Venezuela is the blueprint for what Washington will demand from Iran

Washington’s announcement last week — claiming 55 percent control of a new venture holding more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan crude, under field concessions U.S. officials say could last a century, part of a wider energy accord — looked, at first glance, like a regional story. A post-Maduro resource deal in America’s backyard.

But Venezuela isn’t the headline. It is the template. And it quietly answers a question that has hung over Iran policy for months: What does this administration actually consider a win?

The answer starts with a simple observation: Washington is running two campaigns against oil-producing adversaries, and they increasingly resemble two versions of the same strategy. In Venezuela, the U.S. used force — a military operation, a captured president, and an interim government willing to sign away a century of oil-field access within seven months. In Iran, that kind of decapitation was never plausible. Six months into open conflict, Tehran has absorbed the pressure and has not cracked.

So Washington shifted to the tool it has left: economic strangulation. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s Operation Economic Outcast mirrors the Venezuela playbook in tone and ambition, promising to sever “every economic lifeline” sustaining Tehran — with China, Iran’s largest oil buyer, placed squarely in the crosshairs.

That detail is the real connective tissue. Both operations share a secondary objective that has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with market power: cutting China off from discounted, sanctions-adjacent crude. Venezuela’s joint venture displaces China as the biggest customer of its state oil........

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