New York Times: Trump’s $100 Billion Venezuela Oil Plan Gets a Cool Reception

January 10, 2026 Hunter Wallace Conservatism, Energy, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Politics, Populists, Progressives, Venezuela, World 3

As many people have already noted, Trump is the first American president in history to launch a “war for oil” which is not about oil. There is no pressing need for Venezuela’s oil because of the success of the American fracking industry. The United States is now the Saudi Arabia of oil. Gas prices were already cheap because of the low global price of oil. We could have always bought Venezuelan oil. Chevron is still there. Venezuela was only selling its oil to China because of our crushing sanctions.

The oil majors aren’t in any rush to invest $100 billion dollars in Venezuela’s dilapidated oil infrastructure. They have already written off their losses from the Bush era. The oil majors didn’t push for this and would rather invest in other countries and avoid Venezuela’s political instability.

New York Times:

“President Trump has put a number on how much he wants the biggest U.S. and European oil giants to pour into Venezuela: at least $100 billion.

During a meeting at the White House on Friday afternoon, oil executives made it clear that they were not yet prepared to follow through.

Darren Woods, who leads the largest U.S. oil company, Exxon Mobil, was especially blunt during a televised portion of the meeting.

“We’ve had our assets seized there twice, and so you can imagine to re-enter a third time would require some pretty significant changes,” he said. “Today it’s uninvestable.”

For the company to return to Venezuela, legal changes would have to be made, and there would need to be “durable investment protections,” Mr. Woods, Exxon’s chief executive, said. But he offered an olive branch to the White House, saying Exxon was prepared send an exploratory team to Venezuela within the next few weeks if it received security guarantees.

Exxon and ConocoPhillips, another large American oil company, have been pursuing substantial claims against Venezuela’s government for assets it seized during a nationalization wave two decades ago …”

Trump’s half baked imperial vision is what is driving this.

We don’t need Greenland or Canada to become the 51st state. We don’t need regime change in the “Narco Caliphate” of Cuba, Venezuela and Colombia. We don’t need to attack Iran. The Monroe Doctrine doesn’t explain why Trump attacked Iran, Yemen, Nigeria, Syria and Somalia.

The purpose of Monroe Doctrine, which was enforced by Britain and the Royal Navy for most of the 19th century, was deter European recolonization of Latin America. It wasn’t to turn transform newly independent Latin American republics into formal American colonies. It is also a pathetic indication of our growing economic weakness and political disarray that we are trying to transform Venezuela by force into a colony when China has become the biggest trading partner of most of South America.

Axios:

“MAGA is pressing the Trump administration to write a new chapter in America’s expansionist history — one that adds territory and influence as part of a new Western empire.

Why it matters: On its face, MAGA’s imperial turn is a head-spinning reversal for a movement built around hostility to “endless wars” in the Middle East.

But reframed as hemispheric dominance, the right’s expansionist impulse fits a civilizational worldview: America as the enforcer of the West, bending weaker nations to its will.

What they’re saying: In the days after President Trump’s stunning capture of Nicolás Maduro, even some of MAGA’s loudest non-interventionists began casting strategic lands in America’s hemisphere — including Colombia, Cuba and Greenland — as ripe for colonization.

“How can you get more ‘America First’ than Manifest Destiny 2.0?” “War Room” host Steve Bannon told NBC News.

“Expansion is the American way. It has been since literally the first moments of its existence,” wrote The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh. “If Americans in the 1800s were as timid and weak as some of the naysayers today, we never would have even reached the Pacific.

“[I]t’s up to us to keep pushing for the orderly governance of the world via American imperialism,” MAGA influencer Mike Cernovich said this week on Tucker Carlson’s podcast. …

Zoom out: At its core, MAGA thought leaders are animated by the belief that America is the heir to ancient European empires — and thus the central guarantor of Western power. …”

Initially, I was excited about this rhetoric.

I have always believed that our foreign policy should be focused on the Western hemisphere. I have always opposed stupid wars and interventions in Eurasia.

