at the time, as a concession to climate constituencies and a break with the dominance agenda.^[32] It was nothing of the kind. The pause touched only pending applications; it preserved every existing authorization, carved out a national-security exception, and left untouched the architecture the same administration had spent two years building — a 2022 commitment, made jointly with the European Commission, to flood Europe with American gas explicitly because “Russia continues to use natural gas as a political and economic weapon,” a commitment the United States overfulfilled.^[33] Biden did not retreat from energy-as-leverage; he deployed it at record volume against Russia and paused only the issuance of new licenses. The second Trump administration lifted the pause on its first day by executive order and issued its first new authorization within twenty-five days.^[34] By April 2026 the White House had returned the doctrine to its native register: “While adversaries weaponize energy, America delivers it.”^[35] The line is Perry’s 2017 formulation almost verbatim, across three administrations and two parties. The partisan reversal was real at the surface of regulatory posture. Beneath it, the coercive doctrine never wavered.

VII. The Chokepoint

The 2026 Iran war did not create the energy-dominance doctrine. It tested it, and the test was severe. On February 28, 2026, U.S. and Israeli aircraft opened Operation Epic Fury with strikes on Iran; within days Iran declared the Strait of Hormuz — which carries roughly a fifth of the world’s traded oil — closed.^[36] The International Energy Agency recorded global supply falling 10.1 million barrels a day in March — the largest disruption it had ever measured; Brent crude touched $138, and the IEA’s director called it “the biggest energy security threat in history.”^[37] The doctrine’s central claim — that allied dependence on Persian Gulf oil through contested chokepoints is a strategic vulnerability, and that American supply is the cure — stopped being a slide in a conference room. It had become the lived condition of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines, whose LNG reserves, the INDOPACOM commander told the Senate, were down to “single and low double-digit weeks.”^[38]

The crisis exposed the asymmetry the doctrine is built on — an asymmetry of kind, not immunity. No one can cut the United States off: a net energy exporter every year since 2019, the world’s largest LNG exporter, shipping more than ten million barrels a day of crude and products.^[39] But oil is priced globally, and the shock came home anyway — American gasoline up more than a dollar a gallon in the war’s opening weeks, urea up fifty percent with a third of the world’s fertilizer transiting Hormuz, food-price warnings behind both.^[40] Allied exposure is shortage; American exposure is price; China’s is the Strait of Malacca. And for a net exporter the price cuts two ways: what households paid at the pump, the export sector collected at the terminal. Washington opened the war knowing that bill would arrive, and accepted it — the coercive path chosen not because it was free but despite what it cost at home, with the cost falling on consumers and the gain accruing to the industry whose product the doctrine weaponizes. A doctrine that had been advancing through permitting dockets and trade forums suddenly had a wartime constituency among the exact allies it was designed to bind. The chokepoint is the third face of the instrument: not the dial of sanctions, not the denial of a pipeline, but the structural fact of being the supplier no one can cut off — and the readiness to remind everyone of it.

VIII. A Different Molecule

The same logic operates where the commodity is not a hydrocarbon at all. In April 2025, Executive Order 14285 directed federal agencies to issue seabed-mining licenses under a dormant 1980 domestic statute — explicitly bypassing the International Seabed Authority and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which the United States has never ratified.^[41] The structure is identical to the energy program’s: rather than work the cooperative multilateral framework, build a unilateral track around it and pre-empt the resource. The International Seabed Authority called it a violation of international law; China’s foreign ministry, which reads these instruments closely, responded within the week. The target is the same critical-minerals dependence that runs through Greenland, where the U.S. Export-Import Bank extended a $120 million letter of interest for a rare-earth mine — the administration’s first overseas mining investment — and through the Arctic shipping lanes, where the trilateral ICE Pact aims to build the icebreaker fleet that would erode Russia’s control of the Northern Sea Route.^[42] The 2026 National Defense Strategy, silent on energy, names Greenland “key terrain.”^[43]

This is the link to Iced Out, which read the Arctic record as a diplomacy filter — a structural preference for the coercive option whenever a cooperative one exists. Energy dominance is that same filter applied to fuel; Arctic resource policy applies it to minerals and sea lanes. The commodity column changes; the method column does not. Sanction the rival’s supply, deny its infrastructure, bypass the cooperative framework, capture the market. It is one assemblage observed in different materials.

