Coming Full Circle

History keeps repeating itself. There are songs one hears throughout a life without pausing too long on their words. Until one day a line written for another age seems to have been waiting for the precise moment to return.

“Por la vuelta,” the tango by Enrique Cadícamo and José Tinelli, belongs to that category. For Venezuelans of several generations it carries, besides, a particular familiarity: orchestras such as Billo Frómeta’s and Felipe Pirela made that Río de la Plata repertoire their own. But there is one line that today is hard to hear without thinking of Venezuela:

“La historia vuelve a repetirse” — history keeps repeating itself.

That is what I thought recently, sitting in Caracas, while rereading a book from my shelves: Venezuela, Politics and Oil, by Rómulo Betancourt, a former president of Venezuela and a central figure of twentieth-century democracy.

I had read it many years ago. Books, like countries, change depending on the moment from which one looks at them. Reading Betancourt after 3 January 2026 produces a strange sensation: at times it seems one is not only reading early-twentieth-century Venezuelan history, but searching for keys to understand Venezuela today.

The names are different. The empires are different. The circumstances are, naturally, different.

But some pieces seem to occupy unsettlingly familiar places.

Roosevelt

At the start of the twentieth century Venezuela was governed by Cipriano Castro, an Andean strongman who concentrated power after the Liberal Restoration Revolution.

In December 1902, Britain, Germany and Italy imposed a naval blockade on Venezuela to press for payment of debts and claims. The United States watched with concern as European powers used military force in the Caribbean. That Venezuelan crisis would become one of the fundamental antecedents of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 said, essentially, to Europe: do not extend your intervention into the American hemisphere.

Theodore Roosevelt, then president of the United States, went further. Washington no longer merely warned European powers. It reserved for itself a role of intervention in the hemisphere when it judged regional stability or its own interests threatened.

Betancourt quotes almost literally the American historian Arthur P. Whitaker:

“To Venezuela, another Bolivarian nation, fell a very important role in the development of another expression of Yankee imperialism — the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1904–1905) — which proclaimed the United States an ‘international police power’ in the Western Hemisphere, with the right to intervene unilaterally and at its own discretion in the Latin American countries.”

There appears the first turn of the circle.

Castro

Cipriano Castro did not fall during the blockade.

He survived.

But his relations with Washington deteriorated to the point that in 1908 the United States closed its legation in Caracas. American diplomatic documents show a relationship practically broken, with U.S. economic claims and Castro’s refusal to submit them to arbitration.

That same year Castro left Venezuela for medical treatment in Europe.

And he left in charge one of the men he trusted most: Juan Vicente Gómez.

Not an adversary.

Not an opposition leader.

His vice president, comrade-in-arms and man of the regime itself.

Castro would never return to power.

With Gómez would begin a new relationship with the United States and, soon after, a transformation that would place oil at the center of Venezuelan politics, economics and foreign relations.

It is precisely that history that Betancourt would dissect decades later in Venezuela, Politics and Oil.

And then we arrive at 2026.

Trump

Almost 120 years later, Washington again speaks openly of the Monroe Doctrine.

This time the president is Donald Trump. His administration uses an extraordinarily revealing phrase: the “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.”

The U.S. Department of War published on 23 January 2026 the National Defense Strategy. It states:

“After years of neglect, the Department of War will restore American military dominance in the Western Hemisphere. We will use it to protect our Homeland and our access to key terrain throughout the region. We will also deny adversaries’ ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities in our hemisphere. This is the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine—a commonsense and potent restoration of American power and prerogatives in this hemisphere, consistent with Americans’ interests.”

The geography is the same. The argument is the same. Only the actors have changed.

At the start of the twentieth century the concern was the presence of the great European powers in Venezuela and the Caribbean. In the twenty-first, American concern turns on the influence accumulated in Venezuela and the rest of Latin America by Russia, China and Iran.

And again Venezuela sits at the center of the board.

On 3 January 2026, according to Washington’s official narrative and the coverage that followed, a U.S. operation captured Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores. Maduro was taken to the United States to face federal charges. Trump declared that Washington would have a direct role in what would happen next in Venezuela and expressly linked the new hemispheric policy to the Monroe Doctrine.

But perhaps the most interesting historical coincidence came immediately afterward.

Maduro left.

Chavismo did not.

Delcy

As with Cipriano Castro, the person who filled the space left by Maduro was not an opposition leader.

