To grand Conspiracy Theorists, I always make the Thanksgiving Dinner argument. You can’t even get 8 people around a dinner table to agree with each other on all kinds of fundamental issues. You certainly can’t get a vast conspiracy of people to think like they are of one mind with one shared interest.

That said, oil is the strategic commodity of our age, and it is dumb to imagine there are no hidden power struggles and powerful actors involved in anything to do with it - especially big geopolitical crises.

You don’t need a very big conspiracy to do a lot, politically. The Bolsheviks were a small group. And groups don’t even have to communicate to achieve coordinated results, due to a confluence of interests.

Uranium miners don’t have to phone each other to react the same way to legislation affecting them.

Ditto for companies who make huge military systems. They don’t have to phone each other to act in the same ways, out of a common concern if a new pacifist government is elected on a platform of slashing military spending. They might connect at that point though, and collaborate with their competitors to lobby the government. Wouldn’t you?

Also, the US government does intervene all over the place, and had a very non-secret naval blockade of Cuba. You could take a boat there and see the US ships.

I don’t really know anything about the history of Venezuela, and I doubt I’d be interested in any view of a conflict that was entirely one-sided, but the history of Venezuela and its global relations surely matters. You can’t trust simple news media representation of the situation there, from whatever political perspective, to tell you much - all commentators will have tons of confirmation bias at play.

And you never need a big cabal of people controlling the world to do anything. Confused people, muddling through life, whose job just happens to be protecting and increasing asset pools worth billions, are going to react to things in clumsily analogous ways that end up being coordinated. It’s the invisible hand, in another more pernicious form - with a few actual cabals thrown in, making things worse.

And there have always been humans willing to slaughter or impoverish many others, for power and wealth, all across the political spectrum.

I wouldn’t look for simple argument-winning moves. You’d have to fight historical knowledge with better historical knowledge.

As for the idea that Venezuela is doing a-ok and we are just trying to take their oil that does indeed sound like a Conspiracy Theory, pejorative intended. However I would hesitate to exclude authoritarian impulses working in concert without specific conspiracy as the source of such things. Organizations that have a mandate to grow share values of control and exploitation across the spectrum that does not require top down management to work and act in the ways depicted.