IX. The Council and Its Address

The doctrine has a coordinating institution, and where it sits is itself an argument. Eleven months before the National Defense Strategy appeared with the word energy absent from it, the administration created a body that does hold the energy strategy: the National Energy Dominance Council, established by Executive Order 14213 on February 14, 2025.^[44] The order declared it “the policy of my Administration to make America energy dominant,” seated it in the Executive Office of the President, and modeled it on the National Security Council and the National Economic Council — chaired from the Interior Department. Its mandate is carefully economic — production, permitting, exports — and its deliverable is “a recommended National Energy Dominance Strategy.” But its wiring is strategic: the order directs it to coordinate, on matters bearing on national security, with the National Security Advisor, and the same February reshuffle seated the Interior Secretary on the National Security Council itself.^[45] An energy-coordination body that speaks the grammar of commerce and answers to the national-security desk: the division of labor made concrete.

Why is energy housed here, in the economic register and the December 2025 National Security Strategy — which treats energy dominance as a top strategic priority, a means to “unhook” allies from adversaries and “put the squeeze on adversaries” — rather than in the Pentagon’s defense document?^[46] Not to hide it from rivals. China’s analytic establishment produced structured readings of the 2025 National Security Strategy within days of its release; the Kremlin welcomed it; Beijing’s foreign ministry responded to the seabed-mining order the week it was signed.^[47] Adversaries read everything. The register matters for what it makes lawful to state, and for who is listening. Framed as commerce, energy-as-leverage is prosperity and industrial policy — lawful and unremarkable. Framed in a defense document, the same logic becomes a targeting doctrine — the deliberate denial of energy to a population, which the laws of armed conflict prohibit when they forbid attacking the objects indispensable to civilian survival.^[48] And the allies who buy the gas read the defense document for threat-framing and burden-sharing commitments; a doctrine that weaponizes the product they depend on is easier to present to them as abundance. The doctrine is not abandoned in the defense document. It is relocated to where it can be said.

The council’s chartered purpose is to “counter the coercive influences of China and Russia” in energy — to name their use of supply as leverage as coercion. The doctrine the council coordinates constructs American supply as leverage of exactly the same kind. The same instrument — control of energy flows to shape another state’s choices — reads as coercion when a rival wields it and as security when the United States wields it. A framework that names Russia’s gas cutoffs as weaponization names the American program as weaponization too. The asymmetry is not concealed; it is the doctrine’s organizing grammar.

X. The Hearing as Ratification

By the time the Senate took up the subject, there was nothing left to invent. On April 21, 2026, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a routine INDOPACOM posture hearing, and the energy exchanges in it read like doctrine being drafted aloud: Senator Joni Ernst opening on the threat to allied “energy security,” Admiral Samuel Paparo answering that the United States must “increasingly be a net energy provider… to escape the vulnerability of those key choke points,” Senator Dan Sullivan advancing Alaska LNG as a “virtual pipeline” adversaries “couldn’t touch” and a “private sector American energy counter to the China Belt and Road Initiative,” and Paparo agreeing: “I would, yes, sir.”^[49] Assemblage read this as the hearing writing the missing energy chapter into existence in real time. That reading was right about the hearing and incomplete about the strategy. The chapter was already written, and performed, five weeks earlier on a larger stage: in mid-March 2026 the National Energy Dominance Council convened seventeen nations in Tokyo for an Indo-Pacific Energy Security forum whose stated purpose was to “counter the coercive influences of China and Russia,” producing more than $56 billion in announced commitments across LNG, nuclear power, and critical minerals.^[50] Two months after the hearing, a Quad statement institutionalized the framing among four governments.^[51]

Set the timeline against itself and the hearing’s role is plain. The council was created in February 2025; the LNG pause lifted the same month; the Tokyo forum ran in March 2026 with its seventeen nations and its $56 billion; the Senate convened in April. By the time Sullivan asked whether Alaska LNG might counter China’s Belt and Road, the executive branch had spent a year building exactly that counter and signing the deals. The hearing did not originate the energy strategy. It ratified it — the chamber’s constitutional function, in Assemblage’s reading, being the political mobilization that converts an executed strategy into appropriated consent. Sullivan’s Alaska advocacy is where this is cleanest, and it deserves to be named precisely rather than insinuated. The roughly $44 billion project had been stalled for fifteen years; the Strait closed and Brent at $114 gave it tailwinds it had never had.^[52] Energy is Sullivan’s third-largest donor sector, and the ask was for the energy infrastructure of his own state.^[53] This is not corruption, and during a genuine supply crisis his advocacy is also straightforwardly in the national interest. It is the assemblage functioning as designed: the local economy, the donor base, and the national doctrine all pointing the same way, reinforcing rather than exposing one another.^[54]

