America’s Shift in Energy Strategy Goes Beyond Oil

President Donald Trump is unreserved in expressing his ambitions regarding Venezuela and other nations rich in energy resources. “We’re gonna get the oil flowing the way it should be,” he declared on January 3rd, shortly after his administration shocked the world with what many experts and lawmakers are calling an unlawful incursion into Caracas, resulting in the arrest of President Nicolás Maduro.

Trump’s obsession with “energy dominance” serves as a pretext—layered on top of federal drug trafficking charges against Maduro—for a straightforward power grab. “Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again. Won’t happen,” Trump asserted. Countries like Colombia, Mexico, and Cuba should be on alert, as Trump and his officials have warned. White House adviser Stephen Miller even stated that it’s the “formal position of the US government” under Trump that Greenland should be part of the United States.

In essence, the US is poised to take whatever it desires—borders be damned—whether that’s Venezuela’s oil, Greenland’s rare earth elements, or the sovereignty of other nations. If you’re part of Trump’s inner circle, like the fossil fuel industry and tech moguls who supported his rise, you might reap the rewards. This creates a precarious situation for countries with valuable resources that the US might covet. Even if you’re not directly targeted by Trump, the political and environmental consequences of his administration’s actions will likely ripple across the globe.

“We’re entering this really uncertain, scary moment where this aggressive, toxic way of doing business is being put on the table,” says Catherine Abreu, director of the International Climate Politics Hub.

Abreu, who has Venezuelan roots and resides in Canada, first learned about the US attack on Caracas from her family. “There’s a lot of uncertainty and fear and mixed feelings on the ground in Venezuela … Many Venezuelans have protested against [the Maduro] regime for years and want a change in government, but they want that change to come from the Venezuelan people,” she explains.

Shortly after her family reached out, Abreu heard from concerned colleagues in the climate movement who were “alarmed by the fact that this was being done largely in the name of expanding United States oil and gas production.”

Venezuela possesses the largest oil reserves in the world but currently produces only about 1 percent of the global crude oil supply. This is due to decades of neglect and mismanagement since the 1970s when the country nationalized its oil industry. Now, Trump claims, “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies … go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken [oil] infrastructure.”

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright announced that the federal government is in discussions with American companies to boost oil production in Venezuela, with plans for the US to control future oil sales in the country. The US has also seized two tankers believed to have carried or attempted to carry Venezuelan oil. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have stated that Venezuela will hand over 30 to 50 million barrels of oil, which the US intends to sell at market price.

However, there’s considerable uncertainty about whether American companies will be willing to invest in Venezuelan oil production given the ongoing instability in the country. The US is already the world’s largest oil producer, generating over 20 million barrels daily. Venezuela, on the other hand, currently produces less than a million barrels a day, and it would require more than $50 billion in investment over 15 years just to increase that figure to a steady 1.1 million barrels daily, according to research firm Rystad Energy.

Despite this, following Maduro’s arrest, stock prices for fossil fuel companies like Chevron— the only US oil major still operating in Venezuela through deals with the government—rose. “A lot of what drives the interest in places like Venezuela, with large reserves, is the speculation market,” Abreu notes. Regardless of whether US oil companies ultimately enter Venezuela, financial speculators are already profiting from the potential for increased oil production “based on this invasion,” says Basav Sen, Climate Policy Project director at the Institute for Policy Studies.

There’s a case to be made that a shift to renewable energy could reduce the vulnerability of many countries in the Global South to the predatory interests of wealthier nations eyeing their oil and gas. “These are inherently nonrenewable resources, which means that those who want to continue producing oil, gas, and coal will always need to look for the next source of these nonrenewable resources,” Abreu explains. Solar and wind power, which have become significantly more affordable over the years, are now the fastest-growing sources of electricity globally. “I really see the escalation of these kinds of conflicts being fueled by oil and gas interests as a response to and an attempt to arrest the momentum we’re seeing in renewable energy,” she adds.

Renewable energy development can also lead to complications, as seen in Greenland. Trump has long been fixated on acquiring Greenland. Opening the territory to foreign mining interests could provide a vast new supply of critical minerals and rare earth elements essential for electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels, and rechargeable batteries. More importantly for the Trump administration, these minerals are also crucial for oil refining and military technology. Research indicates that Greenland may hold significant fossil fuel reserves, although extracting them could be commercially unviable due to accessibility issues. Additionally, burning fossil fuels exacerbates the vulnerability of Greenland’s ice sheets to climate change, which threatens to raise sea levels worldwide.

The Trump administration has framed the annexation of Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, as a matter of US national security, disregarding protests from its people and government. “Greenland is not for sale, and this has been clearly stated by both Greenlandic and Danish authorities,” says Anne Merrild, who grew up in Greenland and now heads the Department of Sustainability and Planning at Aalborg University. “In Greenland, the statements we hear in the media are often met with frustration and growing resentment, as they tend to overlook Greenland’s self-government and its ongoing efforts to define its own economic and societal development,” Merrild adds.

The extraction of Greenland’s resources is already a contentious issue in local politics, and it would require the “meaningful involvement” of nearby communities to ensure they benefit from any new projects and to minimize harm to the environment or local livelihoods.

Trump’s current stance toward Greenland, however, “sends a signal that the US is willing to take over places just to access resources, and that is naked 19th-century imperialism,” Sen warns. “It is a very threatening signal to the rest of the world … Either you make the resources in your country available to us on our terms, or you risk invasion.”

Landon Derentz, Trump’s former White House director of energy, stated in a January 4th blog that “Venezuelan oil was the enabler,” while the real goal is to exert US influence across the Western hemisphere.

This revival of a philosophy has driven centuries of calculated interventions in Latin America, resulting in political upheaval in the name of establishing governments friendly to US interests. “The United States is now practicing an enhanced version of the two-hundred-year-old Monroe Doctrine,” Derentz notes. A new national security strategy document released by the Trump administration last year explicitly states the intention to “assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine.”

With this power structure in place, history is repeating itself—whether the conflict revolves around oil in Venezuela or minerals in Greenland. The rules of the game dictate the outcome. Addressing climate change and transitioning to cleaner energy through collaborative efforts like the Paris accord has been a significant test of global cooperation against the backdrop of strongman politics. The US’s shift from one philosophy to another with Trump back in office is clearly tipping the balance.

“I worry about how the US, through these actions, is normalizing the idea that a country would completely disregard the norms of multilateralism and lawful interactions between states in the international arena,” Abreu states. “It would throw those norms aside in pursuit of its oil and gas interests, even if that ultimately isn’t what is served.” On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced its withdrawal from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and 65 other international organizations and treaties.

While America’s tendency to assert its will is nothing new, it’s taking a more audacious turn than it has in decades. The president is “deadly serious about getting back the oil that was stolen from us,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared on January 3rd. “And deadly serious about reestablishing American deterrent and dominance in the Western hemisphere.”

The claim of theft oversimplifies the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil industry. It serves as a talking point justifying the notion that what you believe is yours—regardless of its location—is already claimed by someone else simply because they assert it.