oil

The Iran conflict and disruption to the Strait of Hormuz are forcing major oil importing countries to rethink how they source crude. Countries that once relied heavily on nearby Middle Eastern suppliers are increasingly turning to producers in the Americas and Africa, accepting longer voyages and higher shipping costs in exchange for greater energy security.

Japan Diversifies Its Oil Supplies

Japan is among the clearest examples of this shift. Before the conflict, more than 90% of its crude came from the Middle East, benefiting from short and relatively inexpensive shipping routes.

Since Gulf exports were disrupted, Japanese imports from the United States have surged. Between March and June, Japan imported more than 4.5 million metric tons of US crude, compared with less than 1 million tons during the same period in 2025.

The alternative comes with a cost. US crude takes roughly nine days longer to reach Japan, increasing freight expenses and requiring refiners to adjust their delivery schedules.

Asia Looks Beyond the Middle East

Japan is not alone. South Korea and India are also increasing purchases from suppliers in the Americas and Africa as Middle Eastern shipments decline.

China, the world’s largest crude importer, has relied heavily on strategic reserves to cushion the impact of the conflict. As those reserves are drawn down, Chinese buyers could return to international markets and intensify competition for crude from alternative producers.

The Americas Emerge as Major Suppliers

The disruption has created a major opportunity for oil exporters outside the Middle East.

US crude exports reached a record 61.6 million metric tons in the second quarter of 2026, up 43% from a year earlier. Brazil, Argentina and Guyana have also recorded strong export growth.

Brazilian shipments to India, for example, were three times higher in the first half of 2026 than during the same period in 2025.

Longer Routes, Higher Costs

The new trade patterns are considerably less efficient.

A tanker travelling from major Gulf terminals to India’s western coast can take only three to five days. A shipment from Brazil to the same destination can take around 25 days.

Longer journeys mean higher tanker demand, greater freight costs and more complicated logistics. Yet importers are increasingly willing to absorb those costs because dependence on a single vulnerable supply corridor carries its own risks.

Avoiding Strategic Chokepoints

The shift is also about reducing exposure to vulnerable maritime routes.

The Strait of Hormuz remains a major risk, while geopolitical tensions have reduced traffic through the Suez Canal. Drought has also constrained the Panama Canal.

As a result, importers are increasingly valuing suppliers whose shipping routes can bypass these chokepoints.

A New Global Energy Map

The emerging pattern is creating a more geographically dispersed oil market.

Middle Eastern producers will remain crucial because of their enormous reserves, low production costs and established infrastructure. But Asian buyers are unlikely to forget the disruption caused by the Hormuz crisis.

Regular purchases from new suppliers can therefore become a form of insurance, even after Gulf exports recover.

Analysis

The most important change is that energy security is beginning to outweigh pure economic efficiency.

For decades, Asian refiners benefited from buying Middle Eastern crude because geography made it cheaper and faster. The Iran conflict has exposed the vulnerability of that model. A short shipping route is of limited value if a single geopolitical crisis can disrupt it.

The result could be a lasting diversification of global oil trade. Importers are unlikely to completely abandon Middle Eastern crude, but they may maintain larger relationships with US, Latin American and African suppliers to create alternative sources of supply.

This means the cost of energy security will increasingly be reflected in the global oil market. Longer voyages, higher freight rates and more complex supply chains may become the price importers are willing to pay for resilience.

The broader shift is therefore from an oil market designed primarily around efficiency to one increasingly designed around redundancy and geopolitical risk.

With information from Reuters.

Late last night, on September 1st, on the day the commercial terminals of Maiquetía airport went back online, US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright landed in Caracas for the second time this year. Of course, Wright didn’t fly commercial, and he was swarmed by a flurry of journalists looking for headlines on the “massive” oil deal that has invaded the news both in the US and Venezuela. 