XI. The Cost

A doctrine described only through its instruments abstracts away the thing the instruments do. Sanctions are an act of force, and the force lands on people. The Center for Economic and Policy Research estimated that U.S. sanctions on Venezuela caused roughly 40,000 excess deaths in 2017 and 2018 alone — an estimate authored by named economists, one of them an adviser to the Venezuelan opposition, which makes it difficult to dismiss as the target government’s propaganda.^[55] Three successive United Nations rights monitors condemned the sanctions: the independent expert Alfred de Zayas, who recommended the International Criminal Court examine them as possible crimes against humanity; the special rapporteur Idriss Jazairy, who said of blockading a nation’s finances, “It’s like going into microsurgery using a kitchen knife”; and his successor Alena Douhan, who in 2021 documented their toll as collective punishment.^[56] The candor on the American side was its own indictment — a senior official describing the sanctions to reporters as “sort of like in Star Wars when Darth Vader constricts somebody’s throat — that’s what we are doing to the regime economically,” and a Secretary of State’s transition plan that, stripped of euphemism, told a population to suffer into submission.^[57]

The framework that names Russia’s weaponization of gas against European civilians as coercion names the deliberate strangulation of the Venezuelan economy as coercion of the same kind. The laws of armed conflict prohibit attacking the objects indispensable to a civilian population’s survival; the sanctions program achieved by financial means a result those laws exist to prevent, and no court has been asked to weigh it. The asymmetry is total: the man the United States flew to Manhattan stands trial on a narco-charge his prosecutors quietly downgraded the moment it had to face a jury, while the documented mass mortality of the campaign that removed him is charged to no one. That is the doctrine working as designed — built to name the other side’s energy coercion and blind to its own.

XII. The Diplomacy Filter

Across Venezuela, Europe, the Iran war, and the Arctic, the pattern holds. Confronted, in each case, with a cooperative path and a coercive one — a negotiated transition in Caracas, a managed energy interdependence with Russia, a multilateral seabed regime, a partnership rather than a dominance with the allies who “do not seek to be dominated” — the apparatus chose coercion. Not once, under the pressure of a single administration’s ideology, but repeatedly, across administrations that agreed on almost nothing else. “Energy dominance” is the name the United States gives that choice, and the National Energy Dominance Council is the cabinet body it built to make the choice durable. The National Defense Strategy has no word for any of it, and it does not need one. The strategy was never missing its energy chapter. The chapter was filed under a different department, written in the grammar of prosperity, signed eleven months before the document that left it blank — and it reads, in every case, the same way: when both paths lie open, the coercive one is followed.

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Acknowledgments

The April 21, 2026 INDOPACOM hearing at the center of Assemblage, and reused here, was surfaced by Brian Berletic and The New Atlas. The expanded account of the pressures on Venezuela draws on the sustained Venezuela reporting of The Grayzone (Max Blumenthal, Anya Parampil, Aaron Maté, Wyatt Reed, Ben Norton), read critically and tiered by independent corroboration: its documented findings and on-record quotes are used directly; its stronger inferential claims are noted as contested or set aside. The institutional and sanctions record — the National Energy Dominance Council, the OFAC license sequence, the Nord Stream investigation, the LNG export-policy chronology, the seabed-minerals order — was assembled from primary and reported sources cited below.

References

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1. “2026 United States intervention in Venezuela,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_intervention_in_Venezuela. The capture (Operation Absolute Resolve, January 3, 2026) is corroborated by NBC News, “How the US captured Nicolás Maduro,” https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/us-venezuela-strike-nicolas-maduro-captured-how-timeline-trump-rcna252041, and the U.K. House of Commons Library briefing, “The US capture of Nicolás Maduro,” https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10452/. ↩︎

2. “United States v. Nicolás Maduro,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Nicol%C3%A1s_Maduro. Maduro entered not-guilty pleas before U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein on January 5, 2026; the next proceeding is set for June 30, 2026. NPR, “What are the charges against Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro?,” January 3, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/01/03/nx-s1-5665617/venezuela-nicolas-maduro-charges. ↩︎

