The United States government has said it aims to control Venezuelan oil sales indefinitely.
“We need to have that leverage and that control of those oil sales to drive the changes that simply must happen in Venezuela,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright .
His comments come days after US forces abducted Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro on Saturday. Since then, the administration of US President Donald Trump has announced a deal under which Venezuela would turn over 30 million to 50 million barrels of sanctioned oil to the US to sell.
That comes against a backdrop of demands that Venezuelan government officials open up access to US oil companies or risk further military action.
On Friday, executives from several major oil companies, including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron, are slated to meet with the president to discuss potential investments in Venezuela.
Can the US control Venezuelan oil sales indefinitely?
“The US federal government can absolutely intervene, make demands, capture what it wants, and redirect those barrels accordingly. I don’t know of anything that would meaningfully interfere with the federal government if that’s what it decided to do,” Jeff Krimmel, founder of Krimmel Strategy Group, a Houston, Texas-based energy consulting firm, told Al Jazeera.
There are, however, geopolitical hurdles. The US has less leverage than it did more than two decades ago when the US military and its allies entered Iraq, another oil-rich country. Today, other superpowers could stand in the way in ways they did not in 2003.
“When we went into Iraq, we were living in a unipolar moment as the world’s only great power. That era is over. China is now a great power, and most experts consider it a peer competitor. That means it has ways to hurt the US economy and to push back militarily, including through proxy conflicts, if it chooses to oppose such actions,” Anthony Orlando, professor of finance and law at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, told Al Jazeera.
China is the largest purchaser of Venezuelan crude, although it only imports about 4 percent of its oil from the South American nation. “It’s a question of whether they want to draw a line in the sand with the United States and say, ‘You can’t do this, because if we allow it, you’ll keep pushing further,’” Orlando said.
“If you’re a minor power like Venezuela, not China or Russia, you’re a country vulnerable to US intervention. That creates an incentive to align more closely with China or Russia to prevent it from happening, and that’s not a good outcome for the United States,” Orlando continued.
In the days since Maduro’s abduction, members of the Trump administration have also renewed calls to take over Greenland.
How does this compare with Iraq?
The US intervention in Venezuela has been compared to its involvement in Iraq, which began under the administration of former President George W Bush in 2003. At the time, Iraq had the second-largest oil reserves in the world, with 112 billion barrels.
However, production was limited. Prior to the invasion, Iraq produced 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd), rising to 4.5 million bpd by 2018.
While the Iraqi government retained ownership of oil, US companies were often given no-bid contracts to operate there, including ExxonMobil and BP, and the majority of sales went to Asian and European markets.
In 2021, Iraq’s then-President Barham Salih claimed that an estimated $150bn in money stolen through corrupt deals had been “smuggled out of Iraq” since the 2003 US-led invasion.
Unlike during the Bush administration and its aims for Iraq’s oil, the Trump administration has been explicit about the role of oil in its attack on Venezuela.
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