Donald Trump Will Run Venezuela
How a regime‑change fantasy collides with geology, sanctions, and OPEC politics.
Trump’s decision to say the United States will “run” Venezuela after Nicolás Maduro’s capture turns what was already a risky energy gambit into an open experiment in occupation politics built around an extra heavy oil province. It sharpens the impression, in OPEC capitals and across the Global South, that Washington is not merely backing a transition but intends to shape directly how Venezuela’s reserves are governed, marketed, and aligned with United States strategic goals.
Paper reserves vs real barrels
On paper, Venezuela’s endowment is unmatched. Official figures put the country’s proven reserves at roughly 303 billion barrels, more than Saudi Arabia’s, a number that appears in maps, investor decks, and think tank presentations as the ultimate long term prize. To foreign strategists looking at charts rather than pipelines, that reserve figure suggests a subcontinental tank which, once “unlocked,” could dilute OPEC’s price power, steady United States gasoline prices, and give Washington leverage over an entire quadrant of the Global South.
Most of those reserves sit in the Orinoco Belt as extra heavy and heavy crude that behaves more like tar than the light oil many Gulf producers export. Orinoco blends must be heated, diluted with lighter hydrocarbons such as naphtha or condensate, or run through large upgraders to produce synthetic crude refineries can handle, and each option carries high capital and operating costs and dependence on imported inputs and reliable power.
In the easy oil era, PDVSA and its partners built a string of projects, including Petropiar, Petrocedeño, Petromonagas, and Petro San Félix, to industrialize this asphalt like resource. Upgraders at sites such as Petropiar were designed to turn Hamaca type extra heavy crude into higher value synthetic barrels, but their economics relied on stable electricity, cheap diluents, access to global markets, and competent operators. When those supports falter, wells must be choked back, blends fall out of specification, and the whole chain becomes vulnerable to bottlenecks at any weak link.
Venezuela today is a long way from those assumptions. Years of under investment, corruption, and talent flight hollowed out PDVSA’s technical core, while repeated United States sanctions rounds restricted access to capital, parts, chemicals, and buyers. Even before the latest naval quarantine, national output hovered around 900,000 to 1,000,000 barrels per day, a fraction of the more than 3 million barrels per day Venezuela produced in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The Chevron story illustrates both potential and limits. After Washington granted partial sanctions relief in 2022 and later broadened waivers, Chevron cautiously ramped operations at Petropiar and in western fields such as Petroboscan, nudging national output modestly higher and reviving Petropiar’s upgrader toward six figure daily throughput. But Treasury licenses capped which joint ventures could operate, constrained dealings with sanctioned officials, and required constant renewal, which made long horizon investments risky and underscored how contingent Venezuelan output had become on United States policy cycles rather than geology alone.
Late in 2025, Washington tightened the screws again with new designations and a naval blockade of sanctioned tankers. The naval quarantine and fresh sanctions created precisely the kind of logistical choke points that extra heavy systems cannot easily absorb: storage tanks in the Orinoco region filled as exports slowed, operators shut in wells and cut throughput at upgraders such as Petropiar to avoid overflows, and production in some key blocks fell by roughly a quarter within weeks. A resource that looks boundless in reserve tables thus translates into surprisingly fragile flows once pipelines, power grids, and tanker routes come under stress.
This is the material reality behind headlines about “the world’s largest reserves.” The Orinoco is a reservoir system that can shape markets over decades under predictable governance and sustained spending, but it is not a tap a foreign military can simply turn on after a change of regime, especially when the enabling infrastructure has been degraded and politicized for years.
Terrain, logistics and the reach of force
Geology is only one layer of constraint. Venezuela’s geography and built environment impose their own brakes on any rapid scaling of production, particularly in a contested political landscape.
