By Robbin Laird

My latest book on Australian defence has focused on the significant challenge facing liberal democracies to develop credible defense in depth capabilities that extend far beyond traditional force structures to encompass whole-of-society considerations.

The contemporary security environment demands a fundamental reimagining of how nations prepare for, deter, and respond to existential threats. The lessons learned from ongoing conflicts, particularly the war in Ukraine, combined with the strategic challenges posed by authoritarian powers like China, underscore that defense is no longer solely the province of professional military forces.

Modern defense requires the active engagement, preparation, and resilience of entire societies. This is not merely a return to earlier models of national service or mass mobilization, but rather the development of sophisticated, multi-layered capabilities that integrate civilian infrastructure, industrial capacity, technological innovation, and social cohesion into a comprehensive defense posture. As President Kennedy once challenged Americans, “we must ask not what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country” and in the current context, this question has never been more urgent or complex.

The Manufacturing and Industrial Imperative

The hollowing out of manufacturing capabilities due to economic relationships with China, a pattern visible not only in Australia but across the Western alliance system. Australia and Brazil, having become major food and commodity providers to what can be termed “Global China,” have witnessed the systematic atrophy of their manufacturing capabilities, creating dangerous vulnerabilities in any scenario requiring rapid industrial mobilization.

This deindustrialization represents more than an economic policy failure; it constitutes a strategic vulnerability that undermines the foundation of national resilience. The capacity to rapidly produce, modify, and scale production of critical defense materials, from ammunition to advanced electronics, has proven decisive in modern conflicts. Ukraine’s ability to innovate and adapt its defense industrial base under extreme pressure demonstrates both the possibility and necessity of maintaining robust manufacturing capabilities.

For middle powers seeking to maintain strategic autonomy in an increasingly bipolar world, the restoration of manufacturing capacity is not optional but existential. This requires not merely government investment but a comprehensive strategy that integrates energy security, raw material access, technological innovation, and skilled workforce development. The challenge extends beyond defense-specific manufacturing to include the broader industrial ecosystem that supports modern military capabilities, semiconductors, advanced materials, precision manufacturing, and the complex supply chains that enable rapid scaling of production.

The path forward demands recognition that economic security and national security are inseparable in the contemporary environment. This means making deliberate choices about supply chain diversification, accepting higher costs for domestic production capabilities, and investing in the long-term development of industrial capacity even when cheaper alternatives exist abroad. For Australia specifically, this represents a fundamental shift from the resource extraction model that has dominated recent decades toward a more balanced economy capable of supporting sophisticated defense requirements.

An additional challenge is to overecome the bureaucratic and procedural barriers that prevent rapid acquisition and continuous innovation, capabilities that modern conflicts have proven essential. The Australian Department of Defence’s traditional procurement processes, designed for stability and accountability in peacetime, have become impediments to the kind of agile, user-driven development that characterizes successful military innovation today.

Ukraine’s remarkable success in integrating new technologies, particularly unmanned and autonomous systems, demonstrates the power of operational units driving technological development rather than traditional top-down acquisition programs. This represents a fundamental shift from the platform-centric thinking that dominated twentieth-century military development to the payload revolution that defines contemporary warfare. In this new paradigm, the ability to rapidly integrate, test, modify, and scale new capabilities becomes more important than the traditional metrics of platform performance.

The implications extend beyond defense procurement to encompass broader questions about how democratic societies organize themselves for technological competition with authoritarian rivals. China’s ability to rapidly transition from research to deployment, unencumbered by the procedural constraints that characterize Western democracies, presents a systemic challenge that requires institutional innovation rather than merely procedural reform.

This suggests the need for new institutional structures that can operate with greater speed and flexibility while maintaining appropriate oversight and accountability. Special acquisition authorities, experimental units with broad testing mandates, and direct partnerships between operational forces and technology developers represent possible models. The key insight is that technological superiority in the contemporary environment requires not just superior research and development but superior integration and deployment capabilities.

