The Fleet off Venezuela : How Washington Turned Energy into a Weapon and BRICS Is Pushing Back

Long read

A flotilla off Venezuela, and the real target is oil

Off the Venezuelan coast a United States flotilla sails under a familiar flag of convenience. Officially the mission is about cocaine and cartels, an “enhanced counter narcotics operation” in the Caribbean. In practice, the ships sit off the country that holds the largest proven oil reserves on earth, a state Washington has spent the past decade trying to ring fence with sanctions, licences and now tariff threats on any nation that dares buy its crude.

The immediate risk is obvious. A miscalculation in these waters could knock hundreds of thousands of barrels of heavy oil off the market, the same grade that United States refineries were quietly built to process when relations with Caracas were warmer. The deeper story is older. It is about who is allowed to weaponise energy, and who is punished for trying.

When Washington sends destroyers and Treasury lawyers to police other people’s hydrocarbons, this is relabelled as security, democracy, or counter narcotics. When Russia redirects gas, when China tightens exports of critical minerals, when OPEC plus trims output to defend price, it is denounced as blackmail. From Caracas to Moscow, from Beijing to New Delhi and Brasília, that asymmetry is now the core of the argument. It is also why this is the moment to examine the new era of energy weaponisation from the rest of the world’s standpoint, rather than from the lecture halls of the Atlantic policy circuit.

How Washington invented modern energy weaponisation

Western narratives like to start this story in 1973, with the Arab oil embargo. From a BRICS vantage point the story begins much earlier. For most of the twentieth century the real energy weapon was simple: control of other peoples’ resources and of the sea lanes that carried them.

First it was the British empire, then the United States that determined who could drill, who could ship, who could insure, who could be financed. Concessions were negotiated at gunpoint, royalties repatriated to London and New York, local governments toppled if they tried to nationalise. This was not called weaponisation. It was called stability.

After the Second World War the United States tied oil to its currency. Crude was priced in dollars, cleared through its banks, traded on its exchanges, insured by its firms. Whoever controlled that system did not need to shut a pipeline to coerce a rival. They could exclude a state from finance, refuse to insure its tankers, cut it off from the clearing system that settles trade. That infrastructure is still the central energy weapon of our era. Everything else is a derivative.

Seen from the South, the history of the last fifty years is not a story of producers menacing innocent consumers. It is a story of the global North using its financial, legal and naval dominance to decide which producers live, which are strangled, and which are brought to heel under the language of “rules based order.”

From 1973 to sanctions: rewriting the “benign” era

In Western textbooks the 1973 embargo is treated as a sort of original sin, a sudden outburst of irrational producer power. In the Arab world and across the global South it is remembered as something else: a rare moment when resource states briefly used the same logic that London and Washington had deployed for decades.

Oil had been pulled from under Arab soil for generations. The companies were Western, the tankers Western, the insurance Western, the military guarantees Western. The embargo did not reverse that structure. It briefly reminded the West that energy is not an entitlement.

What followed is often described in Washington as a long period in which energy weaponisation “largely subsided.” In reality the tools changed. Instead of overt embargoes, the West perfected a subtler system: sanctions, conditional finance, and legal risk.

Iran, Iraq, Libya and later Venezuela and Russia became case studies in financial strangulation. Central bank reserves could be frozen. National oil companies could be declared off limits to investors. Tankers could be uninsured. The technology and expertise needed to maintain fields and refineries could be declared dual use and withheld. None of this was called energy weaponisation. It was rebranded as non proliferation, human rights, or counter terrorism.

At the same time, the integration of global oil and gas markets was sold as an apolitical success story. Futures markets liberalised prices. Liquefied natural gas cargoes started moving between basins. The Cold War ended, the Energy Charter Treaty was signed, Western oil majors went back into Russia and Central Asia, China joined the World Trade Organisation. It all looked benign from Brussels.

From the BRICS standpoint the picture is less comforting. Integration meant that access to capital, technology, shipping and insurance became even more dependent on Western goodwill. The same financial plumbing that allowed cheap capital to flow into Russian or Brazilian projects could be used later to shut them down. It is this architecture, not any single embargo, that Russia, China, India, Brazil, South Africa and their partners are now slowly trying to escape.

Ukraine, gas and LNG: the European crisis through non Western eyes

The official European story of the 2022 gas crisis is simple. Russia invaded Ukraine, then “weaponised” gas supplies to punish Europe for supporting Kyiv. Liquefied natural gas from the United States, Qatar and others arrived just in time. The lesson, European leaders say, is to never again depend on Russian pipelines.

