Zombie Strikes in the Caribbean: How an Energy Gambit Turned into Regime-Security Theater
- john raymond
- 2 hours ago
- 9 min read
I firmly believe that the Venezuelan boat strikes began as a Kremlin-serving energy operation: a covert attempt to choke Venezuelan crude to China so Beijing would be forced to rely more heavily on Russian oil and pay a premium for it.
But Ukraine’s systematic degradation of Russia’s oil infrastructure and the resilience of Venezuelan exports to China have stripped that operation of its original strategic rationale.
What remains now is a zombie campaign that persists not because it advances any coherent energy objective, but because it now functions as regime-security theater for President Trump—projecting strength, normalizing extrajudicial violence, and testing loyalty inside the U.S. system—even as its substantive value to Russia erodes.
To see this clearly, you have to separate the oil-market story from the regime-security story. The first has largely burned out. The second is still very much alive.
I. The original energy logic: squeeze Caracas to help Moscow
Start with the basic structure of the market.
Venezuela exports almost all of its crude. China is the dominant buyer, directly and indirectly taking on the order of half or more of Venezuelan exports—about 500,000 barrels per day in early 2025, roughly 55 percent of total shipments, much of it disguised via ship-to-ship transfers and relabeling to evade sanctions.
By late 2025, as Venezuelan output rebounded, exports reached around 1.09 million barrels per day in September, the highest since 2020, with China again the primary destination. In November, exports were still about 921,000 barrels per day, roughly 80 percent of them bound for China—some 746,000 barrels per day.
For a Kremlin that needs to sell discounted crude into Asia, this matters. Every heavy barrel China can take from someone else is a barrel it does not need from Russia.
If you assume a Trump–Kremlin alignment, an obvious asymmetric play presents itself: harass Venezuelan flows to China, not enough to trigger an outright oil shock, but enough to raise risk premia, disrupt logistics, and push Beijing to lean harder on Russian supply.
The early 2025 moves fit this pattern. In March, President Trump threatened 25 percent tariffs on any country that continued buying Venezuelan oil, prompting an immediate stall in Chinese purchases as traders scrambled to understand the new risk.
The message was clear: if you buy from Caracas, you buy under Washington’s gun.
By September, that macroeconomic pressure had been paired with kinetic pressure at sea. Under Operation Southern Spear, the United States began airstrikes on small vessels in the Caribbean Sea on 1–2 September 2025, later expanding to the Eastern Pacific.
The administration marketed this as a war on narco-terrorist boats, but it is naïve to treat that as the only axis of intention. In practice, a campaign that makes the waters around Venezuela visibly more dangerous for “illicit” shipping is a campaign that raises the cost and risk of clandestine crude logistics, particularly the gray-market shipments that ultimately feed Chinese refiners.
So the original logic, viewed through an energy-war lens, is straightforward:
Threaten tariffs and secondary sanctions to chill Chinese demand for Venezuelan barrels.
Use military force to make the Venezuelan maritime theater more hazardous and unpredictable.
Drive marginal barrels off the market or into higher-cost channels.
Force Beijing, at the margin, to rely more heavily on Russian crude, ideally at a premium that keeps Moscow afloat while extracting political concessions.
If you accept that premise set, the Venezuelan strikes are a Kremlin-serving operation carried out from inside the U.S. state.
II. Ukraine changes the board
Now lay Ukraine’s campaign on top of this.
Since late 2023 and accelerating through 2024–2025, Ukrainian drones and missiles have repeatedly attacked Russian refineries, export terminals, and key nodes of the pipeline system. By autumn 2025:
Sixteen major refineries with a combined capacity equal to roughly 38 percent of Russia’s total refining capacity had been attacked at least once.
Around 20 percent of capacity was temporarily taken offline at one point, although Russia mitigated the shock by activating spare units, limiting the sustained output drop to perhaps 3–6 percent.
Simultaneously, Western sanctions have shifted from the symbolic to the structural. The EU and G7 are now openly considering scrapping the price-cap regime in favor of a full ban on maritime services for Russian oil—shipping, insurance, and finance—by early 2026.
That would directly attack the logistics skeleton that carries Russian crude, especially to India and China, and force Moscow deeper into a costly shadow fleet and opaque, high-risk routing.
