US Reaches Deal for Majority Control of Venezuelan Oil Reserves
A Republic Playing Prince in Venezuela’s Oil Fields
By using the Pentagon’s machinery to gain majority control over Venezuela’s oil, the United States behaves like a new prince in a shattered province—strong in appearance, but exposed wherever its force and foundations do not match.
I begin from the effectual truth, not from speeches. The United States, under President Trump, has announced an agreement with Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodriguez, by which Washington gains majority control over more than sixty‑five billion barrels of proven oil reserves. The Pentagon, through its Office of Strategic Capital, and figures from the defense industry help carry this enterprise. Around them moves a businessman, Alejandro Betancourt, praised for success in oil yet earlier named in corruption reporting. As I wrote in *The Prince* (trans. W. K. Marriott), how men live is far from how they ought to live; he who neglects what is done for what should be done ruins himself, not his rivals.
What is done here is simple: a great power turns a neighbor’s weakness into strategic supply. Oil is to this age what grain and salt were to the ancients: the daily material of power. Whoever commands it arms factories, fleets, and the promises made to restless citizens. To leave such a mass of reserves to rivals would be negligence toward one’s own people. The interesting question is not why Washington moves, but whether it moves with virtù—that mix of foresight and boldness—or with the hope of gamblers who think a single throw can last a generation.
Here fortuna provides a fine occasione. Venezuela lies in crisis; an “interim” president can sign what predecessors could not; institutions are too fractured to defend their own treasure. In *The Prince* I compared fortune to a flooding river that overwhelms fields where dykes were never raised. Venezuela neglected its dykes; the torrent runs through it. Yet, as I there observed, perhaps half of human affairs remain open to virtù. To write a contract for reserves is one thing; to hold them in fact is another. A prince who commands paper while pipelines, workers, and armed men obey other loyalties resembles those Italian lords who ruled lands they never truly possessed.
At this point arms enter the stage. Arms today are not only soldiers, but also planners, lending offices, contractors, and compliant local elites. When I condemned mercenaries and auxiliaries, I meant that power borrowed is power owed, and the debt falls due in the worst hour. If Washington leans mainly on a thin stratum of Venezuelan intermediaries, already shadowed by corruption allegations, it employs mercenaries in modern dress. They will stand firm while money and protection flow; when the wind changes, they will remember they live under Venezuelan skies, not American ones, and will seek terms with whoever promises their survival.
Appearances are themselves a weapon. A republic that visibly takes majority control of a poor country’s oil will be seen less as tutor than as shareholder. At home, citizens may welcome cheaper fuel or jobs; abroad, many will see the Pentagon entering the oil business and conclude that cannon now draw dividends at the pump. Men judge more by the eye than by the hand, because all see and few understand. When uniforms, derricks, and balance sheets share the same signature, fear easily turns into hatred. And as I warned, it is safer to be feared than loved only so long as fear does not harden into hatred, which no power can long endure.
Some observers will denounce this move as predatory, others as too cautious, urging the toppling of every rival in Caracas. Both misread the economy of severity. When compelled to act harshly, a wise ruler concentrates necessity into clear, limited blows and then governs mildly. Applied here, if the United States chooses to seize such an asset, it should seize it cleanly: define who truly owns, who commands which armed forces, and what concrete gains reach Venezuelans beyond new masters’ names. Ill‑used mercy leaves control ambiguous, profits obscure, and local institutions hollow. Then one pays twice: in treasure and in chronic disorder. The middle course, beloved of cowards, buys the costs of empire and none of its security.
Because this is a republic, another danger appears. In the *Discourses on Livy* (trans. Ninian Hill Thomson) I praised the voice of a free people as “wiser and more constant than that of a prince,” when corruption has not eaten their nerves. If Americans discover that such decisions grow chiefly from a narrow circle in the defense world and a few foreign fixers, they will rightly suspect that their commonwealth is being transformed into a private company with an army. A republic may at times act like a prince abroad; at home it must live by laws, open deliberation, and suspicion of concentrated interests. The surest way to lose an empire is to import its methods into the heart of the republic that holds it.
In sum, this venture shows virtù in its aim: securing a vital resource in a moment of foreign disarray. Yet its instruments—military offices wedded to opaque finance and dubious intermediaries—resemble mercenary arms more than a republic’s own disciplined strength. If Washington persists, it must either regularize this power, binding it under clear laws and visible benefits for both peoples, or retreat. To drift between, half‑princely abroad and half‑republican at home, is to invite tumult in Venezuela and corrosion within the American state, until fortune, which now smiles, returns with the full violence of her flood.
From the works cited
- The Prince — Occasione: the new prince needs the matter (a crisis, a vacuum) and the virtù to shape it — opportunity without capacity is a tragedy, capacity without opportunity a biography nobody writes.
- The Prince — Arms of one's own versus mercenaries and auxiliaries: power borrowed is power owed, and it will be collected at the worst moment.
- The Prince — The economy of violence and the feared/loved calculus: better feared than loved if one must choose, but never hated — fear rests on the prince's will, love on the fickle will of others.