In Moscow, Beijing and New Delhi that story leaves out most of the plot.

From their perspective the sequence began when European governments chose to align fully with United States sanctions. Russian banks were cut off from the Western financial system. Assets were frozen. Turbine maintenance and equipment for pipelines fell under export controls. Political declarations were made in Berlin and Brussels that Russian gas was finished in Europe. Contracts were torn up, certification was withheld, pipeline projects were blocked.

At that point Russian policymakers drew a simple conclusion. A customer that freezes your reserves, seizes your infrastructure and announces in public that it will no longer buy your main export is no longer a reliable long term partner. The decision to redirect gas flows to “friendly” states, and to let politically hostile buyers scramble for LNG on the spot market, was seen in Moscow as defensive, not aggressive.

The real violence, from a BRICS perspective, landed elsewhere. When Europe turned to the LNG market it used its credit rating and political weight to outbid poorer importers across Asia and Africa. Cargoes that would have gone to Pakistan, Bangladesh or parts of sub Saharan Africa were diverted to Europe. The price spikes that followed forced developing states into blackouts and balance of payments crises. But in the Western story that damage barely appears.

The Nord Stream pipeline explosions added their own toxic symbolism. A piece of multi billion dollar energy infrastructure was destroyed in the Baltic. The main beneficiaries were the same LNG suppliers now locking European buyers into long contracts. For the rest of the world, the message was clear. In this game, steel and concrete sunk under the sea are no protection. If your flows run through Western controlled basins, you are exposed.

Oil in a divided world: OPEC plus, shale and BRICS strategy

The middle of this decade is supposed to be the moment when oil demand peaks. In practice even the Western agencies cannot agree on when that peak arrives or how steep the decline will be. What they do agree on is sharper: the era in which United States shale could endlessly flood the market with cheap barrels is ending.

Capital expenditure in upstream oil and gas outside a handful of Gulf states has been squeezed for years. Climate politics, environmental campaigns and net zero pledges in Western capitals have made large investments in new projects politically toxic and legally risky. Sanctions have removed whole countries from the investment map. Even where projects proceed, the cost of capital has risen.

For BRICS producers the conclusion is obvious. If the West both continues to consume hydrocarbons and frightens capital away from developing them, the result will be structurally tight markets. In that world a producer that does not plan for price defence is simply negligent.

OPEC plus is often described in Western media as a cartel scheming in darkened rooms. For the energy ministries of Riyadh, Moscow, Abu Dhabi or Luanda it is a survival tool. It is the only forum in which producer states, many of them targets of sanctions or regime change, can coordinate a response to the volatility generated elsewhere.

From their standpoint Western central banks move oil prices at least as much as any OPEC meeting. A sudden interest rate shock in Washington can crash demand on the futures markets. A new sanctions package in Brussels can lock away millions of barrels from the visible system. If you are not at the table where those decisions are made, you hedge. That is all OPEC plus is.

Venezuela sits on the edge of this reconfiguration. It has reserves on the scale of Saudi Arabia, but production has been hammered by years of sanctions, mismanagement and under investment. For Washington, the ideal scenario is a Venezuela that is opened to Western capital on Western terms, with the new flows priced in dollars and aligned with United States strategy. For the BRICS states, the alternative is obvious: a Venezuela that recovers into a multipolar energy system, trading in local currencies, borrowing from new development banks, and shipping crude without asking permission from a single capital.

That is why there is a flotilla in the Caribbean.

Gas, LNG and the southern front: from Europe to the Caribbean

Natural gas was sold for years as the clean bridge fuel that would carry the world beyond coal and oil. The rise of LNG seemed to de risk pipeline dependence. Cargoes could be redirected; markets would clear; geopolitics would be softened by flexibility.

Europe’s scramble after 2022 showed the other side of that story. LNG is flexible only for those who can pay. The rest get cut off.

Most of the world’s future LNG capacity is concentrated in a handful of states: Qatar, the United States, perhaps a partially unsanctioned Russia, some African exporters if their projects survive politics and litigation. The tankers are financed through Western banks, classified by Western societies, insured in Western markets. The terminals run on Western hardware and software. In every step of that chain there is a lever.

