The Oldest Statecraft
While the world’s attention has been fixed on the Middle East, a different operation has been unfolding quietly across three countries and one very old logic.
Something keeps nagging at us.
It started with Maduro. Not the fact of his removal, which had been coming for years, but the method. A military operation, a capture, a very deliberate transfer of Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) operational control to U.S.-aligned traders within weeks. It feels less like regime change and more like an acquisition.
Then Cuba starts appearing in the sidelines of the news feed, energy numbers that don’t add up, blackouts worsening in a pattern that feels structural rather than chronic, a quiet emergency that isn’t getting the coverage its severity warrants. And then last week, in a phone interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, President Trump said Cuba “is gonna fall pretty soon,” adding that he plans to send Secretary of State Marco Rubio to handle it once Iran is resolved.
That line lands differently once you’ve been watching the data. It doesn’t feel like bluster. It feels like the next line of a script that has already started.
Around the same time, we are tracking patterns in oil flows that feel deliberate in a way routine market movements don’t tend to feel:
India cutting Russian crude sharply and faster than energy policy normally shifts;
Venezuelan barrels suddenly moving through Western traders toward buyers that haven’t touched Venezuelan oil in years;
Washington making unusually specific public statements about where the oil will go and who will buy it, naming countries and companies with a specificity that suggests this isn’t commentary on market forces but something closer to a managed transaction.
We start asking the obvious question. Why these three countries? Why now, in this compressed window? And why this particular combination of tools, this specific layering of sanctions, energy strangulation, conditional market access, and emergency executive orders rather than military pressure or diplomacy alone? The more we pull on the thread, the more it connects.
Cuba is a node in something considerably larger: a restructuring of who controls the world’s sanctioned oil, moving quickly and largely below the threshold of mainstream analysis.
Before we explain what we think is actually happening, here is what the current situation in Cuba looks like on the ground. Since January 2026, roughly 60% of the island’s oil supply, the Venezuela barter line, has been severed. Mexico paused shipments under tariff threat. Russia pledged to continue but faces the same exposure. The result is rolling blackouts across provinces, transport collapse, the health system straining under fuel shortages, and airports running dry. The island experienced a near-total grid failure on March 5th.
Cuba has endured ten American administrations and sixty-six years of pressure. What is different now is that the supply architecture that allowed it to survive the last three decades has been dismantled, systematically and simultaneously, in a matter of weeks.
The deep archive
At RAKSHA, we look backward as deliberately as we look forward. The future lives in the past’s unresolved logic.
Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba are not simply ideological allies flying the same anti-American flag. They are a functioning parallel oil economy, built specifically because each country has been locked out of normal markets by decades of U.S. sanctions, and survival required finding ways around that exclusion. The system they built together is less a formal alliance than a set of overlapping dependencies:
Venezuela bartered oil to Cuba in exchange for doctors, security services, and political loyalty, while also running condensate swaps with Iran where technology and refinery access flowed one direction and heavy crude routing arrangements flowed the other.
Both countries sold heavily discounted crude to China, Venezuela directing roughly 85% of its exports there in the years before 2026, Iran supplying Chinese independent refiners at rates that systematically undercut market pricing.
Russia completed the architecture, providing Cuba with emergency shipments, Venezuela with financial cover, and Iran with diplomatic insulation at the United Nations.
The network operated as an axis of energy rather than ideology, a parallel supply chain built on sanctions evasion and mutual dependence, resilient precisely because it was distributed and informal. No single node was essential enough to collapse the whole thing. The participants had learned, through hard experience, that building redundancy into sanctioned supply chains was the difference between survival and collapse.
The U.S. has now attacked all three nodes simultaneously. And this is only the most visible part of a much larger pattern. The same logic runs across the entire Office of Foreign Assets Control's (OFAC) "policy of denial" cluster: Nicaragua's state oil importer cut off from Venezuelan barter flows; North Korea's energy capped by United Nations sanctions with Chinese waivers offered and withdrawn as a behavioral lever; Myanmar's gas revenues strangled after the 2021 coup; Syria's oil sector frozen under the Caesar Act until Assad fell. The instruments vary - some bilateral, some run through multilateral bodies, Iran involving Israel as a direct co-actor, but the strategic logic in each case traces back to Washington.
