Over the weekend, the United States invaded Venezuela, captured its leader, and then declared itself to be in charge of South America’s fifth-largest country.
And no one — not even the US government — seems entirely sure why.
The Trump administration has offered multiple high-minded explanations for its toppling of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, none of which make much sense.
Vice President JD Vance suggested, for example, that the operation was about bringing drug kingpins to justice: In 2020, a US court indicted Maduro on charges of trafficking cocaine to the United States, among other offenses. “You don’t get to avoid justice for drug trafficking in the United States because you live in a palace in Caracas,” Vance declared on X.
In this account, President Donald Trump is fiercely committed to imprisoning Latin American leaders who export drugs — so committed that he’s willing to risk American lives and nullify the UN charter to bring them to justice.
But we know this isn’t true. Just last month, Trump pardoned a former Honduran president who’d been convicted of trafficking narcotics to the United States.
If this wasn’t about drugs, perhaps it was about democracy?
Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued Sunday that Maduro was “an illegitimate president,” since he had refused to accept his defeat in Venezuela’s 2024 election. Only through Maduro’s ouster and “a period of transition and real elections” could Venezuelans achieve a legitimate “system of government,” Rubio said.
Yet Trump obviously has no principled objection to incumbent presidents ignoring election results they dislike. And Trump isn’t even pretending to care about Venezuelans’ democratic freedom.
In his press conference following Maduro’s capture, Trump:
But the Trump administration has floated another explanation for its act of war — one that is both crasser and, on its face, more plausible: The White House wanted US fossil fuel companies to get a piece of Venezuela’s oil reserves.
Did the US just launch a “war for oil”?
Speaking to the press Saturday, Trump announced that “very large United States oil companies” were going to fix Venezuela’s “badly broken oil infrastructure” and then start pumping “a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground.” Some of this wealth would go to the Venezuelan people, in Trump’s telling, some to the US as “reimbursement” for Maduro’s crimes against America.
Meanwhile, Vance posted on X on Saturday that the American invasion was aimed in part at recovering “stolen oil” — apparently referring to former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s expropriation of fossil fuel assets owned by ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips.
For many observers, this story rang true.
After all, Trump is closely aligned with the fossil fuel sector. And Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Trump routinely takes extreme measures to enrich allied industries.
Moreover, his peculiar approach to regime change in Venezuela — capturing Maduro but leaving his party in charge — makes sense, if his goal were merely to coerce Caracas into handing over its oil fields (as opposed to liberating its people).
Many Democrats therefore declared that Trump’s invasion was a “war for oil,” plain and simple. As US Rep. Pat Ryan of New York put it, “No matter what they say, it’s always oil.” In this framing, Trump risked American lives — and violated international law — just to advance the interests of Big Oil.
Alas, even this account of Trump’s actions doesn’t quite check out.
Trump’s war doesn’t actually help America’s oil industry
For much of the past century, the United States was heavily reliant on foreign oil, while US fossil fuel companies were ravenous for overseas reserves. Ensuring America’s access to the world’s fossil fuel wealth was therefore a core objective of its Middle East policy, particularly following the energy shocks of the 1970s.
Given this reality, whenever the U.S. intervened in a Middle Eastern conflict, many naturally assumed that its true motivation was resource extraction, not whatever pious rationale its presidents proclaimed. “No War for Oil” became a common slogan among American anti-war protestors during the George W. Bush era.
But over the past decade, the fracking revolution transformed America’s energy economy. By learning how to crack rocks with fluid — and drill horizontally — US fossil fuel producers unlocked the vast oil and gas reserves trapped beneath America’s shale formations. By 2019, fracking had turned the United States into a net exporter of energy for the first time since the 1950s.
Today, America’s oil and gas sector isn’t hankering for more reserves so much as for higher prices. Since this time last year, oil prices have dropped by about 23 percent, due to global glut of carbon energy. At a little over $57 a barrel, the price of crude is now below many fossil fuel firms’ breakeven prices.
And forecasters predict that 2026 will witness the biggest global surplus of fossil fuel supply on record.
In this context, Trump’s official plans for Venezuela’s oil sector would be a headache (if not a disaster) for most of America’s fossil fuel industry: Were Venezuela to drastically increase its oil exports, that would further depress global prices, potentially putting many embattled frackers out of business.
Of course, a few US firms might directly profit from revitalizing Venezuela’s energy industry. But even for these companies, Trump’s proposition isn’t especially attractive.
Although Venezuela’s reserves are massive, its oil is mostly extra-heavy crude, which makes it more expensive to extract than America’s shale resources. Analysts estimate that increasing Venezuelan production by half a million barrels a day would take $10 billion in capital investment. This isn’t an especially attractive proposition for ExxonMobil, particularly given Venezuela’s political instability.
All of which is to say: American fossil fuel companies had little reason to lobby the Trump administration into overthrowing Maduro. And there is no publicly available evidence that they did so.
So: If Trump wasn’t acting at the behest of Big Oil, why did he topple Maduro?
The president’s decision likely reflects a confluence of factors. And his personal attraction to Venezuela’s resource wealth could be among them.
Although America’s oil lobby isn’t lusting after Venezuela’s reserves, Trump himself might be. For years, the president has criticized the United States for failing to “take the oil” of various Middle Eastern countries. And Trump also called for America to expropriate Afghanistan’s mineral wealth. In other words, he likes the general concept of pillaging conquered lands.
Meanwhile, many in the GOP — including Rubio — have longed to overthrow Venezuela’s leftist regime for decades. For this reason, Trump’s advisers likely put military action against Maduro on his menu of foreign policy options.
The Trump administration has also declared its intention to revive the Monroe Doctrine, which deems the Western Hemisphere the United States’s rightful sphere of influence.
In concrete terms, this seems to entail deterring South American countries from forming alliances with Russia, China, or other powers hostile to the U.S. Trump suggested Saturday that Maduro’s capture would aid that objective, ensuring that “American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.”
This said, pettier and more performative motives also seem to have informed Trump’s decision.
According to the New York Times, the White House offered Maduro the opportunity to go into “gilded exile in Turkey.” The Venezuelan leader rebuffed this offer, proceeding to dance on state television while a recording of his voice repeated “no crazy war.”
Trump’s team reportedly felt that Maduro was mocking them, seemingly wagering that they didn’t have the gall to make good on their threats. So, the Times implies, the White House felt compelled to make him pay for his insolence.
At the same time, Trump was intent on “kicking off the year with a win,” according to an administration official who spoke with the The Atlantic. A separate White House insider told the magazine that Trump felt he needed a victory to counter “tough headlines” and “slumping poll numbers.”
In a sense then, those accusing Trump of waging war to advance the interests of a major American industry may be giving him too much credit: His real objectives could actually be less rational and more superficial than that.