3. PBS News, “US aims to assert its control over Venezuelan oil with tanker seizures and global sales.” https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/us-aims-to-assert-its-control-over-venezuelan-oil-with-tanker-seizures-and-global-sales. See also NBC News, “US eases Venezuela oil sanctions as Trump seeks to boost oil supply during Iran war,” https://www.nbcnews.com/business/energy/us-eases-venezuela-oil-sanctions-trump-seeks-boost-oil-supply-iran-war-rcna264109. ↩︎

4. Vance, interview on Fox News (Jesse Watters Primetime), January 7, 2026; transcript via Roll Call Factbase, https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-interview-jd-vance-jesse-watters-primetime-fox-news-january-7-2026/. Also quoted in PBS News, “US aims to assert its control over Venezuelan oil,” op. cit. ↩︎

5. Jason Bordoff and Meghan L. O’Sullivan, “The Return of the Energy Weapon: An Old Tool Creating New Dangers,” Foreign Affairs, October 21, 2025. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/return-energy-weapon-bordoff-osullivan. ↩︎

6. Helen Thompson, Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2022). https://global.oup.com/academic/product/disorder-9780198864981. The “geopolitical nightmare” characterization of U.S. shale gas for Russia is a verified paraphrase from reviews of the book. ↩︎

7. Robert D. Blackwill and Jennifer M. Harris, War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft (Harvard University Press, 2016). https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674979796. ↩︎

8. Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations (Penguin Press, 2020). https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317939/the-new-map-by-daniel-yergin/. ↩︎

9. Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman, “Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion,” International Security 44, no. 1 (Summer 2019): 42–79. https://direct.mit.edu/isec/article/44/1/42/12237/Weaponized-Interdependence-How-Global-Economic. ↩︎

10. Jen Schneider and Jennifer A. Peeples, “The Energy Covenant: Energy Dominance and the Rhetoric of the Aggrieved,” Frontiers in Communication 3 (2018): 5, https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/communication/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2018.00005/full. Jonathan Elkind (Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy), “Donald Trump’s call for ‘energy dominance’ is likely to run into real-world limits,” https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/donald-trumps-call-for-energy-dominance-is-likely-to-run-into-real-world-limits/. ↩︎

11. Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay, “Molecules of Freedom,” The Polycrisis, Phenomenal World, 2025, https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/molecules-of-freedom/. Adam Tooze, “Paradoxes of energy dominance,” Chartbook, February 22, 2025, https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/paradoxes-of-energy-dominance-european. ↩︎

12. Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves (approximately 300 billion barrels) per OPEC Annual Statistical Bulletin figures. ↩︎

13. John Bolton, interview on Fox Business, January 24, 2019. The quote — “It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela” — was widely reported; see The Grayzone, “US Coup in Venezuela Motivated by Oil and Corporate Interests,” January 29, 2019, https://thegrayzone.com/2019/01/29/us-coup-venezuela-oil-corporate-john-bolton/. ↩︎

14. Ricardo Hausmann quoted in Reuters, March 12, 2019 (“We need to open up the oil industry to private investment”); see also The Grayzone, “Venezuela Coup Leader’s Oil Plans Revealed,” March 14, 2019, https://thegrayzone.com/2019/03/14/venezuela-coup-guaido-oil-privatize-industry/. ↩︎

15. Executive Order 13808 (August 24, 2017), Federal Register, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/08/29/2017-18468/imposing-additional-sanctions-with-respect-to-the-situation-in-venezuela; PDVSA designated SDN under EO 13850 on January 28, 2019, OFAC, https://ofac.treasury.gov/recent-actions/20190128. On the Citgo general-license carve-out preserving the asset under U.S.-aligned management, see Holland & Knight, “OFAC Designates Petróleos de Venezuela,” 2019, https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2019/01/ofac-designates-petroleos-de-venezuela-sa-us-expan. ↩︎

16. General License 41 (Chevron), U.S. Treasury, November 26, 2022, https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1127; the Barbados Agreement and General License 44 (October 2023) and its revocation as GL 44A (April 2024), U.S. Department of State, https://2021-2025.state.gov/venezuela-sanctions-relief-expiration-of-general-license-44/. ↩︎

17. GL 41 revoked February 26, 2025 (wind-down GL 41A/41B), Holland & Knight, https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2025/03/ofac-terminates-license-authorizing-certain-petroleum-related; Executive Order 14245, “Imposing Tariffs on Countries Importing Venezuelan Oil,” March 24, 2025, The White House, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/imposing-tariffs-on-countries-importing-venezuelan-oil/; Federal Register, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/03/27/2025-05440/imposing-tariffs-on-countries-importing-venezuelan-oil. ↩︎

