Hours after carrying out the raid on capture Venezuelan dictator Nicolas MaduroThe heads of government of the United States met before the press not to exalt democracy or detail their plan for Venezuela’s self-determination, but to make clear that they intend to bleed the nation of its oil reserves.
President donald trump “He takes the issue of recovering the oil that was stolen from us very seriously,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. warned. The president himself repeatedly told reporters that the South American nation, home to some of the largest oil reserves on the planet, “stole our oil.”
“We are going to have a presence in it Venezuela when it comes to oil,” Trump said. “We’re going to pull a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground.”
Trump did not notify Congress of his plans to overthrow Maduro, but he did says He did notify American oil executives. On Tuesday, Trump announced that Venezuela would be “delivering between 30 and 50 MILLION barrels of high-quality sanctioned oil to the United States of America.” The president also clarified that the seized oil would be “sold at its market price, and that money will be controlled by me, as president of the United States of America, to ensure that it is used for the benefit of the people of Venezuela and the United States.”
The arrangement is unprecedented even in the history of American resource imperialism, and experts warn that the administration’s decision to take control of Venezuela’s oil production, apparently with the intention of preserving profits, will be incredibly difficult, risks triggering a complete internal collapse within Venezuela, and could turn violent.
“There is absolutely no doubt that this is 100 percent due to President Trump’s desire for Venezuelan oil to now be owned by the White House and therefore its profits controlled by it,” says Robert Pape, a political science professor at the University of Chicago. Rolling stone. However, in Pape’s opinion, “Trump will never control Venezuela’s oil.”
In reality, the United States has no legal rights over Venezuela’s energy resources. As a matter of international law, a government cannot unilaterally claim ownership of another nation’s natural resources. At the center of Trump’s “theft” accusations are billions in unpaid settlement funds that international courts awarded to American oil companies after Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, seized assets belonging to foreign oil companies amid an attempt to completely nationalize the industry in 2007.
That a single industry plays such an important role in a nation’s economy can give “foreign companies an enormous amount of political veto power,” says Patrick Iber, a Latin American historian and history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.. The various waves of economic nationalism that shaped Venezuela’s energy sector often followed political movements that opposed foreign intervention. Negotiating relations between states and foreign companies is “difficult,” adds Iber, because when a nation becomes highly dependent on an export, allowing international control to take hold can seem like a compromise of its sovereignty.
Venezuela’s economic health has been directly linked to the success of its oil production for almost a century. In 1976, President Carlos Andrés Pérez partially nationalized Venezuela’s then-thriving oil industry, creating Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). The move came at a time when many global oil producers were moving toward state-controlled models and Venezuela continued to work with foreign energy companies. The 2007 seizure of power under the Chávez government was the turning point that would eventually lead to the near-total collapse of the Venezuelan economy. The companies fled Venezuela just as oil prices fell globally. The expensive social projects proposed by Chávez depended on oil revenues for financing, which became scarcer as the infrastructure abandoned by major energy corporations fell into disuse and deterioration. The collapse of income, as well as excessive spending, corruption and hyperinflation would ultimately destroy the national economy.
By deposing and arresting Maduro, the Trump administration has refused to endorse members of the opposition who credibly defeated the Venezuelan despot in the 2024 national elections. Instead, the nation will be governed (at least as the administration presents it) by the remnants of Maduro’s government and inner circle, under the command of control and supervision of Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. The administration will open the door to American oil companies interested in extracting the thick crude from Venezuela’s underexploited reserves. The Venezuelan government is likely to accept any accommodation the Trump administration demands. Trump said earlier this week that Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, told Rubio she would do whatever the United States wanted. “She was very kind,” Trump said, “but she really has no choice.” Triumph said The New York Times on Wednesday that the United States could control Venezuela for years.
Still, the Trump administration is preparing to write the next chapter in a decades-long tug-of-war over Venezuela’s oil fields.
“There are a lot of unknowns here,” says Michael Paarlberg, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.. He points out that what is happening “is not a change of regime, it is a change of leadership, but with the same regime in power, one that is just as repressive, just as corrupt and is willing to sell out the Venezuelan people who, anyway, they all continue to repress.” Although Maduro has been replaced by Rodríguez, the factors destabilizing Venezuela largely remain in place. Things could get ugly if the United States tries to dictate how the region’s oil is managed.
“There are already many places in Venezuela where the State does not have a legitimate monopoly on the use of force,” explains Iber. “The other way to think about the way the Venezuelan economy works is as a series of fiefdoms that have been divided up among the regime’s allies to exploit resources – whether oil or gold mining – or where someone in the military has control of an area and takes the profits from the largely illegal operations that are taking place there with great exploitation.”
“Anything that disrupts the networks that are doing it will produce internal conflicts,” he adds.
Pape, who has developed his experience around insurgencies and guerrilla movements, agrees. “We already have the remains of the collectives” – pro-Maduro militias that have carried out arrests of journalists and repressed dissidents. since the capture of the dictator – and factions of the Maduro government who will be “prepared to keep that, the gold, the oil money, for themselves.”
Pape stated that while the United States has made a show of force in the seas around Venezuela, they have little to no hope of controlling the country’s interior without a strong land force.
“I have advised every White House, including the first Trump administration,” he says, adding that the navy of some 10,000 Marines currently stationed in the Caribbean “would be very useful for perimeter defense, for controlling the area and space around the oil fields and oil infrastructure.” […] but they will not be very good at preventing guerrilla warfare.”
The US military is not trained to manage oil fields, and any effort to capture, control and rebuild Venezuela’s energy sector would require the participation of thousands of private contractors. The United States already has a reputation for imperial exploitation in Latin America, and experts like Pape fear that in an already unstable country, Trump’s loud statements that the United States intends to seize its biggest economic resource could put contractors and others hired by the Trump administration to manage the takeover in the crosshairs of insurgent violence.
“This whole mission has a gigantic hole right in the middle, which is that this situation will not be safe for civilian contractors,” Pape says. “It will take hundreds, if not thousands, spread across the oil fields for weeks and months to actually deplete the oil so that the United States, the White House, makes a profit. It is extremely unlikely that this will happen.”
Iber and Paarlberg agree that the situation is extremely fragile. Rodríguez, who is currently acting as interim president, will face pressure and possible violence from other party factions. chavistas vying for power and upset over her public agreement with the Trump administration.
“Whoever is in charge of the country now has to put together a really shaky system in which many people are on the verge of solvency and operate through illegal networks,” Iber says. “[This] could very easily escape the limits of what [Trump] believe it can be done.”
