For more than a quarter century, Venezuela was not merely poorly governed. It was captured by Cuban communist intelligence services. Russian arms entrenched it. Chinese loans stripped the country of sovereignty while the ChávezâMaduro regime looted Venezuela, wrecked the currency, and filled the prisons. The result was a failed state: mass exile, political prisoners, electrical blackouts, and a platform for Americas enemies in the Western Hemisphere. That history is what critics of the new U.S.âVenezuela energy agreement prefer to forget.
Last week, President Trump a historic oil partnership with Venezuelas interim government. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth negotiated it. Interim President Delcy RodrÃguez confirmed the core terms: 17 strategic fields holding more than 65 billion barrels, a production target above 1.5 million barrels a day, more than $100 billion in private investment, and large fiscal flows to Venezuela. Whether the final term is a generation or a century-scale U.S. stake, the meaning is the same. The United States has taken a secured interest in the resource that once financed communism in Cuba and subversion all over Latin America.
Previously, Venezuelas oil was “sovereign” on paper and enslaved in practiceâused to pay Cuban handlers, Russian weapons, and Chinese debt while Venezuelans fled. Sovereignty without property rights, honest courts, and a state that cannot be flipped by the Cuban communist regime is an empty word.
TRUMP TOUTS ACCESS TO 65 BILLION BARRELS OF VENEZUELAN OIL IN DEAL HE SAYS WILL SLASH GAS PRICES
Critics on the left call the deal colonialism. Hard-line Chavistas call it betrayal. Parts of the opposition call it illegitimate because an interim government signed it. Democratic Socialists who treated Maduro as a diplomatic inconvenience suddenly discovered constitutional piety about hydrocarbons. They share a fantasy: that a weak, cash-starved, institutionally gutted Venezuela can stay free if Washington keeps its distance.
History says otherwise: A vacuum in Venezuela is not filled by angels. It is filled by Cuban, Russian, and Chinese intelligence, along with the criminal networks, like the Tren de Aragua, that grew up under the Venezuelan socialist regime and extended through the Western Hemisphere. That axis produced the torture chambers, the refugee crisis, and the political prisons.
A long-term U.S. commercial stakeâbacked by American security interestsâis insurance. It raises the cost of a second communist capture. It makes it harder for a future corrupt regime to re-nationalize the industry overnight and resume shipping the crude to Cuba in exchange for rebuilding the repressive apparatus. American companies built much of that industry in the twentieth century before Chávez confiscated it. The decay that followed was communist plunder. Reopening the oil fields under American capital and strategic oversight is how you prevent the next plunder.