For India, China, Brazil or South Africa, that realisation has consequences. Long term contracts with a mix of suppliers are preferable to blind faith in a spot market that can be cornered by Western policy decisions. Domestic coal, hydro and nuclear suddenly look less like environmental embarrassments and more like insurance.

In the Caribbean the same logic plays out in miniature. Gas discoveries in Venezuela and its neighbourhood could supply power to the region and feed LNG trains. But any such project must run a gauntlet of licences, waivers and threats issued from Washington. One administration grants a narrow licence for a gas field; the next withdraws it. A refinery can take Venezuelan crude one quarter and be banned the next. Shipping routes that pass near United States patrols are always one allegation away from interdiction.

When you can only sell your gas or oil on terms set in another capital, energy is already weaponised. You just happen to be at the wrong end of the weapon.

Clean energy, electricity and the next infrastructure contest

There is a comfortable superstition in some Western circles that the clean energy transition will neutralise energy geopolitics. If everyone runs on sunlight and wind, the theory goes, no one can close a tap.

The BRICS capitals are less sentimental. They see electrification as essential, but they also understand that new systems come with new choke points.

Electricity’s share of global final energy use is rising fast as data centres, electric vehicles, air conditioning and industrial loads proliferate. Most countries can generate a significant share of their power at home: from hydro, coal, gas, nuclear, wind or solar. That offers a path away from imported hydrocarbons priced in dollars. It is one of the reasons China has built a domestic renewable and coal fleet at such scale, why India is laying solar and transmission lines at speed, and why South Africa’s debates about coal phase out are so charged.

But the grid is not a neutral space. High voltage lines, transformers, control systems and market software all come from somewhere. They come with standards, licences and remote update mechanisms. Whoever controls those can exert pressure without ever touching a barrel.

In Western security rhetoric, the threat is always someone else’s hacker. Chinese actors in United States systems, Russian intrusions into European utilities. Very little is said about the record of Western cyber operations against infrastructure in the global South, or about the structural dependence created when an entire region uses hardware and software from a handful of vendors in two or three countries.

For BRICS governments the answer is not isolation. It is redundancy. Multiple suppliers, local manufacturing of key equipment, domestic control of grid software, regional interconnectors that allow one state to support another in a crisis without going through Western controlled markets. It is slower, more expensive and politically messier than buying whatever the cheapest Western consultant recommends. But in a world where software updates can be denied for political reasons, it is the only rational strategy.

Critical minerals and clean tech: the choke points China built for the West

Clean energy still needs copper, nickel, lithium, cobalt, graphite and rare earths. Demand for these is climbing, and in many parts of the chain one country dominates: China.

That dominance did not appear overnight. It was built with Western help. For thirty years Western firms and governments deliberately offshored mining, smelting and dirty manufacturing. They wanted cheap inputs for their own industries and did not want the local pollution or political fights that come with digging large holes in their own soil. It suited everyone in the short term.

Chinese companies moved up the ladder: from operating mines to refining, from refining to cell production, from cells to full battery packs and solar modules. They did it with Western capital, Western demand and, crucially, Western hesitation to invest in the middle of the value chain at home. By the time Washington woke up, the logic was locked in.

Now the United States and its allies have imposed sweeping controls on advanced semiconductors, chip making equipment and some clean tech products. China has responded more cautiously, with targeted controls on exports of certain minerals and components. Each side is signalling that it holds levers it is prepared to use.

For the wider BRICS and global South this presents both danger and opportunity. Countries such as Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo hold large shares of key minerals. In the previous commodity cycle they exported ore and imported finished products. The margin sat elsewhere.

If the new scramble for “secure supply chains” only leads to Western and Chinese firms fighting over access to raw ore, nothing has changed. If producer states insist on local refining, processing and manufacturing as a condition of access, they can finally move up the ladder. That is why there is so much Western anxiety about “resource nationalism” and why you now see the same think tanks that praised globalisation warning about “fragmentation.” Fragmentation, in this context, often means that others would like to capture some of the value that was previously extracted by a narrow club of corporations in the North.

For China the challenge is to keep its lead in clean tech while not pushing other Southern producers into the arms of Western schemes designed to exclude Beijing. For Russia the priority is to protect its role in nuclear fuels and new energy corridors. For Venezuela, again, the question is whether it will be allowed to use its oil, gas and minerals as bargaining chips in a multipolar system or whether it will be forced back into a subordinate role by a combination of sanctions, naval pressure and elite deals.

