But even at the height of tensions when Hugo Chávez was Venezuela’s president, oil shipments to the United States never stopped. Even now, companies like Chevron and Halliburton continue to operate in the country. Before sanctions announced last week on the state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA, Venezuela received as much as $8 of every $10 in oil sales from the United States. The reality is that Venezuela depends on the United States far more than the other way around.

Some claim democracy has driven the Trump administration to intervene. But when President Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras stole the election in 2017, the United States offered him full support. Likewise, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tacitly backed Guatemala’s president, Jimmy Morales, as he quashed a United Nations-mandated anticorruption commission, Cicig, in a move widely seen as antidemocratic. And anyone who claims to promote democracy and human rights would condemn the appointment of Elliott Abrams as special envoy to Venezuela. His involvement in covert operations and support for death squads in Central America in the 1980s has been well documented.

If not oil or democracy, what, then, drives United States officials’ outsize push to oust the Chavismo leadership, and with what larger implications for Venezuela and Latin America? For the United States, regime change in Venezuela means reclaiming leadership over its “backyard,” as then-Secretary of State John Kerry characterized Latin America in 2013, after nearly 20 years of marginalization.

Mr. Chávez was first sworn in as president on Feb. 2, 1999. He was swept into office partly by promising to reverse United States-led austerity, free trade and privatization policies that brought inequality and poverty to millions across the region. As Mr. Chávez spotlighted their suffering, he helped to usher in a new crop of leaders regionally willing to assert greater political independence from the United States.

As left-wing governments won office across Latin America, they used the spike in commodity prices to distribute wealth and lower poverty. They also formed strategic partnerships to counter United States influence in hemispheric affairs, opening up relations and major investment with then-booming China and Russia. When Brazil helped scuttle the Free Trade Area of the Americas in 2005, it proved that the era of overriding United States influence in the region was over. Washington had lost the ability to set the agenda.