The country’s output is split between historically important conventional basins in western and eastern states and the newer extra heavy heartland of the Orinoco Belt. Fields in Zulia and around Lake Maracaibo rely on aging infrastructure, including corroded pipelines, subsiding well pads, and leaky flowlines, that need constant maintenance even in stable times. In the central eastern plains, Orinoco projects depend on long stretches of pipelines, power lines, access roads, and river crossings linking remote well pads and upgraders to the Jose terminal and other coastal outlets.
The environmental setting is a chronic challenge. The Orinoco region is an unforgiving mix of savannahs, wetlands, and seasonally flooded areas, with heavy rains and soft ground that complicate road building and pipeline burial. High temperatures and humidity add stress on pumps, compressors, and electrical systems, so operators must budget for frequent repairs and keep spare parts on hand, exactly the kind of redundancy sanctions and lost expertise tend to erode.
Once the country moves from low grade political crisis into overt militarization, every vulnerability becomes a pressure point. Pipelines, power pylons, and pumping stations that snake through sparsely populated areas are classic soft targets that small groups can sabotage with basic explosives or manual damage. Upgraders, which concentrate flows and power consumption at a handful of sites, are especially attractive: disabling one facility can remove a large fraction of export capacity without holding territory.
Offshore firepower cannot fully secure that web of assets. Carrier groups or long range bombers can destroy boats, radars, and air defense systems, and a blockade can deter or seize tankers, but such tools do not translate into persistent control over thousands of kilometres of onshore energy infrastructure. Protection of pipelines and nodes ultimately depends on local communities, unions, and regional security forces, which are precisely the actors most likely to fragment or switch allegiances in a post coup environment.
The logistics of moving Venezuelan barrels out of the Caribbean have also become more complex in the sanctions era. As United States and European buyers pulled back, Caracas increasingly turned to a shadow fleet of older tankers using tactics such as turning off automatic identification system tracking, conducting ship to ship transfers, and sailing under dubious or non existent flags to move cut price crude to Asian buyers. Marine intelligence firms now estimate that hundreds of tankers worldwide participate in this gray trade, moving oil from Russia, Iran, and Venezuela under flags of convenience or fraudulent registries.
Recent enforcement trends show that United States authorities are prepared to escalate from blacklisting to physical interdiction. Treasury sanctions in late 2025 targeted specific companies and tankers linked to Venezuelan exports, stressing that Maduro’s government increasingly depends on this dark fleet, while the seizure of at least one stateless tanker accused of manipulating tracking and using a defunct flag signalled that gray zone shipping practices can trigger direct intervention, not just legal designations.
For Venezuelan planners, the export chain is now squeezed from both ends: at home, decaying infrastructure and power problems limit what can be produced and processed; offshore, shadow fleet constraints, insurance fears, and interdiction threats shrink the pool of ships and routes willing to handle Venezuelan barrels. For a heavy oil system that needs steady, high volume flows to remain technically and commercially viable, such volatility is profoundly destabilizing.
Washington’s OPEC strategy fantasy
Inside Washington, the military moves are being justified in terms of democracy, narcotrafficking, and human rights, but energy strategy runs through the subtext. For more than a decade, officials and policy shops have floated scenarios in which Venezuelan oil serves as a counterweight to both OPEC+ and Russian exports, especially in heavy sour segments where United States Gulf Coast refineries are most exposed.
Many Gulf Coast plants were built to run heavy crude from Venezuela and Mexico, later supplemented by Canadian oil sands blends, with coking units and desulphurization trains sized for such feeds. Sanctions on PDVSA forced refiners to lean more on Canadian and Mexican grades and, in some cases, to buy heavier barrels from further afield, eroding the original economics of their configurations.
In the optimistic version of Washington’s scenario, a friendlier government in Caracas rapidly normalizes relations with United States firms, renews long term offtake deals, and re establishes a flexible flow of Venezuelan heavy crude to Gulf Coast refineries. That provides refiners with a closer, potentially cheaper source of suitable feedstock while delivering a symbolic victory over what Washington portrays as an illegitimate regime in its near abroad.