“I think very good times are coming,” Wright told reporters upon his arrival. “As large investments flow into this country, that creates more jobs, which pushes wage pressure up, creates opportunity and prosperity for Venezuelans, and it snowballs: when you get business confidence and investment, it creates all sorts of opportunities—not just jobs, but opportunities for entrepreneurs.”

Wright arrived to give this new partnership a bit more ceremony, but also, very likely to join in the festivities of what is to be an important week for the Trump administration’s push for energy supremacy in the region and for the Venezuelan oil industry. Besides the strange deal that we’re going to unpack in this piece, this week will feature Chevron, which according to Bloomberg is about to invest $7 billion looking to double its production in the country. Also, it is expected that deals with Eni, ONCC, and Colombia´s Geopark will be signed as well. And the icing on the cake, it’s been also reported that one of the agreements with GE Verona to tackle Venezuela’s decaying power grid is close to being executed.

The clumsy communications around the announcement of the deal have generated some negative backlash from the Venezuelan public and skepticism from the same oil majors the Trump administration is trying to woo. Just a couple of hours before Secretary Wright touched ground in Venezuela, Marco Rubio had to jump on a livestream with a Venezuelan journalist in a damage control mission.

The US-Nabep deal 

Those who brokered the US-Venezuela oil agreement are boasting about historical proportions, about leaving a mark for generations to come, but they took their time to explain why it is so important. Information has been coming out in a very fragmented way, heavily determined by propaganda needs from the Trump administration and the chavista regime. After vague rumors related to Mauricio Claver-Carone taking a step back as the Americans’ informal envoy, and the fall of Harry Sargeant III in Venezuela, we saw an old communication trick, which the Trump administration did not invent, setting the stage for the big news. Washington sent out a first version with catastrophic details, waiting for panic to spread, and published a second, corrected version that would make the news look better than initially perceived. Last week, the first Axios “scoop” talked about 90 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil reserves that the US would own. Now, the current version of the official announcement says it’s 65 billion barrels, so people can say “well, it’s just 65 billion barrels, it ain’t so bad.”

The White House finally published a fact sheet on Monday night disclosing more details about the involvement of the State and “War” Departments in buying the oil produced in 17 Venezuelan fields (supposedly containing about 65 billion barrels) by a private Venezuelan company. North American Blue Energy Partners, or Nabep, is the country’s second biggest crude producer led by notorious Venezuelan oligarch Alejandro Betancourt. To execute this deal, the Rodríguez government is granting a 100-year concession to a Nabep-Pentagon joint venture that looks, sounds and smells pretty unconstitutional from a Venezuelan point of view.

Francisco Monaldi: “Instead of generating more credibility and allowing investors to feel confident, the fact that this is allocated without any bidding and to an individual that has issues with justice, that could be a problem in the future.”

These are the known conditions of the deal:

• NABEP granted the Department of War’s Office of Strategic Capital a 35% equity stake in its corporate parent.
• The Department of State receives a guaranteed right to purchase 20% of NABEP’s current and future output at production costs, alongside a right of first refusal to buy the remaining 80%.
• The deal is strictly governed by US law and US court jurisdiction.
• Washington is granted veto power over board appointments. The majority of NABEP’s board of directors must be American citizens. 

The US government is trying to sell this to the American public as a way to restock US oil reserves and to cut domestic gas prices, which have a negative impact on Trump’s popularity and the prospects of Republican candidates in November’s congressional elections. In an interview in Spanish published Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted that the deal was between the US and a private company, not the chavista regime, and offered this as a model the White House expects can be replicated.

