Oil, Power, and the Climate Stakes of the U.S. Move in Venezuela

To be sure, Trump has thrown some support behind nuclear power and other technologies. And litigation has blocked some of the administration’s efforts to stymie clean energy. But those counterefforts do not come close to offsetting the methane and carbon that his “energy dominance” agenda will pump into the atmosphere. Theories abound as to why Trump has so tightly embraced fossil fuels, but whatever the reasons, the burning of fossil fuels continues to cause temperatures to rise.

Scientists determined that 2025 was the fourth hottest year on record for the contiguous United States, and in every U.S. county, human-caused climate change drove up temperatures. That extra heat exacerbated the Los Angeles wildfires and supercharged Hurricanes Milton and Helene. These climate-worsened disasters are hitting Americans in the wallet through higher insurance premiums, crumbling infrastructure, and increased health-care costs. How high will that bill get? Time will tell. But by locking in fossil fuels, Trump has also locked in escalating costs.

The United States Under Trump: From Petrostate to Petro-Empire? 

David M. Hart is a senior fellow for climate and energy at the Council on Foreign Relations. 

In CFR’s recent roundup of global trends to watch in 2026, I included an entry on the rise of the “electrostate.” In it, I wrote that the term “contrasts with ‘petrostate,’ and its archetype is China.” A few weeks later, the vocabulary now needs to be extended in a new direction: “petro-empire.” Its archetype might be the United States.

The Trump administration’s support for the domestic petro-industry has long been clear. Its “drill, baby, drill” mantra has been translated into deregulation of producers, opening of public lands and waters, and disincentives for competing technologies, such as wind energy and electric vehicles. 

Internationally, the administration has shown a fondness for traditional petrostates, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It has sought to make the world safer for U.S. petro-exports through trade negotiations and by pressuring other countries to limit their climate commitments.

But in Venezuela, the United States is asserting control for the first time over another country’s petroleum resources. In the short run, the U.S. Navy will reportedly determine which tankers can leave and where they can land, with the U.S. government managing the proceeds. In the long run, Trump says he wants to rebuild Venezuela’s production capacity with U.S. ;capital and manage it with U.S. interests in mind.

This venture has more echoes of centuries past than the one ahead. Nineteenth-century imperial powers routinely extracted resources from colonies they conquered by military force. Even though it was founded to throw off the yoke of monarchy, the United States joined the imperialist rush in the 1890s, annexing Hawaii and Puerto Rico, occupying Cuba and the Philippines, and supporting corporate extraction regimes in the Caribbean, Central America, and beyond.

However, a half-century later, at the end of World War II, the United States forced its wartime allies to decolonize. National sovereignty and self-determination were enshrined in international law. While sometimes honored in the breach, these principles nonetheless deterred most attempts at conquest. In the case of Kuwait, which was invaded and overrun by Iraq in 1991, the United States went to war to reverse such a violation, with the United Nations’ authorization.

The current U.S. government disdains the United Nations, and the nineteenth-century parallels of its Venezuela operation are undeniable. To be sure, the effort so far is asset-light, relying on naval and air forces and collaborators in the former Nicolás Maduro regime. But, when asked what would happen to the country’s oil reserves, Trump replied, “We’re going to run everything.”

The United States’ seizure of Maduro was lawless. Its budding petro-empire is pointless. The United States and its Gulf allies already have plenty of leverage in the global oil market. That market is already oversupplied, and as the Chinese “electrostate” expands, oil demand is likely to sag.  

More importantly, twenty-first-century wealth is generated primarily through knowledge creation. In the long run, physical resources can be diversified, economized, and substituted—if enough minds concentrate on the problem. The shale revolution illustrates this point. A quarter-century ago, U.S. oil production was thought to be irreversibly declining. Horizontal drilling and fracturing technology, guided by advanced analytics, revived it. Great ideas pay massive dividends. Even Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman seems to understand this: he has launched visionary plan to transform Saudi Arabia into a knowledge-based economy while diversifying its energy mix. Unfortunately, Trump is trapped in the past, pulling the United States backward with him.

The End of the Beginning 

Lindsay Iversen is the deputy director of the Climate Realism Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations. 

To judge by its immediate aftermath, the U.S. incursion into Venezuela was an unqualified success. In an overnight raid leveraging Washington’s impressive capabilities in intelligence-gathering, cyber warfare, and special forces operations, the United States seized the Venezuelan leader and spirited him out of the country, suffering few injuries and no fatalities. Speaking at a press conference on January 3, Trump called the raid “one of the most stunning, effective, and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history.”

This short-term triumphalism, however, obscures more than it illuminates. Far from being a “short, sharp, decisive use of force,” as national security analyst Matthew Kroenig characterized it on a recent episode of CFR’s The President’s Inbox podcast, the operation that deposed Nicolás Maduro was the product of a monthslong deployment involving more than fifteen thousand service members and military hardware—including aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines—most of which remains in the region. It was, moreover, just one step in service of a much larger goal: taking control of Venezuelan oil flows to dictate government policy, weaken Venezuela’s regional allies, and lower global oil prices.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking to the media shortly after Maduro’s seizure, said that the United States could exercise “tremendous leverage” over the Venezuelan regime’s behavior because it could control the volume and destination of Venezuelan oil exports and the dispensation of oil revenues. Washington can, he argued, use that leverage to compel the regime to implement oil market reforms opening the country to U.S. investment, release political prisoners, pursue a program of national reconciliation, and, eventually, effect a still-undefined political transition.

Whatever one thinks about the wisdom or legality of that plan, it is not a short-term enterprise. To exercise that leverage, the U.S. military needs to be continuously deployed to the region in sufficient force to monitor oil flows, interdict would-be smugglers, and pose a lightly veiled threat of further violence if Caracas doesn’t cooperate, for months or even years to come.

As it stands, the Trump administration has effectively launched an open-ended military commitment in the Caribbean. And that’s the best-case scenario. The administration has offered little insight on its plans, if any, for instability stemming from already-rising inflation, political backlash against the regime, or opportunistic attacks on oil or other infrastructure from insurgent groups or criminal gangs—any of which could disrupt oil production, the government’s cooperation with the United States, or both. It is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which the White House would have to choose between more direct involvement and the failure of its Venezuela policy.

All of which is to say that the success or failure of the United States’ Venezuela gambit should be measured not in hours or days, but months or years. Indeed, there is a credible argument to be made that this policy’s effects will best be measured in centuries. It reiterates and deepens the United States’ commitment to the fossil fuels that are warming the planet, and anchors U.S. energy policy to a shrinking, fading past while China leads the world toward an electrified future.

This work represents the views and opinions solely of the authors. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.