On the heels of a high-stakes mission inside Venezuela’s capital that captured its indicted leader to bring him to justice, President Donald Trump said his goal now was to get major US oil companies access to its huge reserves — even if it means deploying US troops.
“We’re going to have a presence in Venezuela as it pertains to oil,” Trump said in a Saturday press conference at Mar-a-Lago in reply to a question about whether the US military would have a presence there. “So you may need something, not very much.”
Venezuela has one of the world’s largest proven oil reserves, but deploying US troops to guard its oilfields and aging infrastructure comes with high risks and costs, military experts told Business Insider, and will require a stable security environment. This kind of operation may also require congressional authorization or additional funding.
“When you put US troops into a foreign country, there is going to be some resistance unless they are invited,” said Peter Mansoor, a retired US Army colonel and professor of military history at the Ohio State University who is an expert in counterinsurgency warfare.
Mansoor, who commanded a brigade in Iraq, said US operations there are instructive, showing why sending US troops into Venezuela is the “least desirable” option. Iraqis themselves guarded their energy infrastructure, he said, which proved quite vulnerable to attack during the insurgency: Pipelines were bombed, mortars struck an oil refinery, trucks were hijacked only to have the oil sold on black markets.
“All of those things happened in Iraq, and they could happen here too if the Venezuelans allow an insurgency to erupt,” said Mansoor, who is also a senior fellow at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at OSU.
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Much of Venezuela’s operations are now managed by the state-run PDVSA oil company that took on assets that had belonged to US companies. Of US oil majors, only Chevron remains.
Venezuela’s future production is as murky as its tar-like extra-heavy crude. This type of oil is a large part of its massive oil reserves and requires a crude upgrader process to make it easier to move, an industry analyst said.
“All of that requires a lot of upfront investment,” said Ben Cahill, an energy analyst at the University of Texas at Austin. “So the Venezuelan oil sector presents some particular challenges. The reserves are enormous, and under the right political transition, and if a different investment regime returns, it is an opportunity that will be attractive to some companies.”
To be sure, the US military has plenty of experience with energy infrastructure. Soldiers have patrolled near oil fields in eastern Syria. Warships and cutters guarded oil platforms off Iraq during the war and intercepted oil smugglers. A US task force more recently escorted ships, including tankers, threatened by missile and drone attacks in the Red Sea.
Any US military mission in Venezuela turns on a turbulent situation where it’s unclear who’s in charge; Trump said at the press conference that US officials would be “running” Venezuela for a time.
“What’s unclear here is who is actually the opponent,” said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “Do we think we’re going to have to send troops to go in and seize these oil fields rather than simply having the government of Venezuela change its model for managing them? At this point, it’s unclear what exactly the protection is from and who would be doing it.”
“So jumping ahead to say that the US military is going to now be protecting a bunch of oil facilities is premature,” Clark said.
One thing that makes this national discussion so unusual is that it’s so nakedly about oil access, unlike the stated justifications for the Persian Gulf war or the 2003 Iraq invasion.
“The Trump administration has been very open about oil, even though they’ve tried to position this a little bit in terms of human rights,” said Paul Poast, an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago and a resident fellow at the Chicago Council of Global Affairs. “What remains to be seen is how much planning went into the aftermath — which of course the US has a terrible track record with.”
