Relief, legitimacy, and the moral asymmetry of the Left
Venezuela, black-market oil, Russia’s war economy, and the false charge of American plunder
The collapse of Nicolás Maduro’s rule has exposed a fault line that runs far deeper than contemporary Venezuelan politics. It has laid bare a recurring moral asymmetry within Western progressive discourse: an instinctive hostility toward Western power combined with a striking indulgence toward non-Western authoritarianism, provided it is rhetorically anti-American. The scenes of celebration and relief emerging from Venezuelan communities—both within the country and across the diaspora—have been met not with curiosity or sympathy, but with denunciation. The dictator’s removal, rather than the dictatorship itself, has become the principal moral scandal.
This inversion cannot be understood without grasping how Maduro’s regime functioned in its final years. By any serious constitutional or democratic measure, Maduro’s claim to the presidency had collapsed long before his removal. The 2018 election was widely rejected by international observers as procedurally compromised and substantively fraudulent. The subsequent emasculation of the National Assembly, the creation of parallel institutions loyal to the executive, and the routine use of repression to silence dissent entrenched the view—held by a substantial proportion of Venezuelans—that Maduro ruled not by law, but by force.¹ He presided over a state that retained the outward form of sovereignty while hollowing out its substance.
It is within this context that public relief must be understood. Celebration did not arise from geopolitical calculation, nor from naïveté about foreign interests. It arose from exhaustion. After years of hyperinflation, collapsing public services, chronic shortages, and mass emigration, Maduro came to symbolise not merely a failed leader but a closed horizon. His continued presence signified permanence: no accountability, no reform, no lawful transition. The end of that stasis—however uncertain what followed—registered emotionally as release.
Crucially, Maduro’s survival depended less on popular consent than on the systematic criminalisation of Venezuela’s primary national asset. As sanctions intensified and infrastructure decayed, the regime increasingly abandoned lawful oil markets in favour of black-market mechanisms. Venezuelan crude was sold at deep discounts through opaque intermediaries; tankers operated with transponders switched off; ship-to-ship transfers obscured origin; documentation was falsified; cargoes were blended and rebranded through third countries.² These practices were not peripheral workarounds. They became the regime’s economic backbone, insulating elites and security services while the population absorbed the costs through scarcity and inflation.
This transformation of a national oil industry into a sanctions-evasion racket is central to the moral argument—and it is precisely here that much left-wing commentary falls silent. Black-market oil is routinely euphemised as “sanctions resistance,” as though the theft of national wealth and its diversion into elite survival mechanisms were morally neutral so long as it frustrates Western policy. The Venezuelan poor, in whose name such resistance is supposedly mounted, are rendered invisible once again.
By the early 2020s, this criminalised energy system did not operate in isolation. Venezuela became a functional node within a broader authoritarian energy network, intersecting with Russian sanctions-evasion following the invasion of Ukraine. Moscow, facing unprecedented restrictions on its own oil exports, benefited from the precedents Venezuela had already established. Cooperation between Russian and Venezuelan entities, shipping firms, and intermediaries enabled blending, reflagging, and resale practices that diluted enforcement and preserved hard-currency inflows.³ Maduro’s oil did not merely sustain domestic repression; it helped normalise the logistics of a shadow energy economy that Russia would later deploy at scale.⁴
This fact alone exposes the incoherence of much progressive outrage. The same voices that speak of solidarity with Ukraine—or at least condemn Russian aggression—have often ignored or minimised Maduro’s role in sustaining sanctions-evasion structures that made that aggression more financially survivable. Anti-imperialism, in practice, has become a selective ethic: Western power is always suspect, while non-Western authoritarianism is granted infinite contextual mitigation.
It is at this point that the familiar accusation appears: that the United States, and Donald Trump in particular, seeks to rule Venezuela or to steal its oil. This charge functions less as analysis than as ideological reflex. It collapses under even modest scrutiny. The United States lacks both the appetite and the institutional capacity for long-term colonial administration of a collapsed petrostate. Trump’s framing—however blunt—has been consistently transitional: remove an illegitimate, destabilising regime; dismantle criminal energy networks; and create the conditions under which Venezuela can re-enter lawful markets as a sovereign trading partner.
The language of “oil theft” is especially revealing. Theft implies expropriation without consent or compensation. Yet under Maduro, Venezuela’s oil was already being stripped of value—sold cheaply through criminal channels that enriched regime insiders and foreign intermediaries while impoverishing the population.⁵ What is proposed instead is the restoration of contractual, transparent, mutually profitable trade. Such trade presupposes Venezuelan sovereignty, enforceable law, functioning institutions, and accountability. It is not colonial extraction but post-collapse normalisation.
That American firms might participate in rebuilding infrastructure is not evidence of imperial plunder. It reflects a transactional worldview in which stability is secured through commerce rather than ideological isolation. Ending black-market oil does not diminish Venezuelan sovereignty; it is a precondition for its recovery. The alternative is not purity but continued criminalisation.
The Left’s response to this distinction reveals the depth of its moral asymmetry. Sovereignty is invoked as an absolute principle only when external actors intervene, not when it is violated daily from within. Legalism flourishes at the moment of disruption, but was conspicuously absent while constitutions were hollowed out, elections ritualised, and national wealth siphoned into opaque networks aligned with foreign war economies. Law becomes sacred only once it no longer serves the regime in question.
This is why the celebrations matter. They are not evidence of manipulation or false consciousness. People do not celebrate abstract geopolitics; they celebrate endings. The end of an illegitimate ruler. The end—however provisional—of a regime that reduced a nation’s principal resource to a black-market instrument serving repression at home and aggression abroad. Celebration does not imply trust in the United States, nor enthusiasm for foreign influence. It simply marks the lifting of a burden.
That such relief has been met with moral outrage from commentators who never queued for food, watched savings evaporate, or saw their country folded into Russia’s sanctions-evasion machinery should prompt reflection. It suggests that, for much of the contemporary Left, opposition to Western power has become so absolute that it eclipses any consistent opposition to tyranny, corruption, and war.
The Venezuelan crisis cannot be understood without confronting the role of black-market oil and Russian collaboration in sustaining dictatorship and funding aggression abroad. To omit this dimension is not nuance but evasion. Equally, to insist that American involvement can only mean rule or theft is to deny Venezuelans agency and to romanticise a criminal order that devastated a nation. The celebrations seen among Venezuelans are not a misunderstanding of power. They are a recognition that an illegitimate system—sustained by oil, crime, and foreign authoritarian interests—has finally been broken, and that the possibility of lawful stability, however uncertain, has at last re-entered history.
¹ Organization of American States, Report of the High-Level Commission on Venezuela, 2018; European Union statements on the non-recognition of the 2018 presidential election.
² Reuters, investigative reporting on Venezuelan oil exports via shadow tanker fleets and opaque intermediaries, 2019–2024.
³ Financial Times, reporting on Russian–Venezuelan energy cooperation and sanctions-evasion practices following the invasion of Ukraine, 2022–2024.
⁴ International Energy Agency, Oil Market Reports, 2022–2024; Bruegel Institute analyses on Russian oil sanctions evasion.
⁵ Transparency International, Corruption and State Capture in Venezuela; Global Witness reports on illicit oil trading and elite enrichment.
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