Layered onto that vision is a more ambitious strategic idea. Venezuelan volumes, once revived, are imagined as a non OPEC swing supply, limiting how far Riyadh and Moscow can push prices by tightening their own output and functioning as a heavy oil counterpart to United States shale. In this view, Venezuela remains formally inside OPEC but is politically aligned with United States objectives, giving Washington indirect leverage over cartel dynamics.
To get there, Washington’s strategy assumes several things: that regime change will rapidly produce a stable, pro United States leadership with broad legitimacy; that sanctions relief will be swift and coordinated to clear legal and financial obstacles for Western majors and service companies; and that OPEC’s core members will tolerate a founder state being repurposed as a vehicle for a rival power’s market management plans. Each assumption looks stretched when set against recent history.
Even under friendlier conditions, large scale heavy oil projects take years of investment to restore and expand, especially when upgraders must be rebuilt or refurbished and workforce skills rebuilt after brain drain. The long shadow of expropriations during the Chavez era, followed by sanctions and unpaid debts, has made international oil companies cautious about betting tens of billions of dollars on future Venezuelan governments and courts honouring contracts.
The capture of Nicolás Maduro by United States forces, widely reported at the start of January, adds drama but not clarity. Removing a polarizing leader may make it easier for some foreign governments to justify engagement, but it does not automatically resolve who speaks for Venezuela, who controls PDVSA and the security forces, and how durable any new arrangement will be. In the short term, it is at least as likely to fuel factional struggles and sabotage campaigns as it is to invite smooth privatization.
Trump’s subsequent claim, in press appearances, that the United States will “run” Venezuela after the large scale strike pushes this logic further. It suggests not simply backing a new elite but overseeing, in effect, a trusteeship for a decaying heavy oil supergiant, with Washington deeply entangled in contract design, local security, and the sequencing of sanctions relief.
What OPEC is and what it fears
For OPEC and the broader OPEC+ coalition, the Venezuelan episode touches on institutional memory and existential fears. The group still coordinates output adjustments that shape global prices, with Gulf members and Russia holding most of the spare capacity needed to add or subtract barrels at will. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have spent years and tens of billions increasing capacity they can hold idle as a buffer, precisely to preserve their role as indispensable stabilizers.
From their vantage point, the danger is not just that more non OPEC supply appears, but that a block of reserves is harnessed to a hostile political agenda. Many Gulf officials and analysts see the 2010s and early 2020s as a period when United States shale growth, strategic reserve releases, aggressive sanctions, and diplomatic pressure were combined to keep prices in a band that favoured Western consumers over producer revenues and autonomy.
Venezuela has historically sat on the opposite side of that struggle. Under Hugo Chavez and then Maduro, Caracas portrayed itself as a price hawk, pushing for stronger quotas and higher prices and using OPEC platforms to link oil policy with a broader anti imperial narrative. For such a state to be flipped into a Trojan horse for United States energy strategy would not only silence its own voice but, in the eyes of many members, compromise OPEC’s identity as a club where producer sovereignty comes first.
Maduro’s recent diplomatic moves show how acutely Caracas understood this sensitivity. In late 2025 he sent letters to OPEC and OPEC+ leaders warning that United States military deployments and sanctions amounted to direct aggression against an OPEC member, threatening Venezuelan production and global supply stability. In parallel media messages he accused Washington of seeking to seize Venezuela’s oil through force and urged fellow producers to resist what he framed as a precedent setting attack.
Those appeals tapped into long standing anxieties among other producers, including those outside OPEC, about regime change and extraterritorial sanctions being used to reorder control over resources. Even governments that dislike Maduro’s politics have reasons to worry about a world in which an energy rich state can be bombed, blockaded, and have its leadership captured under a narrative of stabilization only to see its resource governance re engineered to suit another country’s strategic needs.