Manifest Destiny was a glorious epoch in American history which was celebrated by Madison Grant in The Conquest of a Continent and Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West. We should reassert the Monroe Doctrine. It is true that expansion is the American way. The problem is that “MAGA thought leaders” don’t understand American history the way that I do.

American expansion WAS NOT imperialism or colonialism. We took sparsely populated territory in North America, settled it with our own people and replicated our own culture and institutions. Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty” was a federation of republics. Liberty was the core animating principle. The Republic grew in size in the lower 48 states. Maine became a little Massachusetts. Kentucky became a little Virginia. Alabama became a little Georgia. Each state was sovereign, the equal of every other state in the U.S. Senate. Each state joined through its own free will and was settled by White people. Indians were treated as semi-sovereign, autonomous, independent tribes and confined to reservations.

In the “American Empire,” Tennessee is not an imperial possession or a commercial colony exploited by Virginia. White settlers moved into trans-Appalachia. They acquired property and farms. They benefited from the process. They became the equals of Virginians with the same laws, institutions, culture, bloodlines. This couldn’t be more different than, say, Ireland’s colonial relationship with the British Empire, Saint-Domingue or Vietnam’s relationship with the French Empire, Indonesia’s relationship with the Dutch Empire, Brazil’s relationship with Portugal, Mexico’s relationship with Spain, etc.

In traditional empires like the Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire or the Ottoman Empire, one people conquer another, loot their resources, exploit them and force them to pay tribute. The Romans brought their captives to Rome who were sold into slavery or killed in triumphs like Vercingetorix the king of the Gauls. The Britons fought back against the Romans under Boudica. The Germans fought back against the Romans under Arminius. The Turks terrorized their subject peoples in the Balkans for centuries. To say that America has always been an “empire” like previous empires isn’t true.

MAGA’s imperialism lacks 1.) racial considerations and 2.) any concern for consent. Cuba, for example, was conquered by the United States in the Spanish-American War, but wanted to be an independent nation and was granted its independence which is inconceivable in traditional empires. We also didn’t want to incorporate Cuba into the United States because of its large non-White population. Previous generations of Americans would have never entertained the notion of reducing Venezuela to a colony or incorporating it into the United States. They recognized its independence, engaged in commerce and sent warships to the region to protect its independence from its German creditors.

In MAGA, there has been an uncritical, dumbed down, vibe based embrace of the idea of “empire” in general, which lacks any concern for the type of “empire” that America actually was when it was great. Specifically, the character of our “empire” was White, Protestant and republican, but I get the sense that the people who are moving in this direction and who support the “Donroe Doctrine” would say that Hitler is based or Genghis Khan is based or Stalin was based. Greatness is being defined as just being powerful or dominant. Look how powerful we are dominating Iran or Venezuela. We’re The Empire, not the Republic in Star Wars. Trump’s attack on Venezuela was a daring Viking raid!

3 Comments

  1. Trump: “30 million barrels of oil was given to us by Venezuela…

    The US uses that much oil in 35 hours, BFD !

    Reply

  2. “United States is now the Saudi Arabia of oil.”

    Emm, not really, we can’t export 10 mm bbl/day. A lot of that ‘oil’ we have is natural gas condensates.

    I think you may be missing a larger scheme that’s afoot. They want to get an alternative supply to the Persian Gulf, so that when they go to war with Iran and Persian oil is cutoff and the world economy won’t collapse.

    I think this is being set up as a buffer for an eventual war with Iran in a couple of years. A scheme hatched by our greatest ally, to be implemented by their goy golem, the USA.

    ( Fracked wells don’t last very long, they exhaust quickly. we are in a temporary golden age of production.)

    Reply

  3. Let’s see how long their enthusiasm lasts when the situation degenerates into Iraq 2.0 with the US having to commit large numbers of troops to force the natives to accept “democracy.” I smell a neocon rat’s forever war brewing.

    Reply

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