18. Council on Foreign Relations, “Operation Southern Spear: The U.S. Military Campaign Targeting Venezuela,” https://www.cfr.org/articles/operation-southern-spear-us-military-campaign-targeting-venezuela; “United States oil blockade during Operation Southern Spear,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_oil_blockade_during_Operation_Southern_Spear. ↩︎

19. General License 52, OFAC, March 18, 2026; see Cleary Gottlieb, “OFAC Issues GL 52, Further Loosening Sanctions Against PDVSA,” https://www.clearygottlieb.com/news-and-insights/publication-listing/ofac-issues-gl-52-further-loosening-sanctions-against-pdvsa. On the U.S. marketing of Venezuelan crude through U.S.-controlled accounts, PBS News, op. cit. ↩︎

20. “Cartel of the Suns,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel_of_the_Suns; InSight Crime, “Cartel de los Soles profile,” https://insightcrime.org/venezuela-organized-crime-news/cartel-de-los-soles-profile/. The name dates to a 1993 investigation of National Guard generals Ramón Guillén Dávila and Orlando Hernández Villegas; Guillén Dávila’s case involved a CIA-cooperation cocaine-shipment scandal subsequently reported by the New York Times and 60 Minutes. ↩︎

21. PBS News, “U.S. set to label Maduro-tied Cartel de los Soles as a terror organization. It’s not a cartel per se,” https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/u-s-set-to-label-maduro-tied-cartel-de-los-soles-as-a-terror-organization-its-not-a-cartel-per-se; the outlet notes the DEA’s National Drug Threat Assessment and the UNODC World Drug Report have never described Cartel de los Soles as a drug-trafficking organization. International Crisis Group analyst Phil Gunson is on record (CNN) that “Cartel de los Soles, per se, doesn’t exist. It’s a journalistic expression.” ↩︎

22. U.S. Department of State, “Terrorist Designations of Cartel de los Soles,” November 24, 2025, https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2025/11/terrorist-designations-of-cartel-de-los-soles; Federal Register, “Foreign Terrorist Organization Designation of Cartel de los Soles,” November 24, 2025, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/11/24/2025-20750/foreign-terrorist-organization-designation-of-cartel-de-los-soles. The designation describes the group as “headed by Nicolás Maduro.” ↩︎

23. U.S. Department of Justice, “Nicolás Maduro Moros and 14 Current and Former Venezuelan Officials Charged with Narco-Terrorism,” March 26, 2020, https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/nicol-s-maduro-moros-and-14-current-and-former-venezuelan-officials-charged-narco-terrorism; the State Department’s Narcotics Rewards Program offered up to $15 million for Maduro. ↩︎

24. Edith Olmsted, “Trump’s DOJ Quietly Changed Its Charges Against Nicolás Maduro,” The New Republic, January 6, 2026, https://newrepublic.com/post/204966/donald-trump-department-justice-change-charges-nicolas-maduro: the 2020 indictment referred to the Cartel de los Soles as “a drug trafficking organization comprised of high-ranking officials” thirty-two times; the 2026 superseding indictment refers to it twice, recharacterizing it as “a patronage system run by those at the top.” The superseding indictment added charges (including against Cilia Flores) rather than dropping them. ↩︎

25. “Nord Stream pipelines sabotage,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_pipelines_sabotage. Investigations by Sweden, Denmark, and Germany each concluded the September 26, 2022 explosions were deliberate sabotage using military-grade explosives. ↩︎

26. On the German investigation and the extradition of Serhii Kuznietsov (transferred to German custody November 27, 2025; detention upheld January 15, 2026), Al Jazeera, November 20, 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/20/italy-to-extradite-ukrainian-nord-stream-sabotage-suspect-to-germany, and Maritime Executive, https://maritime-executive.com/article/accused-coordinator-of-nord-stream-pipeline-attack-extradited-to-germany. The U.S.-attribution claim is Seymour Hersh, “How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline,” February 2023, https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-destroyed-the-nord-stream; it rests on a single unnamed source and was denied by the White House, Pentagon, and CIA. ↩︎

27. Protecting Europe’s Energy Security Act (PEESA), signed as part of the FY2020 NDAA, December 2019; U.S. Department of State, “Fact Sheet on U.S. Opposition to Nord Stream 2,” https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-on-u-s-opposition-to-nord-stream-2/. The Swiss firm Allseas suspended pipe-laying in response. ↩︎

