Geopolitics and the Petrodollar: Understanding Trump’s action, Stephanie Shaakaa 

Power almost never explains itself honestly. It prefers euphemism to confession, procedure to motive, and moral language to material truth. The most durable systems of dominance do not announce their purpose; they embed it so deeply into daily life that it becomes indistinguishable from inevitability.

For more than half a century, American global power has rested not only on military reach or diplomatic alliances, but also on something quieter and far more consequential: the obligation of the world to use the United States dollar.

What is unfolding around Venezuela cannot be understood without confronting this reality.

This is not, at its core, a story about Nicolás Maduro’s character, or narcotics trafficking, or terrorism, or even a sudden Western devotion to democracy. It is a story about a financial order under strain, and about what happens when a country sitting atop the largest proven oil reserves on Earth decides to step outside it.

Venezuela holds an estimated 303 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. More than Saudi Arabia. Roughly one fifth of the world’s known supply. This is not symbolic wealth. It is structural power, the kind that shapes currencies, trade flows, and geopolitical alignments over generations.

To understand why this matters, one must return to 1974.

After the collapse of the Bretton Woods gold standard, the United States faced an existential dilemma. The dollar was no longer backed by gold, yet it still needed sustained global demand to preserve its value. The solution emerged through a quiet but transformative understanding brokered by Henry Kissinger with Saudi Arabia.

Saudi oil would be priced predominantly in US dollars, anchoring global energy markets to American currency. In return, the United States would provide military protection and security guarantees, while surplus oil revenues would be recycled into American financial markets. Other OPEC members followed. Oil, the most indispensable commodity in modern civilization, became structurally inseparable from the dollar.

The central issue was not ideology but architecture. From that point forward, global energy markets doubled as an enforcement mechanism for US monetary dominance. Because oil remained the indispensable input of modern economies, every nation needed dollars to function. The result was a permanent, structural demand for the US currency.

This arrangement conferred a privilege unmatched in modern history. While most countries must generate value before issuing money, the United States could issue money because the world was compelled to hold it. Deficits that would destabilize other economies were absorbed by a system with no viable alternative. Wars could be financed without proportional domestic sacrifice. Inflation could be exported while real goods, labor, and resources flowed inward.

No aircraft carrier has ever matched the strategic value of that arrangement.

But systems built on consensus and habit are vulnerable when belief erodes.

History reveals a pattern when challenges to this system move from theory to action. In 2000, Saddam Hussein announced that Iraq would begin selling oil in euros rather than dollars. The decision was dismissed as symbolic defiance. Three years later, Iraq was invaded under the justification of weapons of mass destruction that were never found. After regime change, Iraqi oil sales quietly reverted to dollar pricing.

In 2009, Muammar Gaddafi proposed a gold-backed African currency, the gold dinar, intended for oil and commodity trade across the continent. Subsequent disclosures revealed that Western governments viewed this proposal as a direct threat to monetary influence in Africa. In 2011, NATO intervened. Libya was destroyed as a functioning state, and the gold dinar disappeared along with Gaddafi himself.

These episodes do not establish neat causation or a single hidden conspiracy. They illustrate something more unsettling: how rapidly challenges to monetary architecture become intolerable to the system that benefits from it, and how consistently economic defiance escalates into existential confrontation.

Now consider Venezuela.

In 2018, Venezuela announced that it would begin selling oil in currencies other than the US dollar. Yuan, euros, rubles, and alternative settlement arrangements were explicitly encouraged. The government declared its intention to free itself from dollar dependence. It pursued direct payment channels with China that bypassed SWIFT, the Western-dominated financial messaging system. It formally sought membership in BRICS, a bloc explicitly committed to constructing a multipolar financial order. This was not rhetoric. It was infrastructure.

And the response was not limited to sanctions alone. In June 2020, Alex Saab, a Venezuelan special envoy responsible for securing food and fuel supplies under sanctions, was arrested during a routine refueling stop in Cape Verde. The operation was executed with clinical precision. No spectacle. No raid. No public confrontation. A quiet detention, based on a US warrant, carried out in a third country, thousands of miles from Washington and Caracas.

Saab was not a general. He was not a politician. He was a financial operator.

His arrest conveyed a message more clearly than any speech could. The United States was prepared to project legal, diplomatic, and coercive power globally to dismantle alternative financial pathways. Banking, shipping, insurance, extradition law, and diplomacy converged into a single enforcement mechanism.

This is how modern power functions.

Not first through invasion, but through choke points. American officials have occasionally articulated this logic with disarming candor. Statements suggesting that Venezuelan oil effectively belongs to the United States because American companies helped develop it a century ago reveal an imperial assumption that transcends ideology. By that reasoning, national sovereignty becomes conditional, and resource ownership is legitimate only when aligned with Western capital.

Yet Venezuela is not the central problem. Momentum is.

Russia now sells significant volumes of oil in rubles and yuan. Iran has conducted non-dollar trade for years. China has constructed CIPS, its own alternative to SWIFT, connecting thousands of banks across nearly two hundred countries. Central banks are piloting direct settlement systems that bypass correspondent banking entirely. Even Saudi Arabia, the cornerstone of the original petrodollar understanding, has openly discussed accepting yuan for oil sales.

These developments are not ideological revolts. They are rational hedges.

The United States has increasingly weaponized its financial dominance through sanctions, asset freezes, and extraterritorial enforcement. In doing so, it has reminded the world that reliance on the dollar is not neutral. It is conditional.

Every frozen reserve, every blocked transaction, every seized asset teaches the same lesson: dependency is vulnerability.

Venezuela, facing relentless economic pressure and holding vast energy reserves, drew the logical conclusion. So are many others.

This is not a defense of the Maduro government, which has presided over corruption, mismanagement, and profound human suffering. But moral arguments collapse when applied selectively. The United States maintains close alliances with governments that hold no elections, tolerate no dissent, and suppress basic freedoms. Democracy has never been the consistent dividing line.

Currency alignment has.

The petrodollar system will not collapse in a dramatic moment. Empires rarely fall that way. What unfolds instead is erosion. Fragmentation. Bilateral trade. Regional settlement systems. A gradual reduction in dollar share, followed by higher borrowing costs and diminishing room for error.

Venezuela matters because it sits at the intersection of energy, finance, and defiance. It is not the origin of de-dollarization. It is a catalyst.

That is why pressure intensifies. That is why enforcement becomes surgical. That is why the language of democracy often obscures the mechanics of preservation.

The real question is not whether the United States can punish Venezuela. It almost certainly can. The real question is whether coercion, sanctions, and legal reach can indefinitely preserve a monetary order whose structural advantages are slowly weakening.

History suggests otherwise.

The dollar will remain powerful for years, perhaps decades. But power sustained primarily through enforcement is not stability. It is postponement.

And the most consequential conflict of the twenty-first century may not be fought over territory or ideology, but over which currency the world uses to price reality itself.

Venezuela has already made its choice.

What happens next will reveal how the system responds when belief, at last, begins to fracture.

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