Syria is instructive precisely because it shows what the exit looks like when the strategy works: the sanctions lift, the reconstruction contracts open, the asset capture begins. Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela are simply where the pressure is most acutely in motion right now.
The oldest statecraft, refined
This is not a new playbook. Its lineage runs long enough that recognizing it changes how you read the present.
The logic of controlling who eats, who trades, and who survives has been a tool of power for as long as there have been powers worth the name. The British built an empire partly on it, using the Navigation Acts to dictate who could carry what into which ports. When the Dutch strangled Antwerp by closing the Scheldt river in the 1580s, they were making an economic argument: that a city cut off from its supply lines will eventually negotiate on whatever terms the cutter offers.
What the First World War did was industrialize this logic. When Britain imposed its naval blockade on Germany in 1914, it interdicted roughly 80% of German imports while simultaneously managing neutral states through a calibrated mix of pressure and access. Sweden and Norway were intermediaries: too important to antagonize, too useful to leave unmanaged. Britain offered them selective access, waivers on certain goods, the implicit promise that compliance would be rewarded. The neutrals largely complied. Germany’s GDP contracted by nearly a third. The blockade held until the armistice.
India in 2026 is Sweden in 1916. The instruments are different, Treasury designations and Office of Foreign Assets Control licenses rather than naval interception orders, but the underlying logic of the managed neutral is identical.
What is different in 2026 is the precision. The First World War blockade was a blunt instrument, total or near-total. What the current operation is running is something more surgical: tighten on targets, loosen for compliant neutrals, redirect the flows, capture the assets. The dial has been refined across centuries into something that can distinguish between Germany and India, between Cuba and Vietnam, between a state being punished and a state being onboarded. A blunt instrument at least signals clearly what it is.
What happened in Venezuela
The Venezuela move is the most structurally significant development of early 2026 and also the most misread.
Washington did not simply remove a regime, it reorganized the commercial infrastructure through which Venezuelan oil reaches global markets. Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. exports began moving through U.S.-aligned traders Vitol and Trafigura, with proceeds flowing into U.S.-controlled accounts and buyers redirected to India, Europe, and American Gulf Coast refiners. Venezuelan oil sales reached approximately $2 billion by the end of February alone, and the adversarial supply node was converted into a managed one.
Cuba’s crisis followed directly from this conversion. The Venezuela barter line, which had accounted for roughly 60% of the island’s oil supply, was severed; Mexico paused under tariff threat from Executive Order 14380; Russia pledged to continue but faces the same exposure. The result is what the administration in Washington has described explicitly: pressure through energy strangulation, a private-sector release valve offered in parallel, and a wait for bargaining to begin. Blackouts across provinces, transport collapse, a near-total grid failure on March 5th. Some frame this as a humanitarian crisis, but it is managed collapse, designed to produce a negotiated outcome rather than sudden rupture.
How Iran connects everything
When Venezuelan crude shifted to market rates, China’s independent refiners pivoted immediately to Iranian crude as the replacement cheap barrel, increasing Tehran’s revenues at precisely the moment U.S. military pressure was escalating. The disruption of one sanctioned supply source created demand pressure on another, which provided additional justification for striking the second. The three theaters form a sequence, each one creating the conditions for the next.
That sequence led directly to India. Through late 2025 into early 2026, the U.S. ran India through a full conditioning cycle: tariff, pledge, tariff cut, compliance expectation. India’s refiners moved from Russian crude to Venezuelan and Gulf barrels, and then the Gulf became the problem.
Following U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran beginning February 28, Iranian forces hit back across Gulf infrastructure in escalating waves. Saudi Arabia’s Ras Tanura refinery shut down March 2, Qatar’s Ras Laffan liquefied natural gas facilities halted between March 2 and 4, Bahrain’s Maameer desalination plant was struck March 8. Iran frames each strike as retaliation. The U.S. and Israel dispute the framing. What is not in dispute is the cumulative effect: oil above $85, and Indian refiners squeezed from both sides simultaneously, Russian crude phased out under American pressure, Gulf supply suddenly disrupted.