The expert opinion

Francisco Monaldi, director of the Latin America Energy Program for the Baker Institute at Rice University, warned on X that Venezuela’s famous oil reserves are inflated by order of Hugo Chávez: in reality, they are about a third of the 300 billion barrels everyone quotes as the total proven reserves. So those 17 fields must have about 25 billion barrels, instead of 65 billion barrels, an unreliable figure no one should take for certain. Besides that, it would be very hard to actually extract those 25 billion barrels in 25 years, given that most fields are undeveloped. Monaldi added before PBS News that “the presence of the US government could make investors more willing to take the risk of going into Venezuela with all the issues, including the fact that this is an illegitimate government in Venezuela, and that the history of the country, of course, is not great in terms of respecting deals… The other issue is that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve typically uses light oil, and Venezuela mostly produces heavy and extra heavy oil.”

Monaldi thinks that “if it’s an opaque deal that doesn’t seem to benefit the country, then there will be a backlash eventually, and we will end up as in other parts of the world and in Venezuela itself with renegotiation at some point.” Even if the agreement with NABEP means that they can run faster than other private companies, Trump’s anxiety to get American investors to Venezuela won’t be helped by this, because “instead of generating more credibility and allowing investors to feel confident, the fact that this is allocated without any bidding and to an individual that has issues with justice, that could be a problem in the future.”

Amid the fall of Tareck El Aissami and the rise of súper ministra Delcy Rodríguez, Betancourt re-entered the Venezuelan oil scene alongside Trump-linked oil magnate Harry Sargeant.

Harvard scholar Ricardo Hausmann, a former planning minister who leads a research center on economic growth, avoided the oil economy dimension of the matter and just trashed Rubio for betraying the idea of democracy transition. On the other hand, some influential economists see opportunities. Asdrúbal Oliveros chose a middle ground between celebration and condemnation and pointed out that benefits will come as long as the country develops not only the oil fields but the institutions to create accountability. 

Betancourt: a meteoric rise and a shady trail

That Alejandro Betancourt, the CEO of NABEP, is at the center of this deal is bad news in the eyes of observers and Venezuelan journalists familiar with his trajectory.

Over the past two decades, this businessman became a symbol of the bolichico culture, a term apparently coined by investigative journalist Juan Carlos Zapata to define those scions of Venezuelan old-money families who became travel companies of Bolivarian-era corruption. Betancourt and his partners—namely his cousin Pedro Trebbau López and childhood friend Francisco Convit Guruceaga—became synonymous with the vanishing of hundreds of millions of dollars the Chávez government allocated to a newly-formed company, Derwick Associates, to fix the country’s power grid. Both Betancourt and Trebbau were in their late 20s when Derwick first emerged, and had no experience in the electricity sector.

Many things would happen between then and now. Betancourt became famous in Spain for investing in Hawkers, a Spanish sunglasses brand that got him cleaner headlines before local journalists discovered who he was. Prior to the Hawkers move, the three bolichicos created a Bahamas-based company to partner with a Gazprombank subsidiary. The resulting company, called Gazprombank Latin America Ventures, would operate a heavy-crude PDVSA project in the Lake Maracaibo region called Petrozamora. The joint venture did get to hold a steady production, but as with everything Russian, its operations were quite opaque. The Maduro regime eventually raided its offices and forced Betancourt to leave the country.

Betancourt faces probes in Spain and Switzerland. US prosecutors investigated him as an alleged co-conspirator in the $1.2 billion money-laundering scheme that targeted Convit and others, but didn’t charge the former.

Amid the fall of Tareck El Aissami and the rise of súper ministra Delcy Rodríguez, Betancourt re-entered the Venezuelan oil scene alongside Trump-linked oil magnate Harry Sargeant. Through Nabep,  Betancourt and Sargeant took control of a number of oil projects (including the Petrozamora fields) under the CPP scheme, in which private companies could hold a larger stake than the State (running counter to the country’s hydrocarbons legislation until it was changed this year). 

Betancourt seems to have a hand on both sides of Venezuela’s political conflict. That a close relative of Juan Guaidó was seen visiting Betancourt’s castle in Spain, in the company of Trump ally Rudy Giuliani, helped to cement the bad reputation of the interim government. In fact, Rubio now alleges that Betancourt was a friend of the opposition to deflect the suspicion that the tycoon is a man of the Rodríguez regime, and that the US chose Nabep because it is the biggest private company in the Venezuelan oil sector. Questioned by journalist Sergio Novelli about Betancourt’s past, the Secretary of State said that the businessman faced no charges “in our system.” 