De dollarising energy: the financial counter weapon

All of this leads back to the same place: money.

As long as oil, gas and most traded commodities are priced in dollars and cleared through Western banks, the United States and its close allies will retain the main energy weapon of our age. They will be able to freeze reserves, block transactions, deny insurance and threaten sanctions on third parties. Building new pipelines or solar farms does not change that if the invoice still runs through the same pipes.

BRICS governments know this. That is why, beneath the rhetoric about strategic partnership, so much of their practical work has been about payments. Local currency trade deals between Russia and India, yuan invoicing for Gulf crude, the slow expansion of the BRICS New Development Bank, experiments with non Western messaging systems for banks, bilateral swaps that allow central banks to avoid using dollars when they do not have to.

These initiatives are halting, often poorly coordinated and sometimes more rhetorical than real. But they all push in the same direction: to reduce the volume of energy trade that must pass through channels that can be turned off by Western policymakers.

De dollarisation is not a magic escape. The dollar is still deeply embedded in global balance sheets; local currencies are not automatically strong or credible; diverging interests within BRICS are real. But if you step away from the daily noise and look at the trajectory, the logic is clear. The more often Russia can sell oil in roubles or yuan, the more often China can settle commodities in its own currency, the more financing can be done through Southern institutions rather than through Wall Street, the smaller the share of world energy flows that can be weaponised by a single capital.

That is the real strategic project. Everything else, from naval manoeuvres to sanctions press releases, is tactical.

Two energy orders: a split system takes shape

Put these strands together and you see the outline of a split system emerging.

On one side sits a dollar energy zone, anchored by the United States and the European Union, joined by Japan, South Korea and those Gulf states that still feel safest under a United States security umbrella. In that zone, energy trade, insurance and finance remain tightly linked to Western institutions. The price is political obedience. States that cross red lines risk sanctions.

On the other side a looser BRICS energy zone is taking shape. Russia, China and India are its core, joined by various producers and consumers in Asia, Africa and Latin America who would rather not have their energy systems decided in Brussels or Washington. The rules are fuzzier, the institutions weaker, the currency arrangements more experimental. But the appeal is obvious: a chance to trade, borrow and build without having every transaction filtered through a single set of political priorities.

Between these zones are the swing states: producers such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that hedge between both, consumers such as Turkey or Indonesia that buy from whoever offers the best price, and regions such as Europe that talk about autonomy while aligning in practice with United States policy.

In such a world any crisis, a conflict in the Gulf, a strike in the Caribbean, a blockade around Taiwan, will not just move prices. It will test systems. Which zone can reroute cargoes fastest, finance deficits longest, keep its grids stable and its industries running? Which has built resilience, and which assumed that yesterday’s architecture would last forever?

Venezuela as test case: what the flotilla is really signalling

Which brings us back to that flotilla.

For Western audiences the story of Venezuela has been framed through familiar words: dictatorship, corruption, humanitarian collapse, drugs. These are real issues. They have been deliberately fused with energy policy so that coercion can be sold as virtue.

From the BRICS and wider global South vantage point the pattern is less flattering. A resource state tried to pursue an independent path. It flirted with alternative financing and closer ties to non Western powers. It found itself under escalating sanctions, attempts at regime change, and now a naval presence just off its shores. Its main export is the same commodity that underpins United States refinery configurations and strategic reserves. It also sits at the entrance to the Caribbean, a basin that leads directly to the Gulf of Mexico.

If Venezuela can be forced back into line, the message to every other Southern producer is stark. Your energy sovereignty is conditional. It lasts until the day it conflicts with the strategic preferences of those who own the currency and the insurance system. You may attend BRICS summits, sign memoranda and dream of local currency trade. But when it matters, the fleet will still come.

If, on the other hand, Venezuela survives this round with its territorial integrity intact and a degree of policy autonomy preserved, the signal runs the other way. It tells Algeria, Nigeria, Angola, Iran, Iraq and others that the American era in which every significant energy decision had to be cleared with Washington is ending. It encourages them to ask for more from their own resources, to demand better terms, to invest in their own grids and factories rather than relying on Western credit and advice.

That is why this standoff matters far beyond the Caribbean. It is a live test of whether the new BRICS centred energy order is real or rhetorical. It will show whether the rest of the world can finally use its resources without having to ask permission from a distant capital that claims the right to weaponise energy but screams the moment anyone else tries.