As the Trump administration openly courts oil executives in the aftermath of Washington’s aggression against Venezuela, the choreography was unmistakable. Political force first. Legal guarantees next. Balance sheets last.

The administration’s pitch, promising “total safety” for American firms willing to invest tens of billions into Venezuela’s oil sector, made clear who the operation was really for.

The outrageous act of capturing the Venezuelan president was not a project aimed at lowering gas prices for American households or rebuilding Venezuelan sovereignty. It was the Empire's familiar exercise of using state power to make sovereign resources safe for private accumulation.

Venezuela’s appeal is obvious. With more than 300 billion barrels of proven crude reserves, the country represents one of the largest untapped energy endowments on the planet.

What is less often stated, but widely understood within energy and finance circles, is that such reserves are only valuable to capital when political risk is neutralised.

That is precisely what US power has historically specialised in doing.

It bears emphasis that Donald Trump’s drive to secure oil for private profit did not emerge suddenly or accidentally. The confrontation between the US and Venezuela, much like Washington’s earlier campaign against Iran under Mohammad Mossadegh, has always been, at its core, a struggle over oil. And, predictably, the same corporate actors recur whenever such struggles unfold.

During Trump’s first term, the US-backed alternative leadership for Venezuela had already laid out its intentions with striking clarity. Juan Guaido, Washington’s chosen figurehead, made no secret of plans to shift Venezuela’s oil sector decisively into private US hands. According to reporting by The Independent, Guaido’s representatives indicated that a future government under his leadership would allow foreign private oil companies a far greater stake in joint ventures with the country’s state-owned oil giant.

This would have marked a sharp break from the framework maintained by Venezuela’s socialist government, under which Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) was required to retain a controlling share in any joint venture with foreign energy firms. That arrangement, designed to preserve sovereign control over hydrocarbons, was precisely what Washington and corporate oil interests sought to dismantle.

Carlos Vecchio, a close Guaido ally and his representative in Washington, was explicit about this shift. Speaking to Bloomberg, Vecchio stated that a Guaido-led government would move to open the economy in order to raise oil production. “The majority of the oil production that we want to increase will be with the private sector,” he said. The message could hardly have been clearer.

Venezuelan-born sociologist María Páez Victor has offered a succinct explanation for why Venezuela’s oil, in particular, occupies such a central place in USstrategic thinking, and why the country’s existing political order has proven such an obstacle to private oil companies.

Venezuela, she notes, possesses the largest known oil reserves in the world and occupies an exceptionally strategic geographic position. An oil tanker takes approximately 43 days to travel from the Middle East to refineries in Texas. From Venezuela, the journey takes just four.

This logistical advantage alone makes Venezuelan oil uniquely attractive to both corporations and the governments aligned with them.

As Páez Victor points out, were Venezuela a producer of mangos rather than crude, its political fate would likely be of little interest in Washington. What provoked confrontation was the decision by the Venezuelan state to assert control over PDVSA, permit private participation only under conditions of majority public ownership, and impose taxes that had remained at a token one percent for decades.

The revenues generated from oil, rather than being siphoned off to elite business interests, were redirected towards long-neglected public services. This redistribution, more than any rhetorical radicalism, marked Venezuela as intolerable to entrenched oil interests.

Even before overt regime-change efforts escalated, discussions were already underway during Trump’s presidency about transferring Venezuela’s oil industry into US corporate hands. Trump’s then–national security adviser, John Bolton, acknowledged this openly.

“We’re in conversation with major American companies now,” Bolton said. “It would make a difference if we could have American companies produce the oil in Venezuela. We both have a lot at stake here.”

At the same time, Guaido moved unilaterally to appoint a new board for Citgo, Venezuela’s US-based oil subsidiary. All six board members he selected resided in the United States, and two were US-born citizens.

Meanwhile, the US and allied governments had already begun stripping Venezuela of its overseas assets, reallocating them to Guaido as the presumed custodian of Western interests. The Bank of England froze and effectively seized Venezuelan gold reserves worth $1.2 billion, earmarking them for Guaido’s control.

The US followed suit, confiscating roughly $7 billion in Venezuelan assets held on US soil and designating them for transfer to Guaido, who pledged to redirect these resources towards US and allied priorities.