Over the past several weeks, Betancourt reemerged as a key operative between the Trumpworld and the Rodríguez government. The Washington Post reported last week that the Trump administration lobbied Switzerland to “resolve” an ongoing money-laundering probe into Betancourt without him facing criminal charges. Despite such a level of external interference, Betancourt remains under investigation in both Spain and Switzerland. He hasn’t been charged in these countries. US prosecutors investigated Betancourt as an alleged co-conspirator in the $1.2 billion PDVSA money-laundering scheme that targeted Francisco Convit and many others, but did not charge the former. 

Distrust has grown in the Venezuelan public sphere. Before the oil agreement was announced, Cazadores de Fake News published an investigation about the network of social media accounts defending Betancourt. Hours after the White House published the fact sheet, an Axios piece tells the story of Betancourt as the global, influential businessman that promoted the Trump-backed Guaidó government and, during the events of January 3, persuaded Delcy Rodríguez to cooperate with Rubio. An Axios source even says that Maduro would still be in power had Betancourt not helped to remove him.

How Delcy is selling this

As another blackout hit Western Venezuela over the weekend, Delcy Rodríguez released a video statement saying this was about improving the future of the country. She was emphatic in thanking Trump and Rubio, and assured the nation would preserve sovereignty of the oil reserves while turning into a big energy powerhouse. Social media reacted by reproducing pre-2026 footage of her and Diosdado Cabello accusing the opposition of offering all our oil to the US. The most significant detail remains a mystery: what Delcy Rodríguez is demanding in exchange for signing and enforcing this deal.

How Venezuelan political figures are reacting

The most enigmatic reaction in the Venezuelan opposition came from María Corina Machado: she hasn’t said anything, really. A couple of days after Trump’s announcement, the opposition leader remotely attended an international conference held in Slovenia. She did not mention the reported contents of the deal or the role of Betancourt, but insisted on the potential of Venezuela as the energy hub of the Western Hemisphere in light of the Ukraine War and the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz. Machado added that a democratic government could serve as a bridge between the US, Europe and Latin America.

Leopoldo López and Julio Borges, two important opposition figures who held leadership roles in the past, also remain quiet. Their political parties are linked to a US-sponsored working group meant to reform the Venezuelan Supreme Court (TSJ) and electoral authority. López and Borges previously praised the US for its role and welcomed the progress made in August. In the deal’s factsheet, the White House says these talks resulted in significant reforms to the Venezuelan judiciary and the release of hundreds of political prisoners, which are grossly exaggerated claims. The reform to the Organic Law of the TSJ has not been approved yet, though the National Assembly sanctioned it on Tuesday night.

Edmundo González Urrutia said more, but not much against it. He stated that “Venezuela’s recovery cannot be measured only by the barrels it produces again, but by the lives that wealth allows us to rebuild.” He made no mention of Delcy, the deal’s legality, or its conditions, but wondered whether oil will improve the lives of all Venezuelans or only some this time around.  He asked what those millions of dollars could mean to a family that lost a home and is still waiting to rebuild it, to someone who arrives at a hospital to find no supplies, to a community that lives waiting to see when the water will come. González did not denounce the agreement, but reflected on the difference between financial resources reaching the country and reaching the families that need it most. 

Ruling chavismo has invoked its “loyalty to national sovereignty and the well-being of the people,” offering a list of crises the deal is supposed to solve: economic reactivation, the recovery of public services, care for those affected by the double earthquake, jobs, workers’ wages.