Perhaps the most sobering observation from the September 2025 Sir Richard Williams seminar on which the book is based came from an attendee who focused on what he saw as the relative lack of attention paid to the human dimension of national defense, both in terms of military personnel and broader societal preparation for conflict. The stark reality highlighted by this ADF officer was that Ukraine’s standing military from February 2022 has largely disappeared through casualties, capture, and medical retirement. This clearly underscores the brutal mathematics of modern high-intensity conflict.

This observation forces uncomfortable questions about the sustainability of professional military forces in protracted conflict against peer competitors. The assumption that conflicts can be managed through limited engagement by professional forces, while civilian society remains largely insulated from the costs and demands of war, appears increasingly untenable. The multi-domain nature of contemporary threats, cyber, space, information warfare, means that civilian infrastructure and civilian populations become both targets and participants regardless of government preferences.

The challenge extends beyond military casualties to encompass the broader question of societal resilience under pressure. As one seminar attendee noted, there has been almost no discussion about preparing families and communities for the targeting they will inevitably face through cyber operations and information warfare. The assumption that war can be compartmentalized away from civilian life reflects a strategic blind spot that authoritarian competitors are prepared to exploit.

Modern conflicts demonstrate that societal cohesion, public understanding of threats, and civilian preparedness for disruption become crucial elements of national defense capability. This includes practical preparedness, backup communication systems, food security, energy resilience, but also psychological and social preparedness for the sustained pressure that characterizes contemporary strategic competition.

The concept of mobilization, as explored throughout this book, requires substantial reconceptualization for contemporary challenges. Traditional mobilization focused primarily on expanding military forces and defense production during periods of declared war. Modern mobilization must be understood as a continuous capability that integrates responses to natural disasters, pandemics, cyber attacks, and military threats within a comprehensive framework of national resilience.

Australia’s experience with wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated both the potential and limitations of existing mobilization capabilities. The Australian Defence Force, particularly the Army, proved capable of rapid deployment and sustained operations in support of civilian authorities. However, these experiences also revealed the dangers of over-reliance on military forces for tasks that properly belong to broader governmental and societal capabilities.

The development of effective mobilization systems requires thinking beyond military expansion to encompass the full spectrum of national capabilities. This includes industrial surge capacity, civilian infrastructure resilience, information system security, supply chain diversification, and social cohesion under pressure. As Air Marshal Harvey emphasized in an earlier Williams Foundation seminar, mobilization capability becomes a foundation for national resilience that supports deterrence through demonstrated capacity to sustain pressure and respond effectively to diverse challenges.

This broader understanding of mobilization aligns with the strategic reality that deterrence in the contemporary environment depends less on the threat of decisive military victory than on the demonstrated capacity to impose unacceptable costs through sustained resistance and resilience. For geographically isolated nations like Australia, this resilience-based deterrence becomes particularly important given the challenges of rapid external assistance in crisis scenarios.

The broader challenge facing liberal democracies involves what we might term the “citizenry gap” or the disconnect between professional military forces and the societies they defend. With the exception of the Baltic states, Nordic countries, and Poland, most Western democracies have moved away from models of universal service or broad civilian involvement in defense preparation. This separation, while understandable given the absence of immediate threats during the post-Cold War period, has created vulnerabilities that authoritarian competitors are positioned to exploit.

This does not suggest that liberal democracies must abandon their commitment to individual freedom and prosperity, but rather that they must find ways to prepare their populations for the realities of strategic competition. This includes education about threats and vulnerabilities, practical preparedness for infrastructure disruption, and the development of social cohesion capable of sustaining pressure over extended periods.

The challenge is particularly acute given the dependence of modern societies on cyber and space systems that are inherently vulnerable to attack. Unlike previous conflicts where governments could potentially insulate civilian populations from direct effects of war, contemporary threats guarantee civilian involvement regardless of government preferences or military strategies.

