The Trump administration says it can’t wait to get Venezuela’s oil “flowing the way it should be” and boost the nation’s mining industry after the Trump team removed the country’s leader and announced a U.S. takeover.
President Donald Trump and his aides are looking to boost fossil fuel extraction, secure U.S. influence over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves and juice mineral production following the U.S. operation to capture the South American leader Nicolás Maduro on Saturday.
The takeover of Venezuela — with its oil reserves and vast gold and critical mineral supplies — previews a new foreign policy playbook for the administration that’s focused on access to resources and fending off other global superpowers in the region, experts say.
“It’s a window into the centrality of resource politics to Trump’s worldview,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton administration Interior Department official who’s now a professorial lecturer at American University’s Center for Environmental Policy.
Maduro, his wife and adult son are facing federal drug trafficking charges detailed in a 25-page indictment unsealed Saturday. But energy and foreign policy observers say Venezuela’s natural resources and geopolitical concerns were major factors in Maduro’s ouster.
“If this was another country that didn’t have large oil reserves, it just wouldn’t have happened,” Bledsoe said. “And that’s a window into the administration’s thinking.”
Trump labeled Maduro’s ouster an example of an emboldened foreign policy agenda as he kicks off the second year of his second term, one focused on “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere.”
“The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot,” Trump said Sunday. “They now call it the Don-roe Doctrine.”
Eyeing Venezuela’s minerals
U.S. intervention in Venezuela is raising big questions about what’s next for the nation’s mining sector.
“You have steel, you have minerals, all the critical minerals, they have great mining history that’s gone rusty,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday. “President Trump is going to fix it and bring it back.”
Minerals have repeatedly emerged at the forefront of Trump’s dealmaking from African nations to Ukraine and Greenland. “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security, and Denmark is not going to be able to do it,” Trump said on Sunday.
The administration is likewise intervening in Venezuela for minerals — not drugs — Krystal Kauffman, a research fellow with the Distributed AI Research Institute, asserted in a recent op-ed in The Hill.
Southern Venezuela hosts deposits of gold, iron ore, bauxite, nickel and rare earth elements, which Maduro tried unsuccessfully to leverage over the years as the nation’s oil sector collapsed. In 2016, Maduro created the “Orinoco Mining Arc” to boost production. Lutnick on Sunday highlighted the district’s rich deposits of nickel, bauxite and gold on X, calling it “one of the largest mineral and mining regions in the hemisphere.”
And yet the region has emerged as a hub for organized crime and illegal mining. That risk, combined with U.S. sanctions and the presence of armed groups, has hampered investments from U.S. and Canadian mining companies, said Bram Ebus, a consultant for International Crisis Group in Latin America.
“Nevertheless, the gold deposits are too significant to ignore if there’s a significant change of power in Caracas,” he said.
The China factor
Another reason for U.S. intervention: preventing China from getting the upper hand.
Beijing, Ebus said, has “direct but discreet access to Venezuelan gold,” as well as a host of minerals needed for aerospace, defense industries and renewable energy.
“Many of these critical mineral mines are under control of armed groups allied to the interests of Caracas … most of the minerals are shipped to China, with Chinese buyers often directly showing up in the mining districts,” he added. Ebus is also the founder of Amazon Underworld, a research collective covering organized crime in the Amazon.
Trump’s move toppling Maduro will help curb the influence of China, Russia and Iran in the resource-rich nation, said Tom Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance.
“This is more of a story about three adversaries working their will in Venezuela,” Pyle said. “China, through the extraction of and movement of critical minerals, I think, is the most important.”
George David Banks, who served as a White House energy adviser during Trump’s first term, also sees countering China as a cornerstone of the U.S. stance toward the South American nation.
The “presence of all that crude matters,” Banks said. “We didn’t want it to all fall into the hands of Chinese companies and then that becomes the foundation for China to essentially dominate the Venezuelan economy and then build military bases.”
What’s next?
Big unanswered questions in the fallout of Maduro’s capture include how U.S. oil companies will respond. Trump said U.S. companies will go in and “spend billions of dollars” to “fix the badly broken infrastructure” and “start making money for the country.”
But the appetite of U.S. firms to invest in Venezuela will likely depend on what incentives they receive and on the country’s political climate, which could remain volatile for some time.
“It looks like the scale and pace of any sort of expansion post-Maduro is going to depend on the structure and stability of the transition,” said Kevin Book, managing partner at ClearView Energy Partners. “Companies are going to put money to work when they know what the risks look like, and when they have a sense of what the contract terms look like.”
As for minerals, Venezuela hasn’t historically drawn interest from investors, and U.S. gold companies in particular have not indicated they’re interested in going into the Caribbean nation, said Gracelin Baskaran, director of the Critical Minerals Security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Another unknown: What’s the political aftermath for Trump as midterm elections approach?
“The jury’s out on that,” said Banks. “There’s already a large part of the base that is largely isolationist,” and there are people who remember U.S. intervention during the Iraq War and the Vietnam War who think, “This isn’t what we voted for,” he said.