Juan Pablo Guanipa, a popular ally of Machado in Primero Justicia, sort of misread the animus. He called for a “calm reading” of the deal hours after it broke, arguing that Venezuela cannot develop its reserves without massive foreign capital. “If we see new jobs, more investment, more income, and a new economic upturn, this agreement will earn its backing. But if we don’t see it, little by little, popular rejection will follow.” His critique became sharper days later. From a rally in Falcón, Guanipa denounced that no government without an electoral mandate—like Delcy’s— has the standing to enter binding commitments like this. 

Henrique Capriles did better, insisting Venezuelans were entitled to defend their oil, their interest and their future: “What is the deal’s scope? Its legal basis? What do Venezuelans receive? What do they give up, and under what conditions? Questions, he noted, no one can begin to answer when the country doesn’t even have clarity on this year’s oil income.” He recognized that, although oil remains the only lever at hand to “push everything” and grow the economy, the triumvirate of the Rodríguez siblings and Diosdado Cabello are not qualified to lead that commitment, and will only coat the process with more opacity and corruption.

Diosdado Cabello is yet to say a peep, though we expect him to put some nice words together for his Con el Mazo Dando TV show tonight. PSUV, Venezuela’s ruling socialist party still under Cabello’s control, fully backed Delcy Rodríguez’s leadership in light of the oil deal. The party recalled its historical loyalty to national sovereignty and the well-being of the people, offering a list of crises the deal is supposed to solve: economic reactivation, the recovery of public services, care for those affected by the double earthquake, jobs, workers’ wages. According to them, Rodríguez was simply using “every tool possible within the constitutional framework to put our immense hydrocarbon reserves at the service of national development.” During last night’s session, the Rodríguez-controlled National Assembly passed a motion supporting the “US-Venezuela Binational Energy Agreement.”

Maduro’s son, “Nicolasito” Maduro Guerra, came out in support of the “historic” deal—as he called it, in English. He quoted an interview where his father said the State was fully open to the return of American capital to the Venezuelan oil industry. Which isn’t exactly false: before the US captured Maduro on January 3, The New York Times reported that the dictator had offered all existing oil and gold projects to US companies in exchange for being allowed to remain in power.

Rafael Ramírez, Venezuela’s oil tsar under Hugo Chávez who oversaw PDVSA’s total collapse and the embezzlement of billions of public funds, called the new deal illegitimate, unconstitutional, and a pillage (saqueo). He considered it a ploy by the Trump administration ahead of midterms, as the “Venezuelan case has become the only success to show their [voter] base,” further criticizing Delcy and US policy in an interview with El Nacional.  Among other original chavistas that broke with the Maduro regime, Chávez’s  former propagandist Andrés Izarra used a double-edged sword: “Delcy is carrying out Machado’s oil plan.” He also tweeted that the agreement was high treason for which its enforcers should be tried.

Juan Barreto, the former chavista mayor of Caracas who is trying to become a relevant opposition figure, quote-tweeted Alejandro Betancourt’s defense of the agreement (who had said that it would benefit Venezuelans and Americans alike) and took the class war route: “The true head of the transition speaks: from intervention to colony… from the stands, the traditional political class and the elites applaud, begging for a scrap… in the streets, neighborhoods, and factories, the people converse, organize, unite…Workers across the country, begin national dialogue and consultation.” Elías Jaua followed suit. The former chavista vice president and career chavista minister said Venezuela is now under the occupation of a foreign invader, calling for grassroots organizing and the recovery of national independence. In what seems to be an ongoing effort to distance himself from what remains of chavismo in power, Jaua clarified he had not spoken to any government official or PSUV leader.

THE HOOK

Late Monday, Donald Trump signaled the ceasefire with Iran was effectively over, threatening fresh strikes and casting doubt on the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Brent crude jumped past $90 a barrel. By Wednesday morning, the US Dollar Index had climbed to 99.73 — its highest in nearly three weeks — and the 10-year Treasury yield touched 4.81%, just shy of a 52-week high. The reason: traders now put the odds of a September Fed rate hike near 65–70%, not a cut.