Despite this pressure, Russian crude exports remain substantial. October–November analysis shows that China and India still absorb the bulk of Russian shipments, with China alone buying nearly half of Russia’s seaborne crude at times, albeit at steep discounts and increasingly via non-G7 ships.
The key point is not that the exports have “totally collapsed” in volume; they have not. The key point is that the battle for Russia’s oil revenue is now being fought primarily through direct strikes on Russian infrastructure and direct constraints on Russian logistics, not through squeezing a third country like Venezuela.
Once Ukraine turned Russian refineries and ports into live targets, and once Brussels began openly entertaining a maritime-services ban, the marginal effect of harassing Venezuelan small craft on the Kremlin’s strategic position shrank dramatically.
The big levers on Russia’s oil war are now at Novorossiysk, Primorsk, Ust-Luga, the refineries, and the tanker fleet—not on low-tonnage boats in the Caribbean.
III. Venezuela’s exports to China prove stubbornly resilient
At the same time, the “victim” of the Caribbean campaign proved far more resilient than the architects of the operation might have hoped.
Despite Trump’s tariff threats in March 2025 that briefly stalled trade, China remains Venezuela’s primary customer.
The mechanics are crude but effective: ship-to-ship transfers, silenced AIS signals, and relabeling Venezuelan crude as Brazilian or Malaysian to disguise its origin. Traders rebranded more than a billion dollars’ worth of Venezuelan shipments as Brazilian crude over the last year alone to get it into China.
The volume story is unambiguous:
In January 2025, Venezuela exported about 867,000 barrels per day, with China as the top destination and deliveries rising more than 20 percent month-on-month.
By September 2025, exports broke above 1 million barrels per day, the highest level since 2020, again with China and Chinese-linked channels soaking up the majority of crude.
In November 2025, exports were still around 921,000 barrels per day, with roughly 80 percent—about 746,000 barrels per day—headed to China.
In parallel, Venezuela has exploited crypto-denominated schemes, alternative shipping arrangements, and third-country intermediaries to keep barrels moving despite sanctions.
The bottom line is simple: Venezuelan oil is still reaching China in large quantities, often under different names.
Set that against the operational facts of Operation Southern Spear. As of 4 December 2025, the U.S. has carried out 22 strikes on 23 vessels in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, killing roughly 87 people, under a campaign the administration describes as a war on drug traffickers and designated terrorist organizations such as Tren de Aragua and Colombia’s ELN.
These are small craft, not VLCCs carrying hundreds of thousands of barrels.
Thus, on the metrics that matter for the original energy logic—volumes to China, dependence on Russian barrels, and the price spread—Venezuela has not been meaningfully removed from the board. If anything, its exports to China have grown in spite of U.S. pressure.
IV. When strategy dies, regime security takes over
At this point the original “help Russia by starving China of Venezuelan barrels” rationale is badly degraded. Ukraine is hitting Russia’s energy system directly. Europe is targeting Russian shipping. Venezuelan barrels are still pouring into Chinese refiners. The energy-market payoff from harassing small boats near Venezuela is negligible.
And yet the strikes continue.
This is where you have to shift to a regime-security and asymmetric-warfare frame.
From a Pillar One perspective—regime security as prime directive—the campaign delivers several benefits to President Trump that are independent of any Kremlin energy payoff:
First, it projects personal ruthlessness. Polling shows that 71 percent of Americans support “destroying boats trafficking drugs from South America” when the question is framed that way, but only 29 percent support “killing suspected drug traffickers abroad without judicial process” once the legal reality is made explicit.
The administration’s messaging sticks to the first framing; the reality is closer to the second, especially in the September strike where survivors clinging to wreckage were reportedly killed in follow-up attacks.
This disjunction is not an accident. It allows Trump to posture as the man who “blows up narco-terrorist boats” while normalizing the idea that his enemies can be killed abroad on his say-so.
Second, it functions as a loyalty filter inside the military and legal apparatus. Authorizing double-tap strikes on shipwrecked survivors is a bright red line in the law of armed conflict. Any officer, JAG, or civilian lawyer who balks marks themselves as unreliable; anyone who goes along demonstrates that their primary loyalty is to the leader, not to the law.
