When one asks why the US is attacking Venezuela, is it just because of the oil?

I mean, that is a big part of it, but it's much more.

It's because Venezuela represents a true affront to the neo-liberal capitalist system the US has been since Day One.

It's about enabling their people in a way the United States doesn't want to in any with theirs.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2026/02/05/how-venezuela-poses-an-unusual-and-extraordinary-threat-to-the-us-agenda/

The Venezuelan “threat”

When President Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999, a revolutionary process began that would set out to repay the “social debt” owed to the Venezuelan people, beginning by dedicating 75% of national spending to social investment – funds, importantly, generated by the country’s historically predominant oil sector. Through missions that began the year Chávez was elected, the country elevated its population out of poverty and illiteracy, reaching a 100% literacy rate, with more than three million people learning how to read and write (Mission Robinson); training 6,000 professionals in universities and graduating one million high school students (Mission Sucre); granting nearly 5 million homes to families across the country (Mission Vivienda); building health clinics in 320 of Venezuela’s 355 municipalities (Mission Barrio Adentro); and restoring the eyesight of some 300,000 Venezuelans while providing eye surgery to 1 million (Mission Milagro).

President Nicolás Maduro has continued this legacy, despite the duress imposed by the US-led unilateral coercive measures imposed in the years following Chávez’s death, ensuring not only that the country’s resources benefit the well-being of the majority, but also that power is given back to the people through a model of direct democracy. Weeks before he was kidnapped, for instance, Maduro convened the Constitutional Congress of the Working Class, the culmination of 22,110 assemblies in workplaces across the country in which delegates debated and made proposals to the president about the future of the country’s labor sector and productive processes, such as strengthening domestic production of machinery components in order to reduce external technological dependency. Aprobada (“approved”), Maduro told delegate María Alejandra Grimán Rondón as she presented him with the conclusions of the congress in front of a packed auditorium; for another proposal, “the method still needs to be refined”, he replied, outlining next steps for further debate.