How OPEC is likely to respond
In the near term, OPEC’s most consequential moves are likely to remain technical and tactical rather than dramatic. The group enters 2026 in a delicate balancing act, rolling over voluntary cuts and adjusting quotas in response to slowing demand growth and rising non OPEC output from United States shale, Brazil’s pre salt, and Guyana’s offshore fields. Venezuelan production, in its current constrained state, is small enough that even significant short term losses do not force an overhaul of that framework.
The naval blockade and sanctions driven export crunch tighten the heavy sour segment of the market, supporting prices for grades many complex refineries favour. If traders start to price in more severe or prolonged Venezuelan disruptions, pushing up benchmarks and widening spreads, Saudi Arabia and allies can release selected light and medium barrels from spare capacity to prevent runaway spikes, defending demand while reinforcing their role as stabilizers.
The more difficult question lies a few years ahead. If a new, more pro United States government in Caracas, functioning under explicit or de facto tutelage from Washington, tries to ramp production back toward 2 million barrels per day or higher with Western help, OPEC will have to decide how to slot that path into its quota and alliance system. One option is to treat Venezuela as a normalizing member, set a gradually rising quota that allows visible recovery but caps incremental volume, and use internal politics to blunt the potential for Caracas to act as an anti OPEC spearhead.
Another possibility is to grant Venezuela temporary special status or exemptions, acknowledging the need for reconstruction while insisting on consultation and data transparency. That carries risks because other members under stress, including Libya, Iraq, and Nigeria, can demand similar treatment, potentially weakening discipline, but it might be seen as the least bad way to manage re entry without either alienating a founder or giving Washington effective voting power inside the group.
A third, more confrontational response would be to treat overt United States weaponization of Venezuelan barrels as a direct challenge. Core producers could answer a United States driven output surge with deeper coordinated cuts to defend price floors, or even by reviving a 2014 style price war to reset expectations and remind markets who still controls most low cost reserves. OPEC’s behaviour in recent years suggests an aversion to such shock therapy, but the symbolism of a founder state being explicitly mobilized against cartel interests will test that restraint.
Whatever mix of options the group chooses, one theme will dominate internal discussions: precedent. If United States military action against Venezuela is rewarded with durable influence over an OPEC member’s output strategy, other producers will wonder if they could be next in line for stabilization when their policies diverge from Washington’s preferences.
Sanctions mechanics and the shadow fleet
The sanctions architecture surrounding Venezuela has evolved into its own ecosystem that will shape outcomes regardless of who holds power in Caracas. Early measures targeted key individuals and PDVSA’s formal access to United States financial markets; later rounds hardened into broad restrictions on crude exports, refined products, and dealings with state entities.
As direct sales to Western buyers dried up, PDVSA and intermediaries turned to traders in Asia and the Middle East willing to handle discounted barrels under arrangements involving ship to ship transfers, mixed cargoes, and opaque corporate structures. Many of these flows relied on the dark fleet, aging tankers that routinely switch flags, owners, and registries and that often manipulate tracking signals to mask their movements.
United States and allied authorities are moving from a mostly reactive stance, blacklisting individual ships after the fact, to more predictive network based targeting. Firms that track vessel behaviour and ownership patterns report a growing list of tankers broadcasting non existent flags or using fraudulent registries, making them attractive interdiction targets because they are effectively stateless. The seizure of a Venezuelan linked tanker in late 2025, justified on grounds of sanctions evasion, tracking manipulation, and false flagging, is widely read in the shipping world as a sign that physical intervention is now on the table for high risk vessels.
For any successor regime hoping to scale exports quickly, these trends will matter as much as geology. Even if Washington lifts some sanctions to reward political change, compliance cultures in shipping, insurance, and banking have shifted toward caution, and regulators have built tools to monitor and penalize gray zone operations. Undoing that environment, or carving out a reliable corridor for Venezuelan barrels, will take time and political will that cannot be conjured by airstrikes or press conferences.