28. President Biden, joint press conference with Chancellor Scholz, February 7, 2022; NPR, https://www.npr.org/2022/02/07/1078953858/biden-says-the-nord-stream-2-pipeline-wont-move-ahead-if-russia-invades-ukraine; NBC News, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/biden-meet-german-chancellor-russia-ukraine-tesnions-rcna15190. ↩︎

29. Russian pipeline gas to the EU fell from roughly 140–150 bcm (2021) to about 28 bcm (2023): Enerdata, https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/volume-russian-gas-imported-eu-fell-46-2023.html; EIA, https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=53379. U.S. LNG to Europe rose from 2.4 Bcf/d (27% of European LNG imports) in 2021 to a majority share by 2024, and the U.S. was the world’s largest LNG exporter in 2023 and 2024: EIA, https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61483 and https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64844. ↩︎

30. The White House (Trump archives), “Press Briefing by Secretary of Energy Rick Perry,” June 27, 2017, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/press-briefing-secretary-energy-rick-perry-principal-deputy-press-secretary-sarah-sanders-062717/. ↩︎

31. U.S. Department of Energy, “Department of Energy Authorizes Additional LNG Exports from Freeport LNG,” May 28, 2019, https://www.energy.gov/articles/department-energy-authorizes-additional-lng-exports-freeport-lng (“spreading freedom gas throughout the world”; “molecules of U.S. freedom to be exported to the world”). ↩︎

32. The White House, “Fact Sheet: Biden-Harris Administration Announces Temporary Pause on Pending Approvals of Liquefied Natural Gas Exports,” January 26, 2024, https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/01/26/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-temporary-pause-on-pending-approvals-of-liquefied-natural-gas-exports/. The pause applied only to pending non-FTA applications and preserved existing authorizations and a national-security exception. ↩︎

33. Joint Statement by President Biden and President von der Leyen on European Energy Security, March 25, 2022, https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/06/27/joint-statement-by-president-biden-and-president-von-der-leyen-on-european-energy-security/ (“Russia continues to use natural gas as a political and economic weapon”); the EU committed to seek roughly 50 bcm/year of additional U.S. LNG, and U.S. LNG to Europe reached 56 bcm in 2022 and 63 bcm in 2023. ↩︎

34. Executive Order 14154, “Unleashing American Energy,” January 20, 2025, https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/DCPD-202500121; first post-pause non-FTA authorization issued to Commonwealth LNG, February 14, 2025, U.S. Department of Energy, https://www.energy.gov/articles/secretary-wright-issues-first-lng-export-approval-commonwealth-lng. ↩︎

35. The White House, “President Trump’s Powerful Leadership Highlights American Strength as Energy Dominance Delivers Global Stability,” April 14, 2026, https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/04/president-trumps-powerful-leadership-highlights-american-strength-as-energy-dominance-delivers-global-stability/ (“While adversaries weaponize energy, America delivers it”). ↩︎

36. “2026 Iran war,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_war; “2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Strait_of_Hormuz_crisis. On Hormuz carrying about 20 million barrels per day (roughly a fifth of global petroleum-liquids consumption), U.S. EIA, “Amid regional conflict, the Strait of Hormuz remains critical oil chokepoint,” June 16, 2025, https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65504. ↩︎

37. International Energy Agency, Oil Market Report — April 2026, April 14, 2026, https://www.iea.org/reports/oil-market-report-april-2026 (global supply down 10.1 mb/d in March, the largest disruption on record). The “biggest energy security threat in history” is IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol, CNBC, April 23, 2026, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/23/oil-markets-prices-fuel-shortages-iran-war-iea-chief.html. On Brent reaching about $138, U.S. EIA, Today in Energy, April 7, 2026, https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67424. ↩︎

38. Senate Armed Services Committee, INDOPACOM/USFK posture hearing, April 21, 2026; Admiral Samuel Paparo, transcript from hearing video, approximately 00:52:08–00:54:25 and 01:27:37–01:31:00 (“net energy provider… escape the vulnerability of those key choke points”; partners’ LNG reserves “in single and low double-digit weeks”). ↩︎

39. U.S. Energy Information Administration, “The United States exported 30% of the energy it produced in 2024,” https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65924; the U.S. has been a net total energy exporter since 2019 and the world’s largest LNG exporter in 2023–2024, https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64844. ↩︎

