Subject: Re: As Albaby says...
Question for you: Who was in charge of Venezuela's oil on January 2, 2026 and who was in charge of it from January 4, 2026 onwards?

On January 2, 2006: the military dictatorship that rules Venezuela.
On January 4, 2006: the military dictatorship that rules Venezuela.

The fact that you asked this series of questions shows that you're overlooking the main point. Because we didn't actually change the regime, we didn't change who's running Venezuela. This is what keep tripping up the Administration's messaging during the immediate aftermath of the Maduro seizure. Trump kept saying that we're running the country, people would ask "how, exactly, are we running the country without a single member of U.S. personnel inside the country?," and then Rubio would have to walk that back and say that we're not running the country but influencing the direction it goes in.

As far as attributing points to others, nice try on the "US oil companies" bit. I don't believe I've taken much of a stand one way or the other on that. Why? Because I don't care.

What I care about is tying a rope around the nuts of China and Cuba's oil supplies and giving it a good yank when we feel like it. Everything else is secondary.

Then you need to care about the U.S. oil companies, because that's the key element to that. Once more, with feeling - we haven't changed who's running Venezuela. Therefore, all of the things that led them to be active allies with China are still present to the same degree as they were before. We don't have any rope today that we didn't have before the capture of Maduro. It's not removing Maduro - it's the fact that we relocated our flagship carrier group (from the Middle East, which fleet is probably missing that capability a bit now that Iran may be popping off) and a host of other naval assets into the region to impose a blockade of Venezuela tankers.

But we're not going to keep doing that indefinitely. When we do, Venezuela will start conducting itself the way it does when there isn't a massive naval buildup conducting an active blockade. And since nothing else has changed in the country, there's no particular reason to suspect that it will start to behave differently than it did before Maduro was removed. Especially since, again, they're in hock to the Chinese for $100 billion and are more naturally allied with them for a host of geopolitical reasons.

Oh? Losing 4.5% of your entire oil supply is not "modest" nor is it "easily replaced".

It is both modest and easily replaced. You know that oil is fungible. The U.S. plan is not to take Venezuelan oil off the market. It's to have the Venezuelans sell to us, instead of China and Cuba. Presumably Trump is going to start lifting sanctions against Venezuela (though there's going go be some domestic pushback to that, so maybe not), which would allow them to start exporting more to us.

But we only have so much refining capacity for heavy sour oil. So whatever the Venezuelans sell to us is simply going to displace heavy sour imports we bring in from Mexico and Canada. But Mexico and Canada are still going to need to sell that oil. So they'll sell it to China.

It will take some amount of time for those flows to reconfigure - but a nonmaterial amount, in terms of China's strategic position. And you know, Russia's right next to China that might be willing to shift some of their oil exports over to China to help a fellow ally out - especially since India's decided they want to temporarily reduce their oil imports from Russia a bit (but still near record highs) in order to get Trump over the finish line for a trade deal.

Oil is fungible, and the world is awash with oil right now. It's not that important a strategic asset for China in the short-term, since there's plenty of it around, and the flows will very quickly adjust.

Cuba is screwed. Their oil imports are about to go to zero and that's adios to their energy sector.

I agree. This might end up having a huge impact on Cuba. Even a temporary (weeks or months not years) cessation in oil imports from Venezuela might cause it to collapse. But Cuba wasn't the country that was generating all those terrible things that you listed in your post above - it was Venezuela. And by not changing the government of Venezuela, we're not going to be materially changing Venezuela's behavior going forward.

Again - exactly the same people (minus two) are running Venezuela today as were running Venezuela before the operation. Removing those two people is unlikely to materially change how Venezuela behaves going forward, because those behaviors were caused by a ton of geopolitical factors and the nature of the regime which haven't changed.