The path forward requires developing new models of national defense that integrate professional military capabilities with broader societal resilience and civilian preparedness. This is not simply a return to earlier models of mass mobilization but rather the development of sophisticated, multi-layered systems appropriate for contemporary challenges.

Key elements of this new model include:

• Industrial resilience: Maintaining sufficient domestic manufacturing capacity to support sustained operations while reducing dependence on potentially hostile suppliers.
• Infrastructure hardening: Developing redundancy and resilience in critical systems including communications, energy, transportation, and logistics networks.
• Civilian preparedness: Educating and preparing civilian populations for the disruptions that accompany modern conflicts, including cyber attacks, supply chain disruption, and information warfare.
• Institutional adaptation: Reforming procurement, development, and deployment processes to enable rapid innovation and integration of new capabilities.

The analysis presented in this book points toward a fundamental choice facing liberal democracies in the contemporary strategic environment. They can continue operating under assumptions developed during the post-Cold War period that defense is primarily the responsibility of professional forces, that civilian society can remain largely insulated from strategic competition, and that economic and security considerations can be managed separately or they can adapt to the realities of renewed major power competition that demands whole-of-society engagement. The rise of the multi-polar world is a reality not to be ignored while clinging the past hopes of globalization.

The evidence suggests that maintaining the status quo is not viable. The nature of contemporary threats, the demonstrated vulnerabilities of over-specialized defense models, and the strategic approaches of authoritarian competitors all point toward the necessity of fundamental adaptation. This adaptation need not compromise the values and institutions that define liberal democracy, but it does require acknowledging that defending those values and institutions demands more comprehensive preparation than has been undertaken in recent decades.

For Australia specifically, this means embracing the challenge of developing genuine strategic autonomy through industrial capacity, infrastructure resilience, and social preparation for sustained pressure. It means recognizing that geographic isolation, while providing certain advantages, also creates unique vulnerabilities that require specific attention to self-reliance and endurance capabilities.

The ultimate test of these adaptations will not be their effectiveness in preventing war, though deterrence remains a crucial objective, but their capacity to sustain liberal democratic societies through whatever challenges emerge from the current period of strategic transition. The goal is not to militarize civilian society but to create resilient civilian society capable of supporting defense requirements while maintaining the characteristics that make democratic societies worth defending.

The choice, ultimately, is between adaptation and vulnerability. The analysis presented in this book suggests that adaptation, while challenging and costly, remains possible for societies willing to acknowledge the changed strategic environment and commit to the sustained effort required for effective response.

The alternative, continuing with assumptions and structures developed for a different era, risks not merely military defeat but the broader failure of the liberal democratic model in the face of sustained authoritarian pressure.

Fight Tonight: Combat Readiness at the Speed of Relevance

By Nick Dowling

In 2016, on a stage at Ohio State, I was asked to debate Donald Trump’s foreign policy. My answer was blunt: there wasn’t one. Trump wasn’t a neoclassical realist. He wasn’t an isolationist. He wasn’t anything you could diagram in an IR textbook. He improvised. And it was risky.

Nearly a decade later, the fog has lifted. Trump’s foreign policy isn’t incoherent: it’s transactional. Power-centric. Deal-driven. Less Grand Strategy and more Art of the Deal, Global Edition.

For years, many of Trump’s supporters and critics misread him as an isolationist. They pointed to his anti-globalist rhetoric, his contempt for multilateral institutions, and his scathing attacks on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The assumption followed naturally: Trump would pull America back from the world.

That theory is now dead.

A president who escalates involvement in the Middle East, plays hardball in Ukraine, greenlights regime change in Venezuela, and toys openly with brinksmanship over Greenland is not retreating from the world.

He’s reengineering how the U.S. exerts power within it.

Trump isn’t anti-intervention. He’s anti-unprofitable intervention.

The defining feature of Trump’s foreign policy is the intentional, transactional use of American coercive power, military, economic, political, to extract tangible returns for the United States. Ideology is irrelevant. Norms are optional. Outcomes are everything.

