On ‘Taking Back Venezuelan Oil’

Even though previous U.S. administrations have certainly also pursued ‘America First’ policies, defined as the advancement of national, or rather corporate interests through U.S. foreign policy, including through overt and covert efforts to influence or change political regimes abroad, in the context of Venezuela, something felt different, something felt new. Exploring this change, I will view U.S. action in Venezuela from the perspective of ‘big oil,’ pondering what the damped response of corporate executives may tell us about international law and its interplay with global petro-capitalism.

International lawyers have widely denounced the illegality of the abduction of a sitting head of Venezuela by U.S. military forces on 3 January 2026. Alex Neve, Member of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela, succinctly put it: “The Maduro government’s longstanding record of grave human rights violations does not justify a U.S. military intervention that breaches international law. Similarly, the illegality of the U.S. attack does not in any way diminish the clear responsibility of Venezuelan officials, including Mr. Maduro, for years of repression and violence amounting to crimes against humanity.”

Whereas past U.S. administrations have engaged well-spoken legal advisors to contort legal justifications for their actions, the gesturing toward the prevention of narco-terrorism as a motivating factor not only seemed weak, but was also immediately undermined by U.S. President Trump’s insistence on the U.S. claim to the petroleum reserves of Venezuela.

“[W]e have to do one thing in Venezuela, bring it back. It’s a dead country right now. […] [A]nd we’re going to have big investments by the oil companies to bring back the infrastructure.”

“[T]he oil companies are ready to go. They’re going to go in, they’re going to rebuild the infrastructure. You know, we built it to start off with many years ago. They took it away.”

Seizing the Oil – Possible Justifications Under International law?

Trump’s promise to seize and maintain control over Venezuela’s petroleum reserves, of course, stands in clear violation of foundational principles of public international law. Most notably, it contravenes the principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources and the closely related right of peoples to economic self-determination. These principles vest decision-making authority over the exploitation and use of natural resources in the peoples of the state concerned. Although they emerged from the decolonization struggles of the mid-twentieth century, the International Court of Justice has repeatedly affirmed that they apply well beyond the colonial context, first in its 2005 Armed Activities on the Territory of the Congo judgment and more recently in its 2024 Advisory Opinion on the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Some commentators have gone so far as to argue that the U.S.’ act of aggression triggered an international armed conflict with Venezuela. I do not share that assessment. Yet, even if the U.S. were an occupying power in Venezuela today, the laws of armed conflict would still impose strict limits under the principle of usufructuary on the extent to which the U.S. could seize control over the revenues resulting from the exploitation of Venezuelan petroleum resources, namely only for use for the benefit of the Venezuelan population, and certainly not for the benefit of U.S. corporations. In fact, whether an occupying power is permitted to enter into new concession or service contracts or production-sharing agreements on behalf of the population under occupation is highly disputed, as I have outlined elsewhere.

Trump’s comments, as outlined above, also seem to suggest that he justifies the seizure of control over Venezuelan oil with the expropriation of U.S. oil corporations by the Chávez regime. Fortunately, contemporary international law has evolved beyond gunboat diplomacy and no longer permits military action, or the threat thereof, in response to the expropriation of one’s nationals’ assets by a foreign state. Just as interesting in this context, however, is that the Trump administration, with its executive order of January 9, 2026, and also through explicit remarks by the U.S. president, has made it clear that it will not enforce the compensation owed to ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips by Venezuela for these acts of expropriation under two arbitral awards (ICSID Case Nos. ARB/07/27; ARB/07/30), amounting to sums of USD 188 million and USD 9.3 billion, respectively.

This is where things get interesting. While violations of the prohibition of the use of force and of sovereignty and self-determination principles are certainly not new, the reluctance of the U.S. administration to enforce international law, even when it aligns with the interests of its own corporations is unusual.

In a recent article, Koskenniemi describes the ‘legal infrastructure of global capitalism’ as the ‘laws—public and private, domestic and international—that regulate practically all aspects of social life by distributing rights and duties, powers and vulnerabilities, to groups across the world’ (Koskenniemi 2025, 18). He reminds us that law, including international law, not only limits and constrains, but also empowers and enables, and more specifically also enables global capitalism, including petro-capitalism. This is an insight we can also draw from Hayek and his definition of the rule of law. To Hayek, “[t]he rule of law, the absence of legal privileges of particular people designated by authority, is what safeguards that equality before the law which is the opposite of arbitrary government.” Fact is that crisis moments present great opportunities for capitalism to flourish, but only when government interventions permit as much, as has been the case with most crisis moments involving ‘big oil’.

For example, the ‘energy crisis’ of 2022 that was triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resulting sanctions regime imposed against Russian petroleum and natural gas exports yielded unprecedented record excess profits of USD 134 billion for the five oil majors (Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and TotalEnergies). These profits were generated by the market’s response to the prospect of scarcity, which led to a significant inflation of the price of natural gas and petroleum.

Is Seizing Venezuela What ‘Big Oil’ Wanted?

By now, the market value for these sources of energy has significantly decreased and among the many problems plaguing the U.S. economy, access to energy is not one of them. The U.S. is a net exporter of petroleum, having exported 3.9 billion barrels in 2024. Seizing control over Venezuelan resources at this point in time, therefore, was not necessary for the well-being of the U.S. economy. Therefore, “cheapening energy” further, to use Jason Moore’s terminology, with the news of the seizure of Venezuelan oil, new being sufficient to have an effect on the financialised value of petroleum, will likely decrease profit margins for ‘big oil’.

To be clear—American oil companies can, and will, make money in Venezuela—lots of money. Yet making such money requires the legal infrastructure of global capitalism to be functional, reliable and predictable—in Venezuela, but also at home in the U.S.. To that end, the reshaping of domestic law in Iraq post-2003 by the Coalition Provisional Authority, established with the authority of the UN Security Council, was crucial to the allure of Iraqi oil reserves for transnational oil majors. In the case of Venezuela, the proposition made by the U.S. administration is that of access to Venezuela’s oil, absent, at the cost of investment of USD 100 billion, and absent any long-term vision of the rule of law as defined by Hayek and described more recently, by Koskenniemi. Perhaps it is this abandonment of any rule of law vision that is what feels different about the current U.S. intervention in Venezuela. Scholars working in postcolonial and critical traditions have long known that adherence to, rather than breaches of, international law align with capitalist interests. In Venezuela, this may not be the case, at least not in the immediate future.

The slippage from hegemony to (neo-)imperialism that we are now witnessing, and the disavowal of international law that this has come with, will not be the downfall of petro-capitalism. Corporations will always adjust. Yet, when the ultimate capitalist Jeffrey Sachs speaks out against U.S. intervention, and for the respect for international law, one can and should be as wary of international law, as one is of the acts that he finds to be in violation of it.

I would like to thank Alice Bertram for her thoughtful engagement with this piece.