Renee Parsons
Trump’s interest in Venezuela dates back to his first term in office (2017-2021) when Juan Guaido claimed to be the ‘true elected’ President of Venezuela in 2018, thereby challenging Nicolas Maduro’s re election.
If Guaido had been successful, the US would currently be control of Venezuela’s greatest proven reserve of petroleum in the world.
Given Venezuelan President Maduro’s recent incarceration by US Delta Force commandos, it would be illuminating to more closely examine President Trump agenda to assume control of Venezuelan oil which presumably will bring great financial wealth to the US.
For starters: because of its vast strategic resource of over 300 billion barrels of petroleum, Venezuela became a founding member (along with Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia) of OPEC in 1960 as it remains an OPEC member today.
The Venezuelan oil industry was naturalized as a state-agency Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) in 1976 by President Carlos Andres Perez in order to protect the sovereignty of its greatest natural resource.
Hugo Chavez became President of Venezuela in 1998 making further adjustments to the PDVSA, the US responded in 2005 with crippling economic sanctions which continue today.
When Trump became president in 2016, those American sanctions (known as secondary sanctions) did not just prevent Venezuela from selling its oil but also penalized any upstart country who believed it had the right to independently purchase Venezuelan oil. What better way for the US to ratify its global hegemony than by diminishing Venezuela’s petroleum revenue.
In a country with petroleum accounting for 90% of its export revenue, the punitive US sanctions increased the suffering of the Venezuelan people with a lack of basic humanitarian aid including food and medicine with increased malnutrition and hyperinflation which saw the departure of 7 million Venezuelans from their country by 2025.
Economically speaking, US sanctions set the stage for more than a decade of severe financial struggles when it froze $7 billion worth of assets and blocked payments on Venezuelan bonds, PDVSA access to foreign markets was restricted, its Bolivarian currency was devalued as the UK confiscated over 31 tons of Gold from Venezuela’s central bank refusing access to its own gold as the country suffered a $11 billion revenue loss in one year (2019).
The net effect of decades of harmful US sanctions on Venezuela’s oil-dependent economy drove the country into poverty by blocking the country’s ability to sell its own natural resource.
Those sanctions also denied Venezuela the necessary funds to maintain its infrastructure and make necessary upgrades and improvements on its PDVSA petroleum industry.
Economic sanctions are a favorite tool of the US Empire as it controlled and dominated many countries around the world to surrender the value of their own natural resources to the US or otherwise fall in line with US geopolitical domination.
While US Sanctions are not a major revenue source for the Federal Government, they are a national security tool to impose costs on targeted countries or entities, to add trade restrictions or freeze assets as the recent EU freeze of $300 billion worth of Russian assets from a Brussels bank. In 2025, US revenue from sanctions exceeded $250 Million in civil penalties. *
Necessity as the Mother of Invention provides every onerous situation with an equitable solution. The overly excessive US sanctions policy can take credit for the creation of what became known internationally as the BRICS alliance organized in 2009 to conduct trade in its local currency rather than the US Dollar.
Since sanctions can only be applied when the US Dollar which became the world’s reserve currency in1972, is the source of payment, hence the US dollar became required for all global trade transactions. No country was immune from the Dollar which allowed the US to simultaneously sanction any country for adverse behavior.
There was no escape until enough countries had an experience linking the Dollar with US-sanction to penalize or freeze its assets. In other words, use of the American dollar was accompanied with the potential of a heavy sanctions penalty.
Aggregating sanction abuses, international leaders like Russia, China and India, all founders of BRICS, grasped an elementary conclusion of replacing trade in the Dollar with local currency; the Rupee, the Yuan, the Ruble required stimulating the increase usage of local currency.
It was a stroke of genius and currently BRICS encourages its growing membership which currently represents 50% of the world’s population and 44% of the world’s GDP, to cultivate its own currency as it has been US sanction policy that motivated the move away from the Dollar to avoid the penalty of onerous sanctions. The Americans had no one to blame but themselves. *
While Maduro and his wife (who reportedly suffered three broken ribs during the kidnapping) were abducted on January 3rd, there has been no regime change in Venezuela as Maduro’s Ministers remain in place as they continue to operate the government.
In the aftermath of Maduro’s imprisonment, the petulant Trump has claimed that the US will ‘run’ Venezuela and control its oil sales ‘indefinitely’ for years as Venezuela “took our oil away from us,” “stole our assets” and ‘we want it back.”
In his own inimitable style, the President said that “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”
The important part here is ‘making money’ as Trump believes that everything he touches turns to Gold – except when it doesn’t.
In his Truth Social post, Trump announced a plan for 30 – 50 M barrels of oil to be turned over to the US at which time Trump announced “we’re in the oil business” while Secretary of State Rubio announced an ambitious three part plan leaving enormous gaps to be determined.
At one point, the President suggested that the US would subsidize costs to rebuild Venezuela’s infrastructure by adding additional debt to the country’s existing $39 trillion liability.
Once famous for his ‘drill baby drill’ mantra, Trump invited the nation’s top oil executives to the WH in the belief they would be eager and anxious to become part of the Administration’s effort to restore Venezuela’s debilitated infrastructure. “You don’t talk to the Venezuelans, you talk to me” he declared to industry reps. Trump presumed a $100 billion industry investment and sufficient renovation to bring Venezuela’s degraded oil production infrastructure up to par.
The general tenor of the meeting was less than encouraging as the US industry executives are well aware of the details of an expensive, technically demanding process requiring special extraction methods to move extremely viscous oil through pipelines.
In addition, current low energy prices contributed to tepid response from the executives as Exxon’s CEO upset the apple cart when he declared what others were thinking; that given past “experience with legal and commercial difficulties” the Venezuela oil market is ‘uninvestable” for an industry with $65/barrel insufficient incentive to satisfy the President’s unreasonable fiscal expectations.
Conoco’s CEO added that “restructuring the entire Venezuelan energy system including PDVSA“ would be required.
What Trump and his band of merry grifters may have failed to understand is that Venezuelan oil is not the usual light sweet oil (diesel/gasoline/flowing petroleum) but is widely known as an extra heavy, thick oil bordering on a bitumen-like tar substance, not unlike molasses as it barely flows at room temperature. Modernization to Venezuelan PDVSA may require horizontal wells, electric submersible pumps or a steam injection process to reconstitute heavy sludge into usable synthetic crude.
Given the status of the deterioration of Venezuela’s production infrastructure, upgrade may be a pipe dream (excuse the pun) as industry reps pointed out the harsh reality of the depth of recovery necessary, the required funds to complete reconstruction including required security guarantees and the length of time to accomplish major renovation.
Back in Mar a Lago after the meeting, Trump responded to a reporter “I didn’t like Exxon’s response; they’re playing too cute” suggesting he would block Exxon from returning to Venezuela.
Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Noble Prize for Economic Science disputed Trump’s optimism predicting that “the vast wealth Trump imagines is waiting there to be taken doesn’t exist.” “During his triumphalist press conference after Maduro’s abduction”, Krugman referred to Trump’s “war of oil fantasies” acknowledging that Venezuela’s heavy oil has ‘low recovery and high cost to produce’ as “politically motivated hype.”
Renee Parsons has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist with Friends of the Earth and a staff member in the US House of Representative in Washington, DC. Before its demise, she was also a member of the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and President of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter.