The reported US strike on Venezuela this morning is not an isolated event nor a sudden eruption of American impatience. It is the culmination of a century long struggle between Venezuelan sovereignty and Washington’s determination to dominate strategic resources in the Western Hemisphere. To understand the legitimacy or otherwise of the action, one must step away from today’s headlines and examine the historical architecture that made such an act conceivable.
Venezuela sits on the largest proven crude oil reserves on earth. Long before the Middle East became the centre of global energy politics, Venezuelan oil powered American industry, fuelled US wars and underwrote the rise of multinational oil corporations. From the early twentieth century, US companies operated in Venezuela as if it were an offshore province of American energy policy. The tension began when Venezuelan leaders decided that ownership of oil beneath Venezuelan soil must belong to the Venezuelan state. The nationalisation of oil in the 1970s was not merely an economic decision but a declaration of political adulthood. It was the moment Venezuela crossed an invisible red line.
Every government that followed which attempted to defend that sovereignty became a target for destabilisation. Some were pressured quietly. Others were confronted openly. The Hugo Chavez era marked a turning point. By redirecting oil revenues toward social programmes and aligning Venezuela with non Western powers, Chavez challenged not only corporate interests but the ideological assumption that Latin America must remain politically subordinate. That defiance did not end with his death. His successor inherited not only a state but a siege.
What followed was not simply sanctions but a comprehensive economic war. Financial sanctions severed Venezuela from global credit markets. Oil sanctions crippled PDVSA by denying access to technology, spare parts, insurance and buyers. The freezing of Venezuelan assets abroad starved the state of foreign exchange. This was not a surgical policy aimed at leadership. It was a blunt instrument whose impact fell overwhelmingly on ordinary Venezuelans. Hyperinflation, shortages, mass migration and institutional decay were not accidental side effects. They were predictable outcomes.
To describe this as pressure for democracy is intellectually dishonest. Democracies are not built by collapsing economies. States under siege do not liberalise. They harden. Sanctions weakened Venezuela not to empower its people but to make the state govern unviable, creating conditions where external intervention could later be framed as rescue rather than aggression.
Against this background, the reported US strikes and alleged capture of Venezuelan leadership must be examined. Under international law, the unilateral use of force inside a sovereign state without UN Security Council authorisation or a clear case of self defence is illegal. Law enforcement objectives including drug accusations or terrorism labels do not grant one state the right to invade another. If they did, global order would collapse into permanent chaos. Every powerful state would simply designate its adversaries criminals and send missiles after them.
The attempt to frame the operation as a counter narcotics or counter terrorism action mirrors earlier precedents that history has already judged harshly. The invasion of Panama in 1989 under the pretext of arresting Manuel Noriega was widely condemned and remains a stain on the post Cold War legal order. What we are witnessing in Venezuela follows the same logic, updated for a more brazen age.
The deeper motive is not hidden. Control. Control over energy flows. Control over political orientation. Control over the signal sent to other resource rich states contemplating independence from US strategic preferences. The message is blunt. Sovereignty is conditional. It exists only so long as it aligns with American interests.
The implications extend far beyond Latin America. If this action stands without consequence, it lowers the threshold for unilateral regime removal globally. It tells weaker states that international law will not protect them. It tells powerful states that restraint is optional. It erodes the principle that borders matter.
For Nigeria, the warning is no longer abstract. Nigeria is resource rich, internally strained and geopolitically exposed. Chronic insecurity, elite fragmentation, economic distress and institutional decay create precisely the narrative environment in which external actors thrive. Terrorism, criminal networks, humanitarian necessity and state incapacity are not merely descriptions. They are tools. Once a state is framed internationally as unable to govern itself, intervention becomes thinkable and then marketable.
Regime change in Nigeria need not arrive with tanks on the streets. It could come through managed economic collapse, elite isolation, targeted sanctions, currency strangulation and the steady delegitimisation of central authority. It could arrive via forced political transitions dressed as reforms. It could be outsourced to internal proxies while external actors shape outcomes from a distance. History shows that once a ruling order loses coherence and popular trust, the end is rarely negotiated. It is imposed.
More dangerous still is the quiet normalisation of fragmentation as a solution. When central authority weakens and identity politics harden, the language of restructuring can rapidly mutate into the logic of dismemberment. The tragedy of Yugoslavia is a cautionary tale that Africa ignores at its peril. A multi ethnic state hollowed out by economic stress, external pressure and elite betrayal does not gradually reform. It fractures. And when it fractures, the violence that follows is neither orderly nor limited.
Nigeria today exhibits several of the early warning signs that preceded that collapse. Competing security authorities. Regions increasingly acting outside federal coordination. A political class more focused on succession games than state survival. A population losing faith in the promise of the union. These conditions do not guarantee disintegration, but they make it imaginable. And once balkanisation becomes imaginable, it becomes discussable. Once it becomes discussable, it becomes actionable.
The strike on Venezuela therefore should be read as a strategic message, not merely a military act. It announces that the era of overt regime change has returned, stripped of the pretence of multilateralism. It demonstrates how economic warfare prepares the ground for kinetic intervention. It warns that sovereignty without strength is ceremonial.
History will not judge this moment by press statements or moral justifications. It will judge it by the precedent it sets and the fires it lights elsewhere. Empires often believe their actions are exceptional. History records them as patterns.
Duruebube Uzii na Abosi
Hon. Chima Nnadi-Oforgu
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