The longer the campaign runs, the more personnel get implicated. Their own exposure binds them to the regime.
Third, it is a test case for expanding executive war powers without congressional authorization. Operation Southern Spear is being justified under the rhetoric of an “armed conflict” against cartels, with the administration invoking an armed-conflict law framework rather than treating these killings as law-enforcement or covert operations.
Congress is only now groping toward a war-powers challenge. In the meantime, a precedent is being created: the president can wage a micro-war against a foreign-designated enemy, in multiple theaters, killing dozens, without any formal authorization.
From a Pillar Two perspective—asymmetric warfare—the strikes are cheap, legally deniable, and narratively potent. A single precision weapon dropped from a drone onto a fiberglass hull costs relatively little; the legal and diplomatic fallout in Latin America and Europe costs the United States prestige and moral capital that may never be fully recovered.
Every allegation of war crimes in the Caribbean dulls the force of Western condemnation of Russian atrocities in Ukraine. Moscow and Beijing can point to these strikes and say, with a straight face, that Washington also kills people at sea without trial.
Overlay the Pillar Three traitor-general lens—where you treat President Trump as a de facto hostile actor operating inside the Western system—and the Venezuelan strikes become a multi-use sabotage tool:
They strain relations with Venezuela, Colombia, and other regional states whose citizens may be among the dead, deepening anti-U.S. sentiment in the hemisphere at precisely the moment the West needs a united front against Russia and China.
They crowd out media and political bandwidth that might otherwise be devoted to sustaining Ukraine or tightening the vise on Russian oil. And they further normalize a world in which great powers violate the law and then brazen it out.
In that light, even an “ineffective” campaign can still be highly effective—just on a different objective function.
V. Marginal utility versus mounting liability
The remaining question is: does the marginal regime-security utility of continuing these strikes still outweigh the liabilities, in Trump’s own mind and in the joint Trump–Kremlin strategic space?
Objectively, the liabilities are mounting:
War-crime exposure from double-tap strikes on survivors.
The possibility that future investigations will identify some of the dead as fishermen or third-country nationals, inflaming public opinion.
Congressional war-powers pushback that could, in principle, constrain future operations.
The gradual erosion of U.S. moral standing in Latin America and the wider world.
But under a regime-security calculus, those are not pure negatives.
Legal exposure for senior officers and officials makes them more dependent on Trump’s continued power, because only he can credibly promise pardons or continued protection.
Domestic controversy gives him another grievance narrative against “weak” politicians and human-rights “globalists” who supposedly care more about traffickers than about American security.
International outrage blurs moral distinctions between Washington and Moscow, which serves Putin’s interest in a world where everyone looks equally dirty.
From that perspective, the campaign will continue until one of three things happens:
A truly catastrophic incident turns the political cost curve vertical—say, unambiguous footage of an obviously civilian boat being destroyed, with victims from a key ally.
Congress or the courts succeed in imposing a binding constraint on further strikes.
Trump concludes that he gets more regime-security benefit from “magnanimously” winding the operation down and claiming victory than from continuing it.
Absent one of those triggers, the marginal utility remains positive in his narrow sense, even as the operation’s most likely original Kremlin-friendly energy logic decays.
VI. What the zombie campaign really teaches
The Venezuelan boat strikes today are not about oil. They are about what kind of system the United States is becoming and how that system interacts with the global authoritarian axis.
What began as a backdoor favor to Moscow—tilting China’s barrel calculus by harassing an alternative supplier—has lost its original leverage as Ukraine attacks Russia directly and Venezuelan barrels continue to reach Chinese refiners in large volumes. The campaign no longer makes strategic sense if you look only at the flow of crude.
But it continues to make sense if you look at it as a live experiment in normalizing extrajudicial killing, expanding unconstrained executive war-making, testing institutional loyalty, and helping erase the moral asymmetry between the West and its adversaries.
On such a board, the operation is not an aberration; it is a feature.
That is the real lesson. When an operation’s original purpose has obviously failed, but it continues regardless, you are no longer analyzing policy.
You are looking at regime security. You are looking at the traitor-general problem.
And you are watching a zombie strike campaign that tells you far more about Trump’s project—and about the system that still tolerates it—than it does about Venezuelan drugs or even oil.