This chapter analyzes Venezuela’s evolving role in the 21st-great power competition, and the country as both an object and subject of strategic contestation among the United States, China, and Russia. The chapter explores Venezuela’s geopolitical history from the Cold War to the present, highlighting how its vast oil reserves, ideological positioning, and geographic location have rendered it a focal point of global rivalries. Drawing on small state or small powers theory and geopolitical analysis, the chapter examines Venezuela’s efforts to assert agency through strategic diversification and regional initiatives, while also underscoring the structural constraints imposed by economic dependency, sanctions, authoritarian politics, and domestic institutional and economic collapse. Venezuela’s hybrid status, as simultaneously vulnerable and assertive, provides critical insight into the limits and possibilities of small states’ behavior in global politics. This chapter contributes to the broader understanding of Latin America’s place in international politics, offering a comprehensive account of the intersection between domestic instability and global power dynamics.