How Washington Uses Energy as a Weapon

Iran (1953), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), Russia (2022), Syria (2024), and now Venezuela (2026). The common denominator underlying the US attacks and economic sanctions against all these countries is America’s weaponization of the world’s oil trade. Control over oil is one of its key methods for achieving unipolar control over the world’s broad trade and dollarized financial arrangements. The prospect of the above-mentioned countries using their oil for their own benefit and diplomacy poses the most serious threat to America’s overall ability to use the oil trade to enforce the aims of its diplomacy.

All modern economies need oil to power their factories, heat and light their homes, produce fertilizers (from gas) and plastics (from oil), and fuel their transportation. Oil under US control or that of its allies (British Petroleum, Holland’s Shell and today OPEC) has long been a potential choke point that US officials can use as leverage against countries whose policies they consider adverse to US designs: the United States can plunge the economies of such countries into chaos by cutting off their access to oil.

The overriding aim of today’s US diplomacy in what its strategists call a civilizational war against China, Russia and their prospective BRICS allies is to block the withdrawal of countries from the US-controlled world economy and frustrate the emergence of a Eurasian-centered economic grouping. But in contrast to America’s position at the end of World War II when it was the world’s dominant economic and monetary power, today it has few positive inducements to attract foreign countries to a US-centered world economy in which, as President Trump has said, the United States must be the gainer in any foreign trade and investment arrangement, and other countries must be the losers.

It was to isolate Russia, and behind it China and Iran, that President Trump used his Liberation Day tariffs of April 2, 2025 to pressure German and EU leaders to voluntarily refrain from importing further energy from Russia, despite the fact that parts of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline were still operative. Germany’s and the EU’s earlier acceptance of the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines in February 2022 is testimony to the ability of US diplomats to force countries to join—to their own detriment—America’s Cold War military alliances and follow the policies that it lays down. Germany’s deindustrialization and loss of competitiveness since its oil and