This logic also explains Trump’s much-maligned trade policy. Critics obsess over tariffs as if Trump were drafting an economics dissertation. He isn’t. Trump doesn’t see tariffs as economic theory. He sees them as a loaded gun on the table. They’re leverage. They force movement. And as a bonus, they generate short-term revenue.

Military power and economic power are, to Trump, interchangeable tools in the same toolbox. One compels with fear, the other with pain. Both get people to sign deals.

The biggest difference between Trump’s first term and his second is not policy: it’s confidence. Trump now understands what most second-term presidents eventually realize: the presidency grants enormous, often under appreciated freedom of action in foreign affairs. Fewer restraints. Fewer advisers willing to say no. Less concern about reelection.

The result is a foreign policy unleashed. Everything is negotiable. Trade deals. Peace deals. Resource deals. Even sovereignty itself. American power is the enforcement mechanism, and Trump is unapologetic about using it.

To his credit, some of the wins have been real, better terms extracted from Europe and China, dramatic realignments in Middle Eastern politics, adversaries forced to the table who once felt untouchable.

But the question lingers: at what cost?

Trump’s approach is tearing at the architecture of the international system built after World War II. The architects of that system — Truman, Eisenhower, Marshall — had seen the abyss. They understood the price of unchecked power in a nuclear age. So they constructed institutions, norms, and alliances designed not to win every deal, but to prevent catastrophe.

For eighty years, that system, underwritten largely by American power and bipartisan leadership, worked. It prevented great-power war in Europe and Asia. It fueled unprecedented prosperity. It expanded freedom. It cemented the United States as the indispensable nation.

Did it cost the U.S. money and flexibility? Absolutely.

But it delivered peace, stability, and American dominance in return.

Now that era is ending.

Longtime U.S. allies are recalibrating, not because America is weak, but because it is different. When the guarantor becomes a negotiator or the bully, everyone rereads the fine print. Alliances shift.  And America may no longer get the benefit of the doubt.

My own view is conflicted. I am 100% in favor of sustaining an international system of alliances, trade agreements, international organizations, rules and norms. It is essential to prevent great war and to manage the complex challenges facing us internationally in the 20th century, from climate change to AI.

That said, the postwar system needed reform. It was ossified, hypocritical, and increasingly detached from the realities of rising powers like China, resurgent Russia, and a transformed Middle East.

In that sense, Trump may be unintentionally providing a degree of creative destruction, shattering old assumptions so something more durable and inclusive can emerge.

But destruction without construction is just vandalism.

If the United States alienates its European and North American allies in the process, those who remain central to our security, prosperity, and global leadership, the price of Trump’s deals may ultimately exceed their value.

Trump may be redefining how power works in the world.

The open question is whether America will still like the world that comes next.

Nick Dowling has 35 years of experience in national security sector, working in both senior government and corporate executive roles.  He is a graduate of Harvard College, has a Masters from Georgetown University, and is a Lifetime Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

By Robbin Laird

The January 3, 2026 U.S. operation in Venezuela can be understood not as an isolated hemispheric intervention, but as a deliberate strike against Russia’s external energy ecosystem and sanctions-evasion machinery, designed to erode Moscow’s war-fighting capacity in Ukraine over time.

What is being reordered is not merely a hostile regime in the Western Hemisphere, but the geography and logistics of global oil flows that have quietly underwritten the Kremlin’s long war. What appears on the surface as a regime-change operation is simultaneously a campaign to close one of Russia’s most important economic pressure valves for sustaining protracted conflict.

This operation must be situated within what I have termed the Global War in Ukraine, a system-defining contest that has already transformed the international order more profoundly than any single event since the end of the Cold War. The war that began with Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 has metastasized into a comprehensive struggle encompassing military innovation, energy security, alliance restructuring, and economic warfare across multiple theaters. Venezuela represents the opening of a new front in this wider campaign, one that targets the financial sinews sustaining Russia’s ability to wage war rather than the battlefield itself.

