It's worth little at its current flows, but this ignores the temporal dimension which is where stock is more important because the flows can be built up over time. Only 20%-30% of China's oil is secure, the rest suffers from the Malacca dilemma which is why the US focuses on naval power projection as part of its Pacific containment policy, a lesson they learned with the oil blockade against Japan in WW2.

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.