After Caracas: Power, precedent, and the new rulebook

Caracas rewrote the mood. Greenland widened the crack. MONEY examines how power is being exercised in 2026 — through force, energy flows and economic pressure — and why Europe is quietly arming itself with tools like the EU’s “trade bazooka”. The new rulebook is forming in real time, and the risk premium is rising.

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On 3 January 2026, the United States carried out strikes in and around Caracas and captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, flying him and his wife to New York to face US charges.

Even if you believe Maduro’s removal is justified, the method matters — because it signals something bigger than Venezuela: a more unilateral, enforcement-by-force approach to power, framed as “security”, backed by capability, and defended after the fact.

Markets, allies and smaller countries are reacting in the only way they can: by recalculating risk.

When “rules-based” becomes “results-based”

The immediate US political aftershock showed how unusual this was. On 8 January, the Senate advanced a War Powers Resolution intended to restrict further action in Venezuela without congressional approval — a rare bipartisan flare in a moment that, politically, should have been an easy victory lap.

But the warning flare didn’t last. Within days, the pushback was politically absorbed. The exact parliamentary mechanics matter less than the trajectory: something extraordinary happened, the system flinched, and then it stabilised.

That arc is the point. The line between military action and law enforcement has blurred — and then normalised. Precedent didn’t just appear. It survived.

And once the world believes the strongest players will act first and justify later, everything downstream becomes more expensive: capital, trade, insurance, fuel, compliance — stability itself.

Oil is back at the centre of the story — openly

The second signal is that Venezuela is being treated not only as a security theatre, but as an energy strategy with enforcement teeth.

This isn’t a sanctions story confined to documents and press conferences. The “control of flows” theme has played out physically, through continuing US moves to intercept tankers linked to Venezuelan oil exports as part of a broader effort to dominate routes and distribution.

That distinction matters. Paper sanctions are a warning. Enforcement at sea is a message. It tells markets that compliance is no longer a theoretical risk — it is operational, visible, and backed by hard power.

Alongside that enforcement campaign sits the longer play: rebuilding and monetising Venezuelan oil capacity at scale, with figures as high as $100 billion floated in the background of restoration talk. The stated logic is reconstruction and stability. The strategic reality is leverage.

This is also where the petrodollar theory surfaces, because it fits the mood of 2026: oil, force, finance, and the return of great-power muscle. But Venezuela’s barrels don’t “save” the dollar in any neat, cinematic sense. What they do reinforce is more practical: control of flows, tanker networks, sanctions compliance, and who gets paid — and how.

Less romance, more plumbing.

In this era, energy isn’t simply an input to the economy. It is leverage again—and it is being applied in public.

Europe’s nervousness has a name: Greenland

Europe watched Caracas and heard something else: not Latin American politics, but a warning about method. Then came Greenland — and suddenly the anxiety had a NATO-shaped outline.

The damage isn’t limited to whether force is used. It’s that “acquisition talk” has returned as a serious instrument of pressure inside an alliance — and it forces Europe into contingency thinking: not “will the US lead?”, but “on what terms — and at what cost to predictability?”

This is modern geopolitics: not always tanks, often leverage — applied at the level of territory, trade, tariffs, and negotiations framed like business deals. Greenland turns Venezuela into something Europe can’t quarantine as “over there”.

Caracas was the precedent for the method. Greenland is the stress test inside the alliance itself.

Europe’s answer isn’t military first — it’s economic

For years, Europe’s reflex was to regulate rather than retaliate. That posture is shifting. Quietly, the EU has built a tool designed for precisely this era: the Anti-Coercion Instrument — widely nicknamed the “trade bazooka”.

Regulation (EU) 2023/2675, which entered into force on 27 December 2023, provides the EU with a framework for responding when a third country uses or threatens to impose trade or investment measures to pressure the EU or a Member State into changing a policy choice.

The toolbox is intentionally broad: tariffs, import restrictions, limits on access to EU public procurement, services, investment, and other market-access measures. The point isn’t to trigger it daily. The fact is deterrence — the ability to respond if economic pressure becomes a standing tactic.

It marks a shift in Europe’s mindset: from assuming disputes remain diplomatic to preparing for an era in which pressure is applied through markets—and must be answered in the same language.

The small-country reality: you don’t get a vote, but you get the bill

For Malta — and for any small, trade-dependent jurisdiction — the practical question is not whether you support one side or another. It’s how you operate when geopolitical shockwaves travel faster than policy can react. Three channels matter immediately:

Energy and inflation: When flows are enforced rather than merely monitored, volatility carries a geopolitical premium. That premium quickly filters into transport, food, and household confidence.

Trade, shipping, and insurance: Interdictions and escalation risk increase perceived route risk, which raises insurance costs, increases compliance friction, and heightens delay risk across supply chains.

Compliance as strategy: In a world where sanctions enforcement expands and legal categories blur, the safest competitive advantage is boring competence: documentation, controls, transparent counterparties, and rapid risk review. The countries and firms that win are the ones that can still say “yes” to business — because they can prove it’s clean.

The temptation: thinking this is “over” because Maduro is gone

It won’t be. Even “successful” interventions leave a tail: legal battles, retaliation risk, regional instability, and an energy market that now knows enforcement isn’t theoretical.

So the real “new beginning” here isn’t Venezuela’s. It is the world’s: a shift toward a more transactional era, where sovereignty, energy, territory and economic pressure are tangled — and where the rules are increasingly interpreted by those strong enough to enforce their interpretation.

For business, that doesn’t mean panic. It implies discipline: scenario planning, diversified exposure, tighter compliance, and a sober acceptance that geopolitical risk is no longer a once-a-decade surprise.

It is a standing operating condition.

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