Venezuela as a Russian Energy Node

For over a decade, Venezuela has functioned as an offshore extension of Russia’s energy presence in the Western Hemisphere, not merely as a diplomatic fellow traveler, but as an integrated component of Moscow’s global hydrocarbon strategy. Russian-linked firms secured equity stakes, financing arrangements, and operating positions in Venezuelan upstream projects, using the country’s heavy crude reserves to diversify a wider portfolio of sanctioned molecules and to maintain leverage within OPEC-plus politics. That presence was renewed and significantly deepened in November 2025, when Caracas approved a 15-year extension of key joint ventures between PDVSA and Roszarubezhneft, locking in Russian access to Venezuelan barrels through 2041 despite multilayered U.S .sanctions.

Venezuela’s geology and degraded infrastructure amplify its strategic value to Moscow as a sanctions-era partner. The Orinoco Belt’s massive heavy-oil reserves, among the world’s largest proven deposits, though technically demanding and capital-intensive, represent one of the few remaining basins that could be ramped up with foreign capital after years of chronic underinvestment and operational decay.

This offered Russia both a hedge against its own future production declines and a cooperative platform for price management within global energy markets. In effect, the Kremlin could treat future Venezuelan output as part of a wider energy axis alongside Iran and other non-aligned producers, collectively exerting leverage over supply volumes, benchmark pricing, and the politics of sanctions enforcement.

The Shadow Fleet and Sanctions Evasion Architecture

Since 2022, Russia has leaned heavily on a rapidly expanded shadow fleet of aging tankers operating under flags of convenience, utilizing dark transponders, ship-to-ship transfers at sea, and deliberately opaque ownership structures to move sanctioned crude and refined products. Iran and Venezuela pioneered many of these evasion techniques over the preceding decade, and Russia effectively grafted itself onto this pre-existing dark-fleet ecosystem centered on those states.

Venezuela’s ports, storage system, and zombie‑tanker ‘ghost fleet’ have become a central hub in sanctions‑evasion logistics, enabling ship‑to‑ship transfers, re‑flagging, identity theft, and falsified documentation to obscure the origin of sanctioned oil cargoes.

Russian suppliers increasingly use the same shadow‑fleet and sanctions‑resistant trading ecosystem, overlapping tankers, intermediaries, and blending points, that services Venezuelan crude, facilitating the movement of Russian barrels into global markets with obscured origin.

By exploiting the expanding shadow‑fleet ecosystem and non‑G7 services, Russian crude and products have been able to sidestep the G7 price‑cap regime and sell at levels well above the 60‑dollar‑per‑barrel ceiling, preserving substantial export revenues. In practical terms, Venezuela’s oil sector has operated as part of this sanctions‑evasion architecture, a site for processing, logistics, and juridical camouflage, helping convert measures that were designed as decisive embargo instruments into persistent but manageable friction for Moscow’s hydrocarbon trade.

How the Operation Attacks Russian Energy Leverage

The January 3 operation and the subsequent assertion of practical control over Venezuelan oil assets directly target three pillars of this Russian-linked energy ecosystem: ownership structures, throughput capacity, and sanctions-evasion infrastructure. By capturing Maduro, sidelining PDVSA’s existing leadership, and creating conditions for freezing or renegotiating joint venture agreements, Washington has manufactured an opportunity to systematically unpick Russian and Iranian stakes in Venezuelan upstream projects that were designed to anchor their presence through mid-century. Contracts that locked in Russian equity and operational control to 2041 now exist under a fundamentally transformed political and coercive reality in which US forces and their chosen Venezuelan interlocutors possess the leverage to reopen terms, suspend operations, or exclude specific foreign partners entirely.