THE MECHANISM

The chain runs cleanly enough to name. Iran’s conflict with the US raises the odds of a shipping disruption through Hormuz, which carries roughly a fifth of global oil supply; oil-price risk feeds straight into headline inflation; and a Fed under Chair Kevin Warsh — already fighting credibility questions after an ambiguous hold in July — cannot afford to look soft on prices while a war pushes them up. That is why futures markets have swung from pricing no move in 2026 to pricing a hike at the September 15–16 meeting.

Higher US rates make dollar assets pay more relative to everywhere else, which is the direct channel behind both the stronger DXY and the 4.81% ten-year. The winners are near-term and narrow: holders of short-dated Treasury bills, whose yields rise with the policy rate; US money-market funds; and, oddly, the stablecoin issuers whose reserves sit almost entirely in T-bills and now earn more for holding them. The losers are broader and slower-moving: emerging markets carrying dollar-denominated debt face a double bill, since a stronger dollar raises the local-currency cost of repayment at the same moment their own borrowing costs rise in sympathy with Washington’s. Oil-importing economies — India, Turkey, Japan, the eurozone — take a second hit, paying more for crude in a currency that is simultaneously getting more expensive to buy. Gold, meanwhile, is caught between two forces: safe-haven demand from the war pulls it up, rate-hike expectations pull it down, which is why it sits near $4,304, off its recent peak but still up 21% over the year.

WHY IT MATTERS

The apparent contradiction — dollar strong this week, dollar weaker for the decade — is really two different clocks running at once. Reserve managers make multi-year diversification bets; traders react to a war in hours. The IMF’s COFER data put the dollar at 57.13% of allocated reserves in the first quarter of 2026, down from 72% in 2000, and a recent survey of reserve managers found roughly three-quarters expect that share to keep falling over the next five years. None of that is undone by one hawkish week from Kevin Warsh.

What is new is where the dollar’s reach is actually growing: not in central bank vaults but in stablecoins. The GENIUS Act framework — now the subject of a Treasury rulemaking comment period that closes in October — has pushed issuers to back their tokens almost entirely with short-dated Treasuries, and forecasts from Standard Chartered and Senator Bill Hagerty put potential T-bill demand from stablecoins as high as $2–2.3 trillion. That is dollarization happening retail-first, in emerging-market wallets and crypto exchanges, invisible to COFER. For Washington, a Fed hike timed to a war raises borrowing costs precisely when the deficit needs cheap financing, and when the countries least able to absorb dearer dollars — many of them US partners, not adversaries — get hit hardest. That is a form of collateral leverage no sanctions list ever names.

WATCH FOR

The September 15–16 FOMC meeting is the date that resolves this. A 25-basis-point hike would confirm markets are right to treat this as an inflation fight, not a growth scare, and would likely push the dollar and yields higher still. A hold — especially if Hormuz tensions ease and oil retreats from $90 — would suggest Warsh blinked, and could send gold back toward its highs faster than the dollar can catch up. Either way, watch the Fed funds futures curve shift in the two weeks before the meeting.

America’s second-largest oil company is preparing to deepen its presence in a country most of its rivals abandoned two decades ago.

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An unnamed US official briefed reporters and said Chevron executives would appear alongside US Energy Secretary Chris Wright in Venezuela to unveil fresh investment, which would be the first corporate move to follow the agreement that just cleared Venezuela’s National Assembly.

Wright landed in Caracas late on Tuesday after the Venezuelan vote, with the signing set for Wednesday.

Chevron is the only major American producer to have stayed in Venezuela since Hugo Chávez completed the nationalisation of the industry in 2007, a move that drove Exxon and ConocoPhillips out.

A vote and an argument about the fine print

Speaking in Spanish for an interview posted online on Tuesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the arrangement in blunt terms.