Iraq, Libya and the Venezuelan twist
Iraq and Libya provide immediate analogies for what happens when regime change collides with oil dependent states. In Iraq, the 2003 invasion toppled Saddam Hussein but also devastated infrastructure and dissolved institutions managing the sector, opening the door to years of sabotage, contested contracts, and politicized decisions over field development. Production eventually surpassed pre war levels, but the path was jagged, marked by pipeline bombings, disputes between Baghdad and the Kurdish region over export rights, and OPEC quota tensions that turned Iraqi volumes into a constant forecasting problem.
Libya, after the 2011 intervention, became the archetype of on and off barrels. Output swung from over 1 million barrels per day to a few hundred thousand or less as rival governments, militias, and foreign patrons fought over terminals, pipelines, and central bank access, transforming Libyan supply into a geopolitical weather vane rather than a stable contribution to OPEC planning.
Venezuela adds the complexity of extra heavy crude and a polarized, sanctions hardened political economy to this pattern. Years of United States pressure have not only choked exports but encouraged alternative power networks around PDVSA, local unions, and security units involved in smuggling, informal mining, and cross border trade. Those actors are unlikely to stand aside if a new leadership, especially one perceived as under United States tutelage, tries to recentralize control and invite foreign majors back on Western friendly terms.
A military intervention and leadership decapitation thus raise the odds of several destabilizing dynamics at once: splinters within PDVSA and the armed forces, regional bosses contesting fields and export routes, and hybrid conflict focused on sabotaging pipelines, power lines, and export terminals. At the same time, investors and courts will be grappling with the legacy of earlier expropriations, arbitration awards, and debt restructurings, all of which can cloud title to assets and complicate new deals.
For OPEC, this combination points toward another member whose stated capacity is high but whose actual dependable output is chronically uncertain, a swing state in the worst sense. For Washington, it risks turning the dream of a neat anti OPEC lever into the reality of a messy client state requiring ongoing security, financial, and diplomatic management just to keep barrels flowing.
Chavez kidnapped, then returned, and the history of failure
The current operation unfolds in a country where outside backed power plays have failed before, most famously in April 2002 when Hugo Chavez was briefly removed and then swept back into office within roughly forty seven hours. Venezuelans and many observers see that episode as a warning that leaders can be toppled quickly but not held if the military, oil workers, and urban poor refuse to accept a new order regarded as externally backed.
In 2002, a coalition of dissident officers, business leaders, and opposition figures pushed Chavez out of Miraflores and installed business leader Pedro Carmona as interim president, dissolving the National Assembly and rolling back key elements of the Bolivarian programme. Chavez was detained and flown to the La Orchila naval base, effectively kidnapped by putschists who assumed they could consolidate a new regime before resistance coalesced.
Instead, mass protests erupted in Caracas barrios and other cities, while units in the armed forces loyal to the 1999 constitution turned against the coup government. Within two days, Carmona’s administration collapsed under popular and military pressure, the presidential guard retook the palace, and Chavez was returned to power, turning the failed coup into a central piece of his personal and political myth.
Declassified documents and later reporting showed that United States intelligence had prior knowledge that some Venezuelan officers were plotting a coup, while the Bush administration initially framed events as a democratic correction rather than condemning the overthrow. Direct orchestration has never been conclusively proven and officials deny planning the coup, but the prevailing perception in Venezuela and across Latin America has been that Washington tacitly green lit the attempt and then lost control when the streets and parts of the military refused to accept the new order.
That 2002 fiasco sits in a longer pattern of United States efforts to shape Venezuelan politics around oil that have produced blowback rather than compliance. Throughout the twentieth century, Washington backed friendly strongmen and parties that kept foreign companies dominant in the oil sector, fuelling nationalist resentment that later powered Chavez’s rise. Since the mid 2000s, successive administrations have tried to isolate or weaken Chavez and then Maduro through diplomatic pressure and escalating sanctions, including measures targeting PDVSA and blocking access to United States markets, which pulverized the economy but did not yield a clean regime change.
