During a triumphant Saturday press conference, President Donald Trump proudly boasted of a U.S. military operation removing the brutal Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. The news diverted attention from America’s affordability crisis, the loss of health care coverage for millions, and the Epstein files. Instead, all eyes turned to Venezuela.

However impressively efficient the American strike may have been, the president’s motives have been muddled. Was it to curb drug trafficking? Halt Venezuelan migration? Boost democracy? 

American oil industry interests quickly became Trump’s primary rationale. 

“We're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” Trump claimed. “We're gonna rebuild the oil infrastructure, which will cost billions of dollars. It will cost us nothing. It'll be paid for by the oil companies directly.”  

The President repeated claims that the U.S. oil industry is interested in making the needed investment to revive the antiquated extraction and refining operations of Venezuela. 

However, the leaders of this industry tell me directly that they had no advance knowledge and have no interest in making the massive investments needed to extract less desirable “heavy” Venezuelan crude oil.  It is noteworthy that, while Venezuela holds 17% of the world’s oil reserves, the largest in the world, and yet only produces 1% of the output, no industry leaders have spoken out in favor of the U.S. invasion as an opportunity to regain assets expropriated by Venezuela in 2007. 

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“I haven’t spoken to U.S. oil companies in the last few days,” admitted Secretary of State Marco Rubio the day after Trump’s declaration. “But we’re pretty certain that there will be dramatic interest from Western companies."

This confidence is at best misplaced, and at worst, fabricated. Simply put: the economic incentives for investing in Venezuela’s oil sector are minimal and the potential costs are

© Time