A protester holds a sign with a caricature of Donald Trump drinking Venezuelan oil. Photo: David Canales/Zuma Press/ContactoPhoto.
By William Serafino – Aug 31, 2026
With almost simultaneous posts on social media on August 28, Venezuelan Acting PresidentDelcy Rodríguez and US President Donald Trump announced an “Oil Agreement” of historic proportions between the US and Venezuela.
According to Rodríguez, the agreement, whose operational and legal details are still unknown, covers the extraction of oil from 17 fields containing 65 billion barrels of proven reserves, with a projected investment of $100 billion that would translate into over $200 billion in taxes for the state, theoretically earmarked for Venezuela’s social and economic recovery. Trump, for his part, presented the energy pact as a great economic and geopolitical victory for his administration, arguing that it was the “largest oil deal in world history,” with the United States directly securing “majority control” over more than a fifth of Venezuela’s proven hydrocarbon potential, which would allow it to “more than double US oil reserves.”
A numbers game that hides what matters
Due to the initial opacity and lack of details on timelines, the US companies involved, and extraction modalities, the announcement drew a mostly negative reaction from Venezuelan public opinion, given what it means as a historic turning point for both bilateral Washington-Caracas relations and Venezuela’s economic and political future. The country has been structurally subjected to the mandates and interests of the White House since the military intervention on January 3 of this year.
Quickly, the interpretive chaos was followed by baseless speculation about potential royalties, whether or not what was signed was convenient for national development, and future material benefits, with no clarity on whether they will be humiliatingly meager and symbolic or moderately acceptable given a bilateral relationship that is openly asymmetric and favors Washington’s agenda of plunder and geopolitical control.
Addressing those aspects, without the agreement and its clauses in hand and without knowledge of the first contracts signed with US companies, would lead us into a dead-end labyrinth. Indeed, the numbers game around still-fictional revenues has bogged down the discussion in the first days, with media statements from the government, Chavismo, and opposition sectors each defending their own positions according to how close or far they are from what Trump wants.
What the current technical and economic debate leaves out—and does not even consider—is too important and decisive. For example, the ambiguity over the structure of the oil pact, rather than being an uncontrolled outcome, represents the core of its configuration and is a symptom of close coordination in shared political calculations between the White House and Miraflores.
The absence of a treaty or verifiable legal instrument shows that what was announced falls within a bilateral political agreement, projected as a strategic energy commitment in which both actors reinforce their narratives and cushion frictions within their circles of power, influence, and target audiences. Thanks to jointly planned ambiguity, Trump and Rodríguez can wield contradictory and divergent narratives without risking their alliance, while seizing the momentum to channel narratives and thus mobilize their support bases and internal coalitions.
Only then can one explain Trump hinting that he directly controls Venezuelan reserves to face the Iranian quagmire he cannot escape. Meanwhile, Rodríguez contradicts him in a public address reaffirming that her government has not ceded ownership of its oil and that it has signed a broadly beneficial and defining agreement for the country’s economic future, leveraging US capital and technology.
In this way, the White House chief tries to kill two birds with one stone: 1) undermine internal pressures from the Republican Party demanding the head of Acting President Rodríguez before the midterms; and 2) encourage oil companies to inject capital and invest heavily under the promise of lucrative medium- and long-term returns, using as risk cover Caracas’ strategic alignment and the Pentagon’s participation as a shareholder in the oil exploitation project.
On the other side, Miraflores also kills its own birds, instrumentalizing the purely discursive nature of the bilateral pact. On one hand, it relativizes public criticism accusing it of handing over oil to the US under regressive conditions, which imply returning, under an adapted vision, to the humiliating concession model (leasing oil fields in exchange for a tax burden favorable to companies) that marked the Washington-Caracas energy relationship for a third of the 20th century. On the other hand, the Venezuelan government reinforces the narrative of economic recovery as its programmatic compass, with a structural bet based on the idea that the theoretical material benefits from preferential and advantageous exploitation for the US will translate into political and social legitimacy through greater wage and public-service well-being. This could dissolve—through the symbolic management of numbers and expectations, at least that is the purpose—the political contradiction posed in terms of sovereignty.
The current picture is one of maximum uncertainty. The degree of oil companies’ confidence in the face of the legal challenge that what was agreed could be reversed after Trump leaves in 2028 has yet to be measured, as well as the complexities that could emerge when harmonizing contracts with Venezuela’s new Hydrocarbons Law approved in February of this year.
In short, the agreement is a high-risk joint maneuver in which Trump and Rodríguez definitively tie their political fates, mutually benefiting from converging in a starkly transactional and mercenary logic, blessed and endorsed by the supraterrestrial powers of the postwar God Money, the dollar.
The one-way trip to the unknown dimension
From now on, the Republican cannot overthrow Rodríguez if he wants a lifeline in the lost battle to control the Strait of Hormuz under Iran’s power. Rodríguez also cannot extricate herself from the strategic alignment with Washington if she wants to be electorally competitive and survive as a political force—one that currently accelerates a complex Venezuelan process of internal transformation in the ideological and programmatic realm toward the orbit of the economy and results-oriented pragmatism.
In the years to come, perhaps August 28, 2026, will be interpreted as the date on which, strangely, Venezuela returned to 1908, the year in which a triumphant Gómez over a Cipriano Castro—public enemy number one of the Roosevelt Corollary—laid the foundations of the modern state by applying a feudal-petroleum doctrine of “open legs” to Western companies, first British and then, after the 1920s, fundamentally from the US.
Perhaps it will also be remembered as a breaking point characterized by elites who replaced politics and republican vision with courting an emperor obsessed with power. It may be that the oil deal is materially beneficial for Venezuela. It may also be that it effectively implies a return to the humiliating times of Gómez. Over a dying Castro, without social support and harassed by the US empire, his rise to power was encouraged, promoted, and later defended by a Washington exultant over the adaptation of the Monroe Doctrine at the hands of a Roosevelt who loved to quote the proverb: “Speak softly and carry a big stick….”
The agreement can rightly be called historic, an approach on which Rodríguez and Trump fully agree. But not because of its technical and fiscal characteristics, but because, politically, it implies the crude acceptance that Venezuela’s ruling elites have nothing more to offer the nation than a lucrative oil business for the US, mediated by the consolation that the rent from extracted barrels will suffice to lift us from the destruction of sanctions and economic mismanagement.
What the pact evidences is precisely the failure of the elites, now at such a point of weakness and lack of autonomy that the degrees of separation among adversaries-enemies of the political spectrum hinge on who is close to Trump, whom they endorse, and with whom they negotiate. In that plot, illegible due to neutralizing technical language, the future of the Bolivarian Republic is defined amid its bitter transit through an inverted pyramid of legitimacy that has turned the White House chief into the rector of the national horizon.
Venezuela, US Announce Controversial Oil Deal as Terms Remain Unclear
In the deep void left by technical narratives, reality operates in its actually existing vertices, with a war of narratives favorable to the elites in their objective of reducing politics to administrative discussions of taxes and royalties, while concealing the crude truth of a nation that lost control of its destiny, one now decided in English and in the metropolis of the Trump empire. Perhaps assuming the truth as it is may be a first step toward facing a future full of questions and doubts, impossible to resolve through partisan slogans, promises not yet materialized, or narratives that cancel history and its lessons.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/JRE/SF