As McClatchy News reported at the time, “the State Department certified that Guaidó has authority to control all Venezuelan government bank accounts in the US financial system, giving him access to any cash or gold Venezuela may be holding in US banks.”

The corporate beneficiaries waiting in the wings were neither subtle nor benign. As in earlier oil conflicts—most notably Iran—Exxon once again emerged at the forefront of the Venezuelan struggle. Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, was himself a former Exxon executive, exposing the company’s extraordinary influence over US foreign policy during this period.

Alongside Exxon stood the Koch Brothers, among the most powerful financiers of right-wing politics in the US and major backers of Trump.

Investigative journalist Greg Palast described their stake in Venezuela with brutal clarity:

“People don’t know the Kochs have these giant refineries, some of the biggest in the world, on the Gulf Coast of Texas, in the middle of ields. They can’t use Texas oil because it’s not heavy and filthy enough, so they have to take almost all their oil from Venezuela, one of the only places where you get this super heavy oil. Normally it’s discounted. But because they know the Kochs have to use their oil, Chavez, who was a really bright man, was squeezing the Kochs by the cojones and charging them a premium for his oil. The Kochs have been going crazy—they were losing money at their refinery because of the price.”

Palast continued

“So they had two choices. Buy Tar Sands gunk from Canada, via the XL Pipeline, but it’s taking too long. First they had to get Trump to come in as president and overcome all of the environmental objections to get the XL Pipeline approved. But it still ain’t there. So what do you do? You better overthrow the government of Venezuela with some guy named Juan Guaido who said, and I quote, ‘I will open up the Venezuela oil fields to American companies.’ You have to understand, Exxon was basically thrown out of Venezuela. They’ve had lawsuits going against Venezuela. Guaido says he’ll pay off Exxon and he will let Exxon take control again of the Venezuelan oil fields. That’s what this game is about, it’s about the oil.”

It would be hard to imagine any socially beneficial outcome from handing Venezuela’s oil to firms like Exxon and the Koch conglomerate. Both Exxon and the Koch network rank among the most aggressive suppressors of climate science, having spent millions to obscure evidence of global warming and the role of fossil fuels in driving it.

In 1954, the CIA-backed overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala was justified as a Cold War necessity. Declassified documents later revealed intense lobbying by the United Fruit Company, which stood to lose land and profits from Árbenz’s agrarian reforms.

As historian Stephen Schlesinger documented, United Fruit executives “had direct access to the highest levels of the US government,” and the coup quickly restored a business climate favourable to American capital.

Chile followed a similar arc. The 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende, later acknowledged by US officials as involving covert destabilisation, paved the way for radical market restructuring. Foreign investment surged under a new regime committed to privatisation, while social spending collapsed.

The Iraq war illustrated this transformation starkly.

Halliburton subsidiary KBR secured billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to rebuild oil infrastructure and supply US forces. A 2011 report by the Commission on Wartime Contracting estimated that up to $60 billion was lost to waste and fraud — money that flowed through private firms while Iraqi oil output lagged for years.

Oil is not about abundance

One of the enduring myths surrounding energy politics is that oil companies want to pump as much as possible. The historical record suggests otherwise. In Afflicted Powers, the leftist collective Retort argued that the defining anxiety of the oil industry has never been scarcity, but surplus.

The history of twentieth-century oil is not the history of shortfall and inflation, but of the constant menace of excess capacity and falling prices.

Control over reserves matters more than immediate extraction.

This insight is crucial for understanding Venezuela. The US strategy is not primarily about flooding markets to help consumers. It is about securing long-term control over a massive reserve, turning it into a strategic asset that can be activated, restrained or leveraged according to market conditions favourable to capital.

The obsolescing bargain

Economist Raymond Vernon provided a name for this dynamic more than half a century ago. In Sovereignty at Bay, he explained the “obsolescing bargain” between multinational corporations and host states. Early on, firms demand favourable terms to compensate for risk. Once extraction becomes profitable, governments seek a larger share—through higher taxes, royalties, or nationalisation.

Venezuela’s own history fits the model precisely. During the oil boom of the 2000s, President Hugo Chávez reasserted state control over the sector, prompting lawsuits from ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips. The current intervention aims to reset that bargain before prices rise again, locking in investor protections and weakening the capacity of future governments to renegotiate