Analysts now warn that the latest turn to open military action and talk of running Venezuela risks repeating the same pattern at a higher level of intensity: overconfidence in the ability to direct political outcomes in a proud, polarized country with strong traditions of nationalist mobilization. Just as Chavez’s kidnapping and rapid return undercut United States claims to be defending democracy, an extended United States tutelage over Maduro’s successor could galvanize opposition across the region and foster long term resistance inside Venezuela’s institutions and oil fields.
For Venezuelans who remember 2002, the sight of another president taken into custody under contested circumstances and the promise that outsiders will oversee the transition is less liberation than replay. The earlier coup showed that while a leadership can be removed by force, it cannot easily be held in place against popular and military currents that view the move as foreign intrusion, a reality that cuts directly against Washington’s fantasy of turning Venezuela into a dependable, United States managed heavy oil counterweight to OPEC+.
Markets, optics and the Global South
Beyond OPEC’s internal calculations, the attempt to reposition Venezuelan oil as a United States aligned instrument will reverberate across the wider Global South. Many governments and publics already see the international energy system as skewed toward the interests of rich consumers, with sanctions and interventions used selectively against disfavoured producers.
The spectacle of an OPEC founder being bombed, blockaded, publicly threatened with seizure of its reserves, and then held up as a candidate for restructuring to benefit Western majors is likely to deepen those perceptions. Maduro’s letter to OPEC, which framed United States moves as an attack on a producer’s right to manage its own fields, was crafted with this audience in mind; his capture and Trump’s statements about running Venezuela will be read through the same lens, regardless of views on his domestic rule.
Major non Western buyers such as China and India have already been important outlets for Venezuelan crude under sanctions, often taking cargoes at discounts and via opaque routes. If a new pro United States leadership tries to reorient exports decisively toward North America and Europe, those states are likely to treat it as confirmation that Washington regards energy flows as tools of geopolitical hierarchy rather than neutral trade.
For OPEC and its allies, that perception gap is both a challenge and an opportunity. On one hand, overt alignment between a member state and United States strategy could weaken solidarity inside the group and complicate consensus on quotas; on the other, by presenting themselves as defenders of producer sovereignty against militarized regime change and extraterritorial sanctions, core members such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq can deepen ties with a wider set of Global South actors who fear similar treatment. Venezuela’s crisis thus feeds into a broader narrative in which non Western producers and consumers try to insulate themselves from United States financial and military leverage through alternative payment systems, long term bilateral deals, and new regional forums.
The uncomfortable conclusion
At the heart of this story is a widening gap between fantasy and constraint. On the fantasy side are strategists and commentators who imagine that capturing Maduro and installing a friendlier elite, now under explicit United States supervision, will in a few years unlock millions of heavy barrels per day, weaken OPEC’s grip, anchor low gasoline prices, and dramatize United States power projection in the Caribbean.
On the reality side are analysts and engineers who see a sector built around extra heavy crude that is expensive and technically demanding to produce, a web of upgraders, pipelines, and power systems degraded by neglect, a workforce and corporate culture damaged by expropriations, politicization, and sanctions, and an export network entangled in sanctions enforcement, dark fleet logistics, and rising compliance risk. They also see a seat inside OPEC that guarantees any significant output move triggers cartel politics and counter moves, not just applause from consuming nations.
Venezuelan oil is not irrelevant. Over a decade or more, under relatively stable governance and consistent investment, its reserves can reshape heavy sour balances, matter greatly for specific refineries, and add another important voice inside OPEC’s deliberations. But nothing in the geology, infrastructure, sanctions regime, or political history supports the idea that these barrels can be turned into a quick reaction weapon against OPEC+ without reproducing the pattern seen in Iraq, Libya, and Venezuela’s own failed 2002 coup: short term chaos, long term uncertainty, and reputational damage that pushes other producers closer to each other and further from United States influence.