“Essentially, this is now an agreement with the US government, specifically involving the Defense Department, which holds a special account allowing it to take possession of a certain percentage of these assets,” Rubio said, adding that American backing would help the company attract the private investment needed to develop the fields.

The “vast majority” of the 17 fields had been in Chinese and Russian hands, Rubio pointed out as the White House has also cast the agreement as a reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine.

Those fields come with 100-year rights for North American Blue Energy Partners and hold 65 billion barrels. A new company will be created in which the US Department of War’s Office of Strategic Capital takes a 35% stake, with the US State Department entitled to buy 20% of output at production cost.

US citizens must form a majority of the board, and Washington holds a veto over appointments.

Venezuelan lawmakers approved the agreement by a show of hands, though some opposition members abstained, saying they had not seen the terms.

“We need and are obliged to know what is written in the fine print,” said opposition lawmaker Luis Emilio Rondón.

“Who benefits from this oil if it stays underground?” argued the National Assembly chief Jorge Rodríguez in return.

NABEP is owned by Alejandro Betancourt, who has faced investigations over alleged money laundering in Spain and Switzerland without charges being filed and has been accused of involvement in a corruption scheme at state producer PDVSA.

An unnamed US official called him a “proven operator” while conceding that geopolitics sometimes means dealing with imperfect figures.

“I’m not nominating anyone for sainthood here,” the official said. “What I am telling you is that this is a person that, in the past, has been helpful to the United States government.”

What the deal has not settled

Analysts remain sceptical that output can be revived quickly, with estimates ranging from one to ten years before new barrels reach the market. Washington is not investing money in the venture, officials say, arguing its backing alone will attract the capital needed.

US President Donald Trump suggested on Monday that others would follow Chevron.

“We have Exxon going in, we have Chevron going in. We have our big oil companies going in,” Trump stated.

However, Exxon’s position appears unchanged as a spokesman said on Tuesday that “nothing has changed” after CEO Darren Woods also called Venezuela “uninvestable” earlier this year.

For the US administration, the urgency is domestic.

US President Donald Trump just met oil executives at the White House on Tuesday as petrol prices climbed because of new US strikes on Iranian targets near the Strait of Hormuz, posting afterwards that “we are unleashing American Energy Dominance!”

Cheaper fuel is a priority before November’s midterm elections, in which Republicans could lose control of both the House and the Senate.

Additional sources • AP

Venezuela’s National Assembly voted to back the 65-billion-barrel oil deal, despite no details being publicly released.

United States Energy Secretary Chris Wright is set to travel to Venezuela, after the South American country has approved a deal that will see the US seize effective control of a large portion of its oil reserves.

An anonymous US official told reporters that Wright will travel to Venezuela on Tuesday, as the administration of President Donald Trump presses forward with the controversial energy deal.

“First and foremost, it furthers the national interest of the United States,” the official said, adding that it is “critically important” for the US to be able to “to buy oil at cost reliably”.

Details are still emerging about the arrangement, likened by critics to deals imposed by colonial powers.

Still, the interim government of Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez has defended the agreement as a boon to her country’s beleaguered economy. The National Assembly, led by her brother Jorge Rodriguez, voted to back the measure on Tuesday.

“Support for the binational energy treaty between the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the United States of America … is approved,” Jorge Rodriguez said.

But even within the National Assembly, there was pushback. Some opposition lawmakers abstained from the vote and denounced the fact that the terms of the agreement have yet to be published.

“We need and are obliged to know what is written in the fine print,” lawmaker Luis Emilio Rondon said, calling for “the full and complete text of what has been agreed”.

While details about the arrangement are still emerging, the deal is slated to give the US access to 65 billion barrels of proven oil reserves in Venezuela, about one-fifth of the country’s total.

As part of the deal, the US is expected to enter into a partnership with a private company to extract fuel from 17 large Venezuelan oil fields. The lease over the oil fields will run 100 years, according to reports.

