I think you're right, but my read is a bit broader. I think that they've been planning a confrontation with China for the past decade, and that Venezuela, Cuba and Iran are just part of the "sequencing" of that war. They see these countries as chess pieces and they need to move those around before going in for the main objective.

But I think two things didn't pan out the way that they had planned. First, China is moving away from oil much faster than they had anticipated, and second, the AI race turned out to be much closer than they had hoped.

The USA's position is basically that whoever "wins" the AI race is going to control the planet for the upcoming decades, because it will provide such massive advantages for industry and warfare. And the USA is used to being a decade ahead of everyone else technologically - but in this instance they're neck-and-neck, because China is producing good chips despite not having the best fabs, and China is producing good LLMs despite throwing way less compute at their models. At the same time, I think everyone was a little surprised at how good LLMs actually are (I know that's a controversial thing to say on Lemmy, but that's what they believe).

So I think this sped up the timeline for the war on China by a lot. Suddenly they felt the need to act immediately, going down their sequence of conquest which was supposed to put them in a much better bargaining position against China.

AI was also a big part of the supposed diversification of the Gulf State economies, where UAE/KSA was supposed to get data centers in exchange for alignment with Israel. They'd fuel the data centers with fossil fuels, cool it with who-knows-what, and get a small part of the slice. Hence why Iran has targeted those data centers.