“Take the oil.”

No, this was not Donald Trump’s stated objective for Operation Absolute Resolve, the January 3 seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, but rather his September 2016 reference to the US military presence in Iraq. “You know, it used to be to the victor belong the spoils,” he told Matt Lauer of NBC’s Today show. “Now, there was no victor there, believe me.… But I always said: Take the oil.”

And this was hardly the first time Trump spoke about seizing foreign oilfields. In a 2011 interview with George Stephanopolous, he said the US should “take it,” referring to Iraqi oil. A few days later, amidst the anti-Gadhafi uprising in Libya, Trump said, “I would just go in and take the oil.”

Indeed, seizing foreign oil for America’s presumed benefit has been an obsession of Trump’s for some time. Growing up as he did in the 1950s and ’60s, when American automobiles dominated world markets and US-owned oil companies controlled most of the world’s most prolific oil fields, he has long expressed nostalgia for that era of big cars and petroleum prosperity—a nostalgia that infuses the chimera of an America made “great again.”

Now, it appears, Trump plans to apply his “take the oil” mindset to Venezuela, a country with vast petroleum reserves—at 303 billion barrels, the largest in the world—but a sanctions-devastated oil industry.

“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” he said during a public address shortly after the January 3 raid.

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As part of this endeavor, Trump stated, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, SA (PdVSA), will be forced to return control over oil fields it had nationalized in the 1970s back to the US companies that once operated those fields. In Trump’s mind, these are “our fields,” not Venezuela’s, despite the fact that the oil is extracted from Venezuela’s sovereign territory.

“We built Venezuela’s oil industry with American talent, drive, skill, and the socialist regime stole it from us,” Trump said on January 3. “This constituted one of the largest thefts of American property in the history of our country.”

As in everything Trump says, these statements are riddled with errors and falsehoods. American oil companies are not “the biggest anywhere in the world,” but are dwarfed by the Saudi state-owned company, Saudi Aramco. Venezuela’s oil fields were never “American property” but were operated by US firms under concession agreements with the Venezuelan government. And they were not “stolen” by a “socialist regime” but rather nationalized in accordance with laws passed under the center-left administration of Carlos Andrés Pérez—in a far more democratic fashion than the Saudi royal family took possession of Aramco, a joint venture of Texaco, Chevron, and ExxonMobil.

Far more than falsehoods, however, Trump’s comments about Venezuela’s oil are imbued with nostalgia and fantasy.

As he tells it, Venezuela’s oil production—now at historically low levels—can swiftly be ramped up by American companies, generating vast profits for US firms and Trump’s chosen beneficiaries (presumably including assorted allies and apparatchiks of the Trump family business empire). But all this flies in the face of economic and geological reality, which stands in the way of any rapid increase in Venezuelan output and oil profits.

To begin with, you cannot just “take the oil” from Venezuela’s fields. Most of Venezuela’s untapped oil consists of extra-heavy crude—a substance more like Canadian tar sands than the liquid stuff that comes flowing out of the ground in places like Saudi Arabia and Iran. To extract and process Venezuela’s heavy crude requires specialized skills and equipment that only a few large international firms possess. Much of the existing infrastructure needed for this has deteriorated in recent years—a consequence of US sanctions, mismanagement by PdVSA, and the departure of skilled technicians. Not surprisingly, then, Venezuela’s oil output has declined sharply in recent years, falling from 2.7 million barrels per day in 2011 to around 800,000 barrels per day in 2023.

Simply to restore previous yields at fields already in operation will require years of effort and immense dollar outlays. Analysts at Energy Aspects, a London-based consultancy, told The New York Times that adding another half a million barrels a day to Venezuela’s oil output would cost in the neighborhood of $10 billion and take around two years to accomplish. To restore output levels achieved prior to 2011, the firm noted, could require “tens of billions of dollars over multiple years.”

If this were the “golden age” Trump often harks back to, when global oil demand was surging and the major US oil firms were avidly seeking new fields to exploit, we might expect a rush by US companies to gain access to Venezuela’s newly reopened reserves. But global demand is not expected to rise appreciably in the years ahead as electric vehicles (EVs) gain in popularity, and so the major companies are not rushing to expand capacity. Predicting future oil prices is always risky, but there is no reason to assume that oil prices will rise from their current rate of $60 per barrel to $90 per barrel or higher, thereby justifying the multibillion-dollar investments that will be required to restore Venezuela’s oil fields to their former glory.

What is more likely is a haphazard selloff of PdVSA’s assets to assorted aspirants to oil wealth—some possessing the necessary expertise to prosper and others not. This will certainly generate a lot of cash for well-connected lawyers, bankers, fixers, and hustlers in both the US and Venezuela, but not the vast wealth envisioned by Trump—and certainly not the benefits he has promised for ordinary Venezuelans.

As they compete for access to prime assets, moreover, some of these interests might resort to violence. This should not be wholly unexpected, given that some top Venezuelan military and political officials have secured prominent positions in PdVSA and other state-owned enterprises—valuable interests they may be prepared to fight for. Popular resistance to a US corporate takeover of Venezuelan oil fields, possibly taking the form of infrastructure sabotage, is also conceivable. Under these circumstances, Trump may feel compelled to put “boots on the ground” in Venezuela, as he has threatened to do. Instead of generating new wealth for the US and Venezuela, therefore, Trump’s drive to take its oil could result in unending conflict at great cost to both countries.