The White House confirmed on Monday that it is partnering with North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), helmed by Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt who is a former ally of the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

The agreement would create a new company, wherein the US Defence Department would take a 35 percent ownership stake and the State Department would have the right to buy 20 percent of the oil produced at cost.

Betancourt has faced criminal investigations for alleged money laundering in Spain and Switzerland.

But a US official who spoke anonymously defended the partnership, arguing that Betancourt is not facing any criminal charges in the US.

“I’m not nominating anyone for sainthood here,” the official said. Instead, the official framed the deal as “a geopolitical opportunity to secure fields that primarily had largely been under the influence of Chinese and Russian companies”.

Asked about the possibility of democratic elections in Venezuela, the official said they were not feasible in the immediate future.

Periods of transition, the official added, “almost invariably requires you to work with elements of the existing structure, even as you are creating a new one”.

Separately, oil giant Chevron is expected to sign an agreement to expand operations in Venezuela on Wednesday.

Venezuela’s energy sector has become dilapidated, with critics blaming heavy US sanctions and government mismanagement.

While the Trump administration has pushed for greater international participation in Venezuela’s oil sector, some companies have expressed scepticism about investing there.

The 65-billion-barrel oil deal was announced on August 27 in a post on Trump’s Truth Social platform.

His administration has exercised increasing influence over Venezuela’s government, since it launched a January 3 military operation to abduct and imprison Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

Trump and Maduro had frequently clashed. In the wake of Maduro’s abduction, Trump backed the socialist leader’s vice president, Rodriguez, to take over Venezuela’s government, holding her up as a model of cooperation.

In nearly simultaneous social media posts on August 28, Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, and U.S. President Donald Trump announced a historic “Oil Agreement” between the U.S. and Venezuela.

According to Rodríguez, the agreement—the operational and legal details of which remain unknown—covers the development of 17 oil fields containing 65 billion barrels of proven reserves, with a projected investment of US $100 billion that would translate into more than $200 billion in taxes for the state, theoretically aimed at Venezuela’s social and economic recovery.

For his part, Trump presented the energy pact as a major economic and geopolitical victory for his administration, arguing that it was the “largest oil agreement in world history,” with the United States directly securing “majority control” over more than one-fifth of Venezuela’s proven hydrocarbon potential, which would allow it to “more than double U.S. oil reserves.”

A game of numbers that hides what matters

Due to the initial lack of transparency and the absence of specifics regarding timelines, the U.S. companies involved, and the operational terms, the announcement drew a largely negative reaction from the public, given that it marks a historic turning point both for the bilateral relationship between Washington and Caracas and for the economic and political future of the Caribbean nation, which has been structurally subject to the dictates and interests of the White House since the January 3 military attack.

The initial confusion was quickly followed by baseless speculation about potential royalties, whether the agreement is positive for national development, and future material benefits—with no clarity as to whether these will be so meager and symbolic as to be humiliating, or whether they will be somewhat acceptable within the context of an openly asymmetrical bilateral relationship that favors Washington’s agenda of plunder and geopolitical control.

But addressing those issues—without the agreement and its clauses in hand, and without knowledge of the initial contracts signed with U.S. companies—would leave us stuck in a labyrinth. In fact, the game of numbers surrounding still-fictitious revenues has mired the discussion in its early days, with statements in the media from the government, Chavismo, and sectors of the opposition defending their own positions based on 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 far too important and decisive.

For example, the ambiguity surrounding the structure of the oil pact—rather than being an uncontrolled outcome—represents the very core of its design and is a symptom of close coordination regarding shared political calculations between the White House and Miraflores.

The absence of a treaty or a verifiable legal instrument shows that the announcement is part of a bilateral political agreement, framed as a strategic energy-focused commitment in which the two parties reinforce their narratives and smooth over tensions within their circles of power, influence, and target audiences.

Thanks to this jointly planned ambiguity