40. On the domestic price shock: U.S. gasoline rose roughly $1.16 per gallon in the war’s opening weeks — CBS News, “In 8 weeks, the Iran war has dented the U.S. economy. The damage could linger, economists say,” 2026, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-war-economic-impact-gas-prices-inflation-2026/; “2026 Iran war fuel crisis,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_war_fuel_crisis. On fertilizer: the Gulf produces nearly half of the world’s urea and about 30 percent of its ammonia, roughly a third of world fertilizer transits the Strait of Hormuz, and urea prices rose about 50 percent by late March 2026 — “2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis,” Wikipedia, op. cit. On the inflation pass-through, CEPR, “Quantifying the impact of the Iran war on US inflation,” VoxEU, https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/quantifying-impact-iran-war-us-inflation. ↩︎

41. Executive Order 14285, “Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources,” April 24, 2025, Federal Register, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/04/29/2025-07466/unleashing-americas-offshore-critical-minerals-and-resources; the order uses the 1980 Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act to permit seabed mining outside the International Seabed Authority and UNCLOS. ISA statement, https://isa.org.jm/news/statement-on-the-us-executive-order-unleashing-americas-offshore-critical-minerals-and-resources/; China’s MFA response via Global Times, April 2025, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202504/1333160.shtml. ↩︎

42. On the $120 million Export-Import Bank letter of interest for the Tanbreez rare-earth mine (June 2025), CSIS, “Greenland, Rare Earths, and Arctic Security,” https://www.csis.org/analysis/greenland-rare-earths-and-arctic-security, and Critical Metals Corp, https://www.criticalmetalscorp.com/projects/project-tanbreez/. On the ICE Pact (US/Canada/Finland, MOU November 13, 2024) and its aim to close the icebreaker gap that gives Russia control of the Northern Sea Route, DHS, https://www.dhs.gov/ice-pact; on Russia–China NSR cooperation, gCaptain, https://gcaptain.com/russia-china-finalize-deal-to-jointly-develop-arctic-shipping-along-the-northern-sea-route/. ↩︎

43. Department of War, 2026 National Defense Strategy, January 23, 2026, https://media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/23/2003864773/-1/-1/0/2026-NATIONAL-DEFENSE-STRATEGY.PDF; the document names Greenland “key terrain” while the word energy does not appear in it. ↩︎

44. Executive Order 14213, “Establishing the National Energy Dominance Council,” February 14, 2025, The White House, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/establishing-the-national-energy-dominance-council/; Federal Register 90 FR 9945, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/02/20/2025-02928/establishing-the-national-energy-dominance-council. Chaired by the Secretary of the Interior (Doug Burgum), vice-chaired by the Secretary of Energy (Chris Wright), staff director Jarrod Agen; modeled on the National Security Council and the National Economic Council per E&E News, https://www.eenews.net/articles/inside-the-white-houses-national-energy-dominance-council/. ↩︎

45. Executive Order 14213, §4© (coordination with the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs); the same February 2025 reorganization seated the Secretary of the Interior on the National Security Council. On the doctrinal shift “from domestic abundance to global strategic leverage,” Sara Vakhshouri, Atlantic Council EnergySource, March 10, 2026, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/energysource/energy-dominance-reconsidered-from-domestic-abundance-to-global-strategic-leverage/. ↩︎

46. Tim McDonnell, “Trump elevates fossil fuels in national security plan,” Semafor, December 9, 2025, https://www.semafor.com/article/12/09/2025/trump-elevates-fossil-fuels-in-national-security-plan (the December 2025 National Security Strategy frames energy dominance as producing and selling enough American energy to “unhook” allies from adversaries and “put the squeeze on adversaries”). On energy as a “top strategic priority” of the NSS, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, December 24, 2025, https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2025/12/24/all-about-trumps-revised-national-security-strategy/. ↩︎

47. On Chinese analytic readings of the 2025 NSS, CNA, “Beijing Starts to Unpack the US National Security Strategy,” December 2025, https://www.cna.org/our-media/indepth/2025/12/beijing-starts-to-unpack-the-us-national-security-strategy, and Brookings, “How China reads the 2025 US National Security Strategy,” https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-china-reads-the-2025-u-s-national-security-strategy/. On the Kremlin’s welcome, CBC News, https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/russia-trump-national-security-strategy-9.7006460. On China’s same-week response to EO 14285, Global Times, op. cit. ↩︎