On throughput, the Trump administration has signaled that core sanctions on Venezuelan crude exports will remain in place even as selected U.S. energy firms prepare substantial investments on the order of several billion dollars to restore production capacity over a multi-year timeline. This combination of physical control on the ground and a phased, license-based reopening of export flows gives Washington powerful leverage over how, when, and through which channels new Venezuelan barrels enter global markets, and which traders, intermediaries, and tankers are permitted access to loadings. Russian-linked entities and shadow-fleet vessels can be systematically excluded from participating in these flows, and any attempts to replicate the previous opaque patterns can be characterized as interference with U.S.-controlled assets, thereby justifying interdiction, seizure, or expanded sanctions under counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, or national security authorities.

Finally, the operation creates both political and legal cover for a substantially more aggressive campaign against the dark-fleet networks themselves. By publicly branding targeted tankers, shipping companies, and maritime service providers as instruments of narco-authoritarian regimes and criminal cartels operating in both Venezuela and Russia, these entities become significantly easier targets for secondary sanctions, insurance blacklisting, port access denial, and potentially kinetic disruption operations. This accelerates a trajectory already visible throughout 2024-2025, when Western enforcement measures expanded from price caps alone to the systematic designation of specific vessels, beneficial owners, flag registries, intermediaries, and shipping agents.

Squeezing Russia’s War-Financing Model

All of these mechanisms connect directly to the Kremlin’s war-financing strategy for Ukraine.

Since February 2022, Moscow has sought to carry the fiscal burden of sustained high-intensity warfare by maximizing cash extraction from energy exports while leaning heavily on domestic credit expansion, deliberately avoiding politically dangerous broad-based taxation that could erode domestic support.

Despite Western sanctions, Russia’s fossil fuel exports continued to yield substantial income in 2024 on the order of USD 180–190 billion by reasonable synthesis of available estimates with baseline scenarios suggesting that, absent significantly tighter enforcement, annual fossil fuel revenues are likely to remain well into the triple‑digit billions of dollars, and plausibly above USD 130 billion, through 2026.

The shadow fleet has been absolutely central to sustaining these flows, offering alternative logistics networks, discounted transport, and opacity sufficient to keep Russian barrels moving to non-aligned buyers willing to accept ambiguous documentation and elevated compliance risk.

The strategic logic behind transforming Venezuela from a Russian-aligned energy partner into a U.S.-controlled supplier is to attack Moscow’s revenue model at the margins and over an extended timeline.

If US-backed investment can gradually restore even a portion of Venezuela’s lost production capacity, adding perhaps 500,000 to 1 million barrels per day to global supply over several years, those incremental barrels will represent non-Russian supply entering a market that OPEC-plus still attempts to manage through coordinated production cuts and quota allocations.

This additional supply places a ceiling on benchmark prices that would otherwise favor the Kremlin’s fiscal position.

Even modest, sustained downward pressure on Brent and WTI benchmarks, on the order of $5-10 per barrel over multiple years, would translate into cumulative lost revenues for Moscow in the tens of billions of dollars, materially narrowing its economic room for maneuver in sustaining a protracted war without resorting to the politically perilous option of comprehensive domestic taxation.

Washington’s emerging operational objective is not the politically and economically impossible task of completely shutting down Russian oil exports, an action that would spike global prices to catastrophic levels and fracture the anti-Russia coalition, but rather to ensure that each exported barrel earns Moscow progressively less net revenue, moves through increasingly risky and expensive channels, faces higher insurance premiums and compliance costs, and operates under perpetual threat of interdiction or designation.

Venezuela’s controlled re-entry into global markets advances this goal by providing alternative supply volumes to price-sensitive buyers in Asia and elsewhere, while simultaneously legitimizing and enabling a substantially harsher enforcement campaign against the sanctions-busting routes and networks that previously operated with Venezuela’s tacit cooperation or active facilitation.

The Global War Context: Structure Over Mood

To fully comprehend the significance of the Venezuela operation, it must be situated within the broader transformation that the Ukraine conflict has wrought on the international system. In my forthcoming analysis of this global war, I have emphasized a fundamental principle: structure outlives mood. The war in Ukraine is not merely about territorial control in Donbas or the fate of a single nation. It represents a comprehensive contest over whether the international order.

