President Donald Trump escalated his effort to force regime change in Venezuela on Tuesday by announcing a blockade of all “sanctioned oil tankers” coming in and out of the country.
On Truth Social, Trump boasted about the military assets he’s moved into the Caribbean — “Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America” — and promised the pressure campaign would continue until “they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” On Wednesday, Trump doubled down, telling reporters, “We had a lot of oil there. As you know, they threw our companies out. And we want it back.”
Trump didn’t specify exactly what he meant, but he’s probably referring to Venezuela’s nationalization of its oil sector in the 1970s through the 2000s. As The New York Times explains:
[T]he Venezuelan government forced Western firms decades ago to become minority partners in joint ventures with the state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., or PDVSA.
American companies were a major presence in the industry until the 1970s. That decade, Venezuelan leaders put the industry under state control, creating PDVSA, in a popular action that was a hallmark of the country’s democratic and nationalist movements. Hugo Chávez, the socialist leader, enshrined that in the Constitution after he came to power in 1999.
Venezuela’s decision to nationalize its oil sector meant it took over private assets belonging to multinational corporations based in the U.S. (and elsewhere), but it hardly stole oil — the oil belongs to Venezuela. “Venezuela’s natural resources never belonged to the United States,” David Goldwyn, president of Goldwyn Global Strategies, an international energy advisory consultancy, told The Washington Post. “While there have been charges of expropriation, which have been arbitrated in an international tribunal, there is no basis for arguing that Venezuela’s oil was stolen from the United States.”
Countries, including friends of the U.S., commonly nationalized lucrative industries focused on extracting their national resources in the 20th century. Saudi Arabia ousted U.S. companies and nationalized its oil industry in the 1970s and ’80s. In 1938, Mexico expropriated foreign oil assets, including U.S. oil companies. These countries and others chose to reap profits from their own natural resources rather than have them siphoned off in perpetuity by foreign corporations that had the initial advantage of investment capital and technical know-how. Until now, Trump has been justifying his saber-rattling against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro with the false argument that Venezuelan drugs pose an existential threat to Americans. But it appears he’s also making a neocolonial rationale for war, effectively claiming that the U.S. is entitled to Venezuela’s natural resources. Trump is once again revealing his tendency to confess to what his predecessors on the right have denied. While the George W. Bush administration insisted that control of oil was not a reason for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Trump seems happy to announce that control of the oil is a reason he’s threatening Venezuela. Trump’s America First paradigm doesn’t seek to present the pursuit of geopolitical power as something more noble than it is. Trump has expressed a desire to seize oil during U.S. conflicts with foreign countries many times in the past, and in a 2023 speech, he said of his first term: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil, it would have been right next door.” As Karthik Sankaran, a senior research fellow in geoeconomics at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, recently pointed out, Trump’s bid for Venezuelan oil is also strangely timed. The U.S. is not in dire need of oil because of its own massive production of it, and the price of oil is as cheap as it has been in many years. Furthermore, Sankaran notes, global demand for oil may have peaked due to increasing demand for clean energy. In other words, even someone who is unswayed by ethical considerations can’t make a strong case for the U.S. risking war in pursuit of oil when it already has so much.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer for MS NOW. Sign up for his newsletter. 