The desalination strikes added a dimension beyond oil. The Gulf states source between 70 and 90% of their drinking water from desalination plants that run on oil and gas. When refineries burn and water systems go dark in the same week, the calculation for every importer shifts in ways that oil price alone does not capture.
On March 5, Treasury Secretary Bessent issued a 30-day waiver for stranded Russian cargoes, with the explicit expectation that India would pivot back to American supply once the crisis stabilized. India is proof of concept of a structured conditioning program.
Sanctions as a dial
Sanctions are not a fixed policy. The should be thought of as a dial, adjusted in real time based on the strategic purpose being served.
On the same day Bessent issued the Russia waiver for Germany and India, Executive Order 14380 remained fully in force for Cuba - no carve-outs, no temporary waivers, no breathing room for any country that tries to supply Havana. The same legal apparatus, the same week, producing entirely different outcomes for different states, each calibrated to its place in the hierarchy: European energy security first, allied importer onboarding second, adversarial regime pressure third.
Germany gets a waiver because a fuel crisis in Berlin would fracture the transatlantic alliance Washington needs intact. India gets 30 days because it is being onboarded into the Venezuelan pipeline and cannot be allowed to drift back to Russian crude mid-transition. Cuba gets nothing because Cuba is not a customer being courted, it is the target itself. Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Gulf infrastructure are accelerating that calibration without changing its underlying logic.
The dial turns, states adjust, and the architecture builds itself one compliance at a time.
Why Cuba specifically
Once the dial logic is visible, the Cuba question reframes itself in a way that makes the strategy much clearer.
Cuba is the most profitable node to crack, and the profit is not only geopolitical. Grupo de Administración Empresarial, S.A. (GAESA), the Cuban military’s commercial conglomerate, controls an estimated $18 billion empire - somewhere between 40 and 95% of the island’s foreign exchange earnings, plus the dominant share of hotels, tourism, retail, gas distribution, and import-export operations. It is among the most opaque economic structures in the Western Hemisphere, deliberately built over decades to be impenetrable to outside actors, and under current conditions the most financially vulnerable it has been since the Special Period of the early 1990s.
The Venezuelan oil cut hit GAESA’s revenue base directly. Tourism collapsed without fuel to run the hotel sector, and the foreign exchange the conglomerate extracts from the Cuban economy contracted sharply. The structure that survived sixty-six years of American pressure is now running on fumes alongside the population it nominally serves, and that simultaneous exhaustion is precisely the condition the strategy requires.
A negotiated opening to American firms would mean capital access to that $18 billion portfolio - hotels, real estate, retail infrastructure, port facilities ninety miles from Florida, in a market untouched since 1960. It would mean cobalt and nickel reserves, Cuba holding the third-largest cobalt deposits globally, currently being developed with China and potentially redirected toward American-aligned supply chains. It would mean expelling Russia’s largest overseas intelligence base and dismantling four Chinese signals intelligence facilities targeting American military installations and Florida infrastructure. The Venezuela operation proved the model: seize the infrastructure, redirect the flows, capture the assets. Cuba offers the same logic applied to tourism monopolies, strategic minerals, and the most strategically located real estate in the hemisphere - a leveraged acquisition with a sanctions wrapper, and Cuba’s current desperation is the discount that makes the deal possible.
The doctrine goes public
On March 7, two days after Cuba’s grid failed, the U.S. administration convened the Shield of the Americas summit at Trump National Doral in Florida. Fourteen countries attended. Mexico was not invited. Colombia was not present. Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela were explicitly excluded from what had originally been planned as the tenth Summit of the Americas, until that gathering collapsed under the weight of the region’s divisions over the Maduro raid.
What replaced it was something more revealing. The assembled leaders, Argentina’s Javier Milei, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa, Paraguay, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Panama, Costa Rica, Trinidad and Tobago, Chile’s president-elect among them, signed a proclamation launching the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, a 17-nation military alliance framing its purpose as the lethal destruction of cartel and narcoterrorist networks. The anti-cartel language is the public wrapper. Underneath it sits something the administration named openly at the same summit.
