An oil rig, symbolizing Venezuela's oil industry, with naval vessels, representing Iran's efforts to export fuel and project military presence in the Atlantic, often in defiance of U.S. pressure. Photo: BettBeat Media.
By Karim Bettache – Nov 24, 2025
Venezuela is being cast in a role it did not audition for: the alternative fuel station for an empire preparing to set the Middle East ablaze.
The theater of American foreign policy has become so transparent in its deceptions that even the most credulous among us should now see through the performance. The sudden elevation of Venezuela—a nation that warranted barely a mention during the recent presidential campaign—to the status of existential threat reveals not a new strategic priority, but the careful staging of alibis for wars already planned.
We are being prepared. The machinery is being positioned. The narratives are being constructed. And Venezuela, that oil-rich nation conveniently located an ocean away from the Persian Gulf, is being cast in a role it did not audition for: the alternative fuel station for an empire preparing to set the Middle East ablaze.
The logic is brutal in its simplicity. If you plan to wage war against Iran—and make no mistake, this war has been desired, planned, and postponed more times than we can count—you must first solve a problem of mathematics and geography. The Strait of Hormuz, through which flows roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply, will almost certainly be closed in any serious conflict with Tehran. This is not speculation; it is strategic inevitability.
So what does an empire do when it knows it will soon choke off its own energy supply? It secures an alternative. It manufactures a crisis that allows it to seize control of the largest oil reserves on the planet. It transforms a regional irritant into a national emergency, complete with the familiar rhetoric of drugs, terrorism, and threats to the homeland—the very same vocabulary deployed to justify every imperial adventure of the past half-century.
The timing betrays the intent. At precisely the moment when questions about American subservience to Israeli strategic interests have reached a crescendo—when even the willfully blind are beginning to ask why their entire political system seems oriented around the demands of a foreign state engaged in acts that much of the world recognizes as genocide—suddenly, miraculously, we discover a new foreign policy priority. Venezuela! Of course! How did we not see this mortal threat before?
This is the propaganda of misdirection. Create the appearance of an independent American agenda, even as that agenda serves to enable the very wars that American power has committed itself to fighting on Israel’s behalf. The war planners in Washington and Tel Aviv understand that public skepticism has reached dangerous levels. They understand that millions now see clearly what was once obscured: that American foreign policy in West Asia is not designed to serve America’s population, but to serve the dominance of the Israeli state and the ideological project of Zionism.
So, as laid out by Alon Mizrahi, they must create the illusion of autonomy. They must pretend that American power still acts according to its own calculations, pursues its own objectives, defends its own interests. Venezuela becomes the stage prop in this elaborate deception—proof, they hope, that America has not wholly surrendered its sovereignty to a foreign capital.
But the Venezuelan gambit serves a dual purpose. It is both camouflage and preparation. It obscures the true object of American military planning while simultaneously positioning the pieces for that very confrontation. When the war with Iran comes—and it will come, for the logic of the current trajectory permits no other conclusion—the empire will need Venezuelan oil. It will need to have already established its dominance over those reserves, already neutralized any government that might choose to withhold them or demand fair compensation for them.
The war with Venezuela will be sold as a war for democracy, for human rights, for the suffering Venezuelan people, and against drug trafficking, against terrorism, against the threat of ‘criminals’ flooding the US border. The war with Iran will be sold as a war for security, for stability, for peace. But both will be wars of choice, wars of aggression, wars designed to maintain a dying empire’s control over the resources and geography of a world that is slipping from its grasp.
And when the Strait of Hormuz closes, when global oil prices skyrocket, when the economic disruption spreads across the planet—then we will understand why Venezuela had to be secured first. Then the logic will become clear. Then we will see that this was always the plan, that the pieces were being moved into position while we were distracted by spectacle and propaganda.
The stage is being set. Venezuela is the opening act. But the real show, the catastrophic finale they have been preparing, waits in the wings. And unless we stop it, the curtain will rise on a war that will dwarf in its destruction everything we have witnessed so far.
(Substack)
Karim Bettache
Prof. Karim Bettache acquired his BSc and MSc in psychology at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and his Ph.D. in psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has worked as a postdoctoral fellow with the cultural psychologist Professor Chi-yue Chiu and as a lecturer for Monash University. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor for the Faculty of Social Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
He specializes in cultural, political, and social psychology. His work attempts to connect individual psychological phenomena (e.g., racism) to broader sociopolitical and historical developments of human societies (e.g., colonialism or capitalism). Hence, his work strongly overlaps with a multitude of social sciences such as sociology and the political sciences.
