Despite dramatic rhetoric, military spectacle, and bold claims from Washington, America’s largest oil companies are signaling that Venezuela remains off-limits for serious investment. What was billed by President Donald Trump as a decisive geopolitical and economic triumph has, in the eyes of Big Oil, failed to deliver the one outcome that truly matters to global energy capital: a stable, investor-friendly regime change.

Trump has framed the January operation in Venezuela as an unqualified success. In his telling, the United States neutralized an alleged “narcoterrorist dictator,” secured access to the world’s largest proven oil reserves, and reasserted American dominance over a long-defiant petrostate. “We’re in the oil business,” Trump declared publicly, boasting that Venezuelan crude was now flowing to the United States. Speaking to oil executives summoned to the White House, he was even blunter: “You don’t talk to the Venezuelans, you talk to me.”

Yet behind the closed doors of that White House meeting, the response Trump received was far from enthusiastic. The chief executives of ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips-two of the largest and most politically influential oil companies in the United States-made clear that they were not prepared to return to Venezuela or commit the $100 billion in investment Trump was urging them to provide. Their verdict was stark and consistent: Venezuela remains “uninvestable.”

This disconnect between political theater and corporate reality highlights a deeper truth about the limits of power in global energy markets. Military force and rhetorical dominance may shape headlines, but oil executives base decisions on legal certainty, institutional stability, and long-term control over assets. By those standards, the Venezuela operation has fallen well short of expectations.

The skepticism of ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips is rooted in experience. Venezuela’s oil industry was nationalized between 2004 and 2007........

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