Russia’s February 2022 invasion did not emerge from a vacuum. The escalatory narrative was hiding in plain sight for those willing to see it. Putin’s July 2021 essay questioning Ukraine’s legitimacy as a sovereign nation, Russia’s November 2021 draft security treaties demanding legally binding constraints on NATO, and sustained military buildups along Ukrainian borders throughout late 2021 and early 2022 all pointed toward an impending confrontation.

What Western policymakers failed to adequately appreciate was that Moscow had concluded, rightly or wrongly, that the post-Cold War settlement was unsustainable, that NATO expansion represented an existential threat requiring forceful response, and that a window of opportunity existed to act before Ukraine became irreversibly integrated into Western security structures.

Yet Moscow’s attempted fait accompli backfired catastrophically, triggering consequences that have reshaped the global landscape far beyond Ukraine’s borders. NATO, which Moscow treated as a moribund bureaucracy, has undergone its most dramatic transformation since its founding. Finland and Sweden abandoned centuries of military non-alignment to join the alliance. Germany launched its Zeitenwende with over 100 billion euros allocated for rearmament. The UK and France have coordinated their nuclear deterrent postures and established the Coalition of the Willing, a 31-nation grouping that committed 40 billion euros in combined assistance for 2025 alone. European energy independence from Russia, once dismissed as economically impossible, was achieved within 18 months through emergency LNG infrastructure, renewable acceleration, and strategic diversification.

The Multi-Polar Authoritarian Axis and Marketplace Dynamics

Parallel to NATO’s revival, the war accelerated the formation of what might be termed a multi-polar authoritarian axis comprising Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. Yet this axis operates fundamentally differently from Cold War-era blocs. It functions as a transactional marketplace rather than an ideologically cohesive alliance with each member pursuing distinct strategic objectives while exploiting perceived Western weaknesses and divisions.

China’s relationship with Russia exemplifies these dynamics most starkly. Beijing has deepened economic and financial integration with Moscow substantially since 2022, the yuan now represents over 50 percent of Russia’s trade settlements compared to less than 2 percent pre-war, while Russian energy flows to China at significant discounts to global benchmark prices. Russia has effectively transitioned from energy price-setter to price-taker in this relationship, a subordination that reveals profound asymmetry: the partnership is existentially necessary for Moscow but strategically optional for Beijing. China has acquired leverage that can be exercised whenever Xi Jinping calculates it serves Chinese interests, whether that involves pressuring Russia toward negotiations, extracting additional concessions on border territories and resources, or simply maintaining the status quo of Russian dependence.

North Korea’s involvement has been even more dramatic and consequential. Pyongyang has supplied an estimated 40 percent of Russia’s artillery shell consumption and has deployed up to 30,000 troops to support Russian operations, representing the first major overseas combat deployment of North Korean forces since the Korean War. In exchange, North Korea receives hard currency, access to Russian military technology, and invaluable combat experience for its military, experience that poses direct security implications for South Korea, Japan, and US forces in the Indo-Pacific. Iran has similarly provided drones, missiles, and technical expertise, using Russia as a testing ground for systems that might subsequently be deployed against Israel or US interests in the Middle East.

Energy Security as System Infrastructure

One of the war’s most instructive lessons has been the demonstration that energy security constitutes critical system infrastructure for geopolitical competition, not merely an economic variable subject to market optimization. The Baltic states’ February 2025 synchronization with the Continental European electricity grid, severing their final connection to the Soviet-era system after nearly two decades of planning and over 1.2 billion euros in EU investment, exemplified this principle. That technical achievement carried profound strategic meaning: it isolated Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, demonstrated that European energy sovereignty from Moscow is achievable despite earlier skepticism, and proved that infrastructure investments guided by security imperatives can reshape strategic geography.

