As president and beyond, George W. Bush spent years fending off the idea that his motive for invading Iraq was to control its oil.
His fellow Republican President Donald Trump didn’t spend a single minute as he explained the goals of his military action in Venezuela. He’s cast aside his complaints about political repression and drug smuggling to focus on Venezuela’s supply of what he calls “liquid gold.”
“We haven’t gotten to that yet,” Trump told reporters Sunday when asked about political prisoners in the country. “Right now, what we want to do is fix up the oil.”
His unapologetic focus on oil is a stark reminder of how much the political landscape has changed since the previous Republican president.
“It is unprecedented,” said Allison Prasch, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who studies presidential communication. “I really tried to use that word sparingly, because everything is unprecedented, but I think that’s apt.”
Trump has shifted from a foreign policy approach that advertised military interventions as a way to deliver freedom and democracy, done in conjunction with other western nations. On Wednesday, U.S. officials announced its plans to sell Venezuelan oil as news outlets reported a crackdown on dissent by the government the United States left in place.
“Just try to imagine George W. Bush standing up and boldly proclaiming that he has started this war because of the oil alone,” Prasch said in an interview.
Asked about the contrast between Trump and Bush and reports of increased repression, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in an emailed statement that Trump will not “allow the abuse of the oil industry to enrich our adversaries around the world” and added that “both the American and Venezuelan people will benefit from greater economic cooperation.”
Bush, an oilman himself, instead focused his rhetoric on how removing dictators from power benefited the world.
“In this battle, we have fought for the cause of liberty and for the peace of the world,” Bush said in his May 2003 “Mission Accomplished” speech aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier.
“Bush saw oil as a byproduct, not a justification,” said Mark Pfeifle, who served in the final two years of the George W. Bush White House as deputy national security adviser for strategic communication and global outreach. Saying the war was fought for oil was some of the sharpest criticism that could be leveled against his decision to start it.
“He would fight against that narrative,” said Pfeifle, now president and CEO of the public relations firm he started in 2011.
But the war became highly unpopular as U.S. occupation dragged on, costing U.S. lives and billions in tax dollars. Trump’s “to the victor go the spoils” approach is consistent with what he has said since at least 2011, well before he ran for president. That year, he told Fox News in an interview about Iraq, “I say take the oil.”
It became a part of his broad criticism of the Iraq conflict in his successful 2016 campaign.
In 2025, pointing to Venezuela’s reserves of crude has become a way to calm Trump’s restive political base, said Rice University political science professor Mark P. Jones.
Many of those who make up the “Make America Great Again” contingent of Trump’s political base, he noted, don’t want to hear about lofty notions of nation-building. It’s more persuasive to pitch the foreign intervention as a win for energy security and consumers, Jones said, giving the United States preferential access to the largest oil reserves in the world.
“It’s the only MAGA thing he really has,” Jones said in a phone interview.
But the appeal of keeping oil prices low ignores the current saturated global oil market that is keeping prices low and discouraging investment among oil companies.
It was a far different picture in 2003. Americans and their leaders worried about dependence on foreign oil. Support for domestic production was a popular talking point.
U.S. production was sliding toward all-time lows. Following the al Qaeda terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Americans and their leaders were increasingly worried about the country’s dependence on foreign oil, particularly from a region seen as hostile to the United States. Bush warned in 2006 that “America is addicted to oil.”
Today, the United States is producing more oil than any country ever, and gasoline prices are at four-year lows. The low price of gas stems at least in part from an effort by Saudi Arabia and other OPEC+ countries to regain market share.
Bush and his father, former President George H.W. Bush, sought support for their Iraq interventions by bringing on as partners other countries, which might have blanched at the idea of grabbing another nation’s natural resources.
“Bush believed he could build coalitions with moral clarity,” said Pfeifle, the former Bush White House aide.
By contrast, Trump acted alone, leaving most foreign governments, even allies, somewhere between astonished and appalled.
For Trump’s base, the astonishment that he will tread where Bush would not is part of the appeal, said Casey Kelly, who studies the American right-wing as a professor of communication at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
“It would only be a downside if he tried to hide it behind humanitarian discourse,” Kelly said. “That would be, for them, the sin of doing it.”
The political calculus
The size and speed of the foreign policy shift makes it all the more notable that Trump appears to face few political consequences for his transactional approach.
Domestically, Trump doesn’t face another election himself. But he has shown himself to be deeply concerned about the upcoming midterm elections, fretting that if Democrats win, they will impeach him for a third time.
With Trump’s low approval ratings, Republicans are fighting an uphill battle to retain their majority in the House, although they have better chances of keeping the Senate.
But voters aren’t likely to react much to Trump’s approach, Pfeifle said. Instead, he says the outcome hinges far more on whether the economy is prospering and whether Venezuela remains relatively peaceful without a large presence of U.S. troops.
“It all comes down to how much does it cost for a gallon of gas and to load up your grocery cart and to pay your rent in the United States,” he said. Most voters, he said, will give him a pass if they go to grocery stores and “they’re not paying an exorbitant amount for a pound of hamburger and a carton of strawberries.”
But to Kelly, in Nebraska, that highlights the biggest potential snag for Trump: quagmire. Trump’s base is cheering the base, but wouldn’t like the complications that come with an occupation.
“When it becomes a long-term commitment,” he said. “That’s when thing go south.”
