Of course we do have competition, but where it has worked the best, it has been done in the context of cooperation, economic trade that follows norms and laws.
Too bad we gave stupid people power.
Meanwhile it's sort of becoming very clear that Venezuela is about Cuba.
Oil is also not the only security dimension, the other dimension is to deny China a physical staging ground near to US territory for air, missiles or radar and SIGINT. Not a problem right now, but again these calculations need to involve the temporal dimension. If you believe there's a 25% chance of conflict over Taiwan, using the status quo of peace to justify decision-making is an "assume the best" doctrine which is a terrible security doctrine.
This isn't to say that security calculations are the only factor involved in this Venezuela operation. It is one piece of it. It's also somewhat besides the point because I am discussing underlying causal mechanisms, not fixating on a specific conflict.
As for how this relates to those mechanisms: the only reason these "security calculations" are even considered is because the US no longer holds a monopoly on world power. In the 1990s, it was a foregone conclusion. In that security, "cooperation" could occur. Then liberals osberve that cooperation and mistake it as the cause, when it's really the effect.
This continues to be the case now. The main difference is that in the 90s, the opposition to Vietnam was still fresh enough in the average American mind. I suspect what we're seeing now is the effect of that memory fading.
You can sense check this by running through various historic eras. Consider the eras before any nation states, when power was at its most decentralized. That was also when conflict deaths were at their peak due to tribal warfare.
Then move on to the era of kingdoms and then nation-states, and conflict deaths decrease because power centralization increases. Intra-national conflict goes to zero because of a monopoly on violence over that local geography, leaving only inter-national conflict in the structurally anarchic power vacuum.
The peace of the 90s was because the United States was completely dominant and had no reason to do anything because it controlled everything. As the United States declines and power decentralization increases, moves such as denying China access to oil from Venezuela become actions that are deemed necessary in the new security environment. Or a clash between Thailand and Cambodia becomes a thing that can happen, because there is an absence of a big dog to lay down the law, as unjust as that law may be.
The analogy would be a country with multiple privately owned police forces and no single power. You're going to get conflict. It's a structural phenomenon of how power vacuums work when you plop humans inside of them, and it has nothing to do with morality or markets.