With Castro it was the man who had at one point been his vice president and right hand. In Maduro’s case, it was his vice president.

Venezuela’s Supreme Court ordered on 3 January that Rodríguez assume the presidency on an interim basis; on 5 January she was formally sworn in.

Again — with all the enormous differences that separate the two episodes — a familiar structure appears:

Castro leaves. Gómez remains.

Maduro leaves. Delcy remains.

This is not to say that Delcy Rodríguez is Juan Vicente Gómez, or that Donald Trump is Theodore Roosevelt. History does not work by photocopy.

But neither can one ignore the parallel the comparison proposes. Indeed, Maduro himself, a few months before 3 January, read a proclamation of Cipriano Castro — almost making it his own — during a session of the National Assembly, which sowed confusion in those days.

In both moments, a Venezuelan crisis takes on an international dimension; the United States redefines its role in the hemisphere; a ruler at odds with Washington leaves power; a central figure of his own regime remains; relations with the United States are recomposed.

And the resulting common denominator: oil.

Oil

Here is where returning to Betancourt began to feel particularly pointed.

If there is a word able to join these two Venezuelas separated by more than a century, that word is oil.

With Gómez begins the great cycle of concessions that would transform the country for good. Foreign capital, Venezuelan concessionaires close to the regime, intermediaries, international companies, and a state that had not yet built the institutions needed to administer the extraordinary wealth beginning to leave the subsoil.

Betancourt dedicates a large part of Venezuela, Politics and Oil precisely to that relationship among political power, oil concessions, foreign interests and national sovereignty.

And one hundred twenty years later the discussion again turns on concessions to Venezuelans close to the regime, fields, American companies, multibillion-dollar investments and the role Washington will play in exploiting the world’s largest proven oil reserves.

Betancourt wrote: “The list of original concessionaires clearly shows that Gómez gave concessions to his favorites, and the most favored applicant was his son-in-law Julio F. Méndez, who received 17 concessions of 15,000 hectares each.”

More than a century later, on the reading this parallel proposes, Rodríguez also handed over 17 fields to NABEP, a company linked to Alejandro Betancourt — a Venezuelan businessman who, by coincidence of surname, should not be confused with the former president. The “favorites of the regime” framing is the author’s observation, not a judicial finding.

Trump said so from the start. After the 3 January operation he spoke expressly of bringing major American oil companies into Venezuela to invest billions and recover production.

Months later, oil is indeed at the heart of the new relationship between Washington and Caracas, even as the terms, the legality and even the duration of some agreements remain contested.

That is why one had to return to Betancourt.

Venezuela, politics and oil

Books outlive their authors; what is set down in their ink becomes reference.

Venezuela, Politics and Oil could have been written as a title yesterday.

Because after more than a century we are still trying to solve the same equation: Venezuela, politics and oil.

Governments change.

American presidents change.

Foreign powers change.

Companies change.

Even the language used to justify decisions changes.

But the geography remains. Power remains. Oil remains.

And so does the fundamental question that runs through Betancourt’s book: how to turn the wealth of the Venezuelan subsoil into sovereignty, institutions and prosperity for Venezuelans, rather than into an instrument of power for whoever circumstantially controls the state?

Perhaps that is the real circle.

Not the return of the United States to Venezuela — because the United States, even if it pulled back for decades to concentrate on the Middle East, never left entirely.

Not even the return of oil, because oil never left either.

It is Venezuela’s return to a discussion we thought we had settled more than a century ago.

Roosevelt and Trump.

Castro and Maduro.

Gómez and Rodríguez.

Europe then; Russia, China and Iran now.

Monroe then and Monroe again.

And at the center of everything, yesterday as today, Venezuela and its oil.

Historical analogies are always dangerous. They illuminate, but they can also deceive if one pretends two different eras are identical. Venezuela in 1908 is not Venezuela in 2026. The United States is not the same either. And the world, plainly, even less so.

But there are coincidences that deserve to be watched.

That is why, more than eighty years after Cadícamo and Tinelli wrote that tango, a line returns from an old song to describe a deeply Venezuelan feeling:

“La historia vuelve a repetirse.”

And perhaps that is why this column could not be called anything else. What remains is the controlled optimism of someone who believes that, as between 1950 and 1980, real opportunities can open — not without friction, not without risk — if the relationship with the United States eventually supplies the checks that are missing today. History guarantees nothing. It only warns that the equation is still open.