Oil Companies Are Key Partners in Trump’s Imperial Plans for Latin America |
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For months, U.S. President Donald Trump proclaimed that his pressure campaign against the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, backed by dozens of illegal killings through drone strikes, was about fighting drugs and cartels. But at his press conference after the U.S. abduction of Maduro, Trump couldn’t stop talking about oil.
“We’re gonna take back the oil,” Trump brazenly said. “Very large United States oil companies” will “go in” and “spend billions of dollars,” he promised. “We’re gonna be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground.”
All told, Trump uttered the word “oil” at least 20 times during the press conference. Oil company stocks — ExxonMobil, Halliburton, ConocoPhillips, Valero, Phillips 66 — surged the following day, with Chevron, the only major U.S. oil corporation with a current foothold in Venezuela, seeing its share value jump more than 5 percent.
Further demonstrating the administration’s drug accusations to be mere propaganda, the Justice Department recently dropped its longstanding claim that Maduro was the head of “Cartel de los Soles,” implicitly conceding that it is indeed not a drug cartel but a slang term referring to political officials who have become corrupted by drug money.
The Trump administration’s barefaced imperial grab for Venezuela’s oil is fraught with challenges, and it’s far too early to predict what will happen. But its abduction of Maduro and effort to gain control over Venezuela’s oil industry aligns with the administration’s openly stated vision of reasserting undisputed political and economic hegemony across the Americas and the Caribbean, including control over natural resources and trade routes, through gunboat diplomacy backed by military threats. In doing so, Trump is looking to corporate allies like Chevron, which could stand to benefit handsomely from his administration’s action — though this is far from guaranteed.
“We’re seeing the confluence of two trends here,” Michael Klare, energy expert and defense correspondent for The Nation, told Truthout. “The first is Trump’s reassertion of U.S. dominance over the Western Hemisphere, and the second is an explicit focus on the acquisition of strategic raw materials as a key aspect of national security — and their denial to strategic competitors, like China.”
The “Trump Corollary”
While Trump has a reputation for acting erratically, the administration’s National Security Strategy report to the U.S. Congress, published in December 2025, suggests how the abduction of Maduro fits its wider imperial agenda.
The report calls for a shift from “permanent American domination of the entire world” to a new emphasis on “global and regional balances of power to prevent the emergence of dominant adversaries.”
Venezuela is home to around 17 percent of the world’s known oil reserves but currently accounts for less than 1 percent of global crude oil production.
Notably, the report advocates the naked and expanded assertion of U.S. hegemony across the Americas and Caribbean and the revival of the Monroe Doctrine — a two-century-old U.S. policy that has come to represent the U.S. assertion of the Western Hemisphere as its sphere of influence — through a new “Trump Corollary.”
The Trump Corollary posits that “the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere” and aims to cultivate a U.S.-dominated network of compliant regimes — “enlist established friends” and “expand by cultivating and strengthening new partners” — across the region.
In his press conference, Trump was blunt. “Under our new national security strategy,” he said, “American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.”
Klare notes that “the assertion of U.S. dominance over the Western Hemisphere is hardly a new theme in American politics, but it’s been neglected in recent decades as the U.S. focused more on Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.”
“What Trump is saying is that we are going to refocus on the Western Hemisphere while downgrading our involvement in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East,” said Klare.
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