48. Protocol I Additional to the Geneva Conventions (1977), Article 54, prohibits attacking, destroying, or rendering useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population. ↩︎

49. SASC INDOPACOM hearing, April 21, 2026: Senator Joni Ernst (energy security of Indo-Pacific allies; “President Trump’s national security strategy rightly treats American energy dominance as a strategic asset”); Senator Dan Sullivan on Alaska LNG as a “virtual pipeline” adversaries “couldn’t touch” and a “private sector American energy counter to the China Belt and Road Initiative,” with Paparo’s assent (“I would, yes, sir”). Transcript from hearing video, approximately 00:52:08 and 01:27:37–01:31:00. The “Belt and Road” phrasing is Sullivan’s and analysts’; official NEDC language is “counter the coercive influences of China and Russia.” ↩︎

50. U.S. Department of the Interior, “President Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council will host the Inaugural Indo-Pacific Energy Security Ministerial and Business Forum,” February 22, 2026, https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/president-trumps-national-energy-dominance-council-will-host-inaugural-indo-pacific (Tokyo, March 14–15, 2026; seventeen countries; purpose to “counter the coercive influences of China and Russia”); on the more than $56 billion in commitments, U.S. Department of the Interior, https://www.doi.gov/trump-administration-announces-deals-totaling-56-billion-during-indo-pacific-energy-security-summit, and Axios, March 16, 2026, https://www.axios.com/2026/03/16/trump-indo-pacific-energy-deals. ↩︎

51. U.S. Department of State, “Quad Statement on Indo-Pacific Energy Security,” May 2026, https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/05/quad-statement-on-indo-pacific-energy-security. ↩︎

52. The roughly $44 billion Alaska LNG project (Glenfarne 75% / Alaska Gasline Development Corporation 25% as of March 2025), pre–final-investment-decision; Pipeline & Gas Journal, March 2026, https://pgjonline.com/news/2026/march/alaska-lng-needs-3-mmtpy-of-offtake-to-reach-final-investment-decision; reservation interest from Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Thailand, and TotalEnergies, https://totalenergies.com/news/press-releases/united-states-totalenergies-signs-agreement-export-2-mtpa-lng-20-years-alaska. ↩︎

53. Assemblage, Part II, §VIII, and this project’s donor crosswalk (OpenSecrets, accessed May 8, 2026): for the hearing’s seven highest-leverage senators, defense industries ranked 7th–12th of 13 sectors with no defense prime among top donors; Sullivan (CID N00035774) is the exception, with energy and natural resources his third sector (~$204,000, 2024 cycle). https://deleuzer.net/research/assemblage-part-2-hearing-articulations/. ↩︎

54. Assemblage: How American Strategy Is Made, Part II — Hearing Articulations, §§VII and XII (the hearing as the wartime political-mobilization layer). https://deleuzer.net/research/assemblage-part-2-hearing-articulations/. ↩︎

55. Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs, Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela, Center for Economic and Policy Research, April 2019, https://cepr.net/publications/economic-sanctions-as-collective-punishment-the-case-of-venezuela/ (estimating more than 40,000 deaths attributable to sanctions in 2017–2018). Francisco Rodríguez, an economist who advised the Venezuelan opposition, separately estimated large sanctions-attributable mortality. ↩︎

56. Alfred de Zayas, UN Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order (Venezuela report presented to the Human Rights Council, September 2018), recommended ICC examination of the sanctions under Rome Statute Article 7; Idriss Jazairy, UN Special Rapporteur on the Negative Impact of Unilateral Coercive Measures, gave the “microsurgery using a kitchen knife” quote in an interview with The Grayzone, April 7, 2019, https://thegrayzone.com/2019/04/07/un-rapporteur-says-us-sanctions-against-venezuela-are-the-bluntest-way-to-engineer-regime-change-and-are-causing-blanket-starvation/; Alena Douhan, Jazairy’s successor as Special Rapporteur, reported on Venezuela to the Human Rights Council in September 2021 following her February 2021 visit, https://reliefweb.int/report/venezuela-bolivarian-republic/report-special-rapporteur-negative-impact-unilateral-coercive. ↩︎

57. The “Darth Vader” characterization was made by a senior U.S. official at a Univision briefing, March 22, 2019; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s “transition” framing is documented in The Grayzone, “Pompeo’s ‘transition’ plan tells Venezuela to suffer into submission,” April 1, 2020, https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/01/pompeos-transition-plan-tells-venezuela-to-suffer-into-submission/. ↩︎