Venezuela fits precisely into this emerging paradigm. Control over major oil reserves and production infrastructure is being recognized as a strategic asset comparable to control over critical shipping chokepoints, semiconductor supply chains, or rare earth mineral deposits. The Trump administration’s willingness to assert direct control over Venezuelan energy assets, despite significant diplomatic costs and operational risks, signals that Washington has internalized this lesson and is prepared to weaponize energy geography as explicitly as it employs financial sanctions or export controls.

Risks, Constraints, and Coalition Fragmentation

The Venezuela strategy carries substantial risks and operational constraints that must be acknowledged candidly. Technically, reviving Venezuela’s oil sector represents a multi-year, capital-intensive undertaking hampered by severely degraded infrastructure, chronic underinvestment, and the emigration of skilled technical personnel over two decades of mismanagement. The disruption from labor strikes, political uncertainty, contractual disputes, and potential sabotage could actually tighten near-term global supply and temporarily lift benchmark prices, ironically providing Russia with a short-term revenue windfall even as the long-term strategic objective is to constrain Moscow’s earnings.

Politically, the operation’s optics reinforce longstanding accusations of American neocolonialism and interventionism in Latin America. Many states in the Global South that were already skeptical of Western narratives regarding Ukraine may perceive little moral distinction between Russian military aggression in Europe and U.S. coercive regime change in the Western Hemisphere. This perception risks undermining the moral clarity that Kiev and its supporters have worked to establish that the conflict represents a fundamental test of whether sovereignty and territorial integrity retain meaning in the 21st century international system.

If significant numbers of non-aligned states respond by purchasing increased volumes of discounted Russian crude, actively resisting enforcement of price caps, or offering registry services and insurance to shadow fleet vessels, they could substantially offset the intended revenue squeeze on Moscow. The success of this strategy therefore depends not only on operational execution in Venezuela itself, but on maintaining sufficient international support or at least acquiescence to prevent the emergence of alternative channels that simply replicate the sanctions-evasion networks Washington is attempting to dismantle.

Conclusion: Venezuela in the System War

Over the medium and long term, Venezuela is being systematically folded into a global theater of economic warfare whose central strategic front remains Ukraine but whose operational geography spans multiple continents and domains. The comprehensive campaign against Russia’s oil-based war-financing ecosystem now encompasses interlocking efforts: targeted sanctions on major energy firms and their executives, progressive designation of shadow fleet vessels and beneficial owners, Ukrainian long-range strikes on Russia-linked tankers and port facilities, EU and UK legal measures against insurance providers and maritime services, and now direct American seizure of control over a rival energy province that had been closely tied to Moscow’s interests.

If Washington can successfully navigate the substantial technical challenges of restoring Venezuelan production capacity and manage the considerable political costs of being perceived as an interventionist power, the combined effect of these measures will be to progressively narrow Russia’s financial and strategic room for maneuver even if the territorial situation on the ground in Ukraine changes only incrementally or enters prolonged stalemate. The objective is not immediate decisive victory through economic coercion alone, but rather sustained attrition that raises the costs of continued aggression to politically unsustainable levels over time.

In this sense, the Venezuelan operation should be understood not as a discrete episode, but as the opening of a new phase in what I have characterized as a system war, a comprehensive contest in which energy flows, tanker registries, joint venture contracts, and production infrastructure are treated as instruments of grand strategy alongside conventional military capabilities and territorial control.

The choice to open this particular front in the Caribbean underscores how profoundly the Ukraine conflict has already transformed into a wider struggle over the fundamental structure of the global energy order, and by extension, over which states and coalitions will possess the economic capacity to sustain their geopolitical ambitions in an era of renewed great-power competition.

The Emergence of the Multi-Polar Authoritarian World: Looking Back from 2024

And my forthcoming comprehensive book on the global war in Ukraine. I am publishing a much shorter book as an essay built on the more comprehensive one and that appears on February 15, 2026.