Everything has gone beautifully in Donald Trump’s Venezuela operation. An alleged narcoterrorist dictator was captured and brought to justice in a New York court, and the planet’s biggest oil wealth is now owned by the US. At least, according to Trump himself.

“We’re in the oil business,” he said after declaring billions of dollars’ worth of Venezuelan crude was now heading to the US. “You don’t talk to the Venezuelans, you talk to me,” he told Big Oil executives who gathered in the White House last week.

The trouble is, Big Oil doesn’t see it that way. The chief executives of ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips are not rushing back into Venezuela.

Trump called the oil chiefs to the White House last Friday to urge them to invest $100 billion in upgrading Venezuela’s petroleum and gas industries. Decades of US economic sanctions are reckoned to have caused the country’s industrial infrastructure to deteriorate.

Venezuela’s oil industry was nationalized between 2004 and 2007 by former socialist President Hugo Chavez. This policy continued under his successor, Nicolas Maduro, who was kidnapped on January 3 when US special forces raided his residence in Caracas.

After Venezuela’s oil industry was nationalized and run by state-owned Petroleos de........

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