Venezuela’s new president, Delcy Rodríguez, was formally recognized, and the administration announced it is “taking out tremendous amounts of oil” and has “the big oil companies in.” A gold and minerals agreement was announced, terms unspecified. Cuba, the administration said, is in negotiations directly through Rubio, and a “friendly takeover” was not ruled out. “Cuba’s at the end of the line,” the president said. “They have no money. They have no oil. They used to get the money from Venezuela. They get the oil from Venezuela, but they don’t have any money from Venezuela. They don’t have any oil.”
That is a sequencing statement. The national security framing that underpins the summit, what the administration calls the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, explicitly targets Chinese infrastructure investment, military cooperation, and resource industry presence across the hemisphere. The U.S. capture of Maduro and the pledge to “run” Venezuela threatens to disrupt oil shipments to China, the biggest buyer of Venezuelan crude before the raid, and bring into Washington’s orbit one of Beijing’s closest allies in the region.
The summit is analytically significant for one reason above all: it confirms that what we have been describing as covert architecture is now declared doctrine. The oil rerouting, the energy strangulation, the asset capture logic, the sequencing from Venezuela to Cuba to the broader hemisphere, none of this is being obscured.
Cuban President Díaz-Canel described the summit as “small, reactionary, and neocolonial,” writing that the U.S. has committed right-wing governments in the region “to accept the lethal use of U.S. military force to resolve internal problems.” What he described is precisely what was announced - he is simply on the receiving end of it.
What doesn’t resolve
The operation’s own contradictions matter for what comes next:
China is not complying: Beijing’s independent refiners moved to Iranian crude when Venezuelan supply tightened, and the U.S. has not found a lever that changes Chinese sourcing behavior at scale. China absorbs enough global volume that its continued non-compliance partially offsets the pressure being applied elsewhere.
India remains exposed on both sides simultaneously. Washington needs it as the anchor importer for Venezuelan re-routing, while the Iran escalation the U.S. helped generate threatens the Gulf supply India’s refiners depend on for the majority of their crude, and Indian refiners are already signaling they may reintroduce Russian oil if Hormuz disruption continues.
Cuba’s tolerance for deprivation is structurally underestimated, as it has been in every American administration since Eisenhower. Sixty-six years of pressure have produced a state with a higher threshold for material hardship than any Western strategic model fully accounts for, and managed collapse as a strategy assumes the regime will choose to bargain before it breaks. That assumption has been wrong before.
The fracture worth watching is not whether Cuba falls or whether Iran escalates further in isolation. It is whether the re-routing architecture holds at scale, whether the states being sequentially pressured into the American-controlled Venezuelan pipeline stay in line when the costs of compliance mount and alternatives, however constrained, remain available.
What makes this statecraft rather than simply sanctions policy is the simultaneity. Multiple instruments, multiple theaters, a single underlying logic of redirecting who controls sanctioned energy flows and capturing the assets that flow from that control. No single action explains it. The Venezuela capture makes Cuban strangulation possible. The Cuban strangulation creates the acquisition target. Iran’s strikes on Gulf infrastructure accelerate the compliance logic that drives India, Vietnam, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, and South Korea toward Venezuelan barrels. The desalination strikes compound the pressure because they turn an oil story into a water story, and water moves governments differently than oil does. Each element amplifies the others. The dial turns across all of them at once.
Vietnam, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, South Korea: each faces a version of the same choice India already made, and each carries the same internal contradiction. The instability being generated to drive them toward Venezuelan supply is the same instability making their energy futures harder to secure. That gap, between the ambition of the operation and the durability of compliant buyer behavior, is where the next fracture lives.
RAKSHA Intelligence Futures tracks structural fractures in geopolitics, capital, and governance, 6 to 18 months before they become visible crises.
On March 31, we publish Geopolitical Fractures 2026: Where the Next Crisis Already Lives - our flagship annual report mapping the fractures that will define the next 18 months. The energy coercion architecture described in this piece is one of four structural fractures we track in depth. Register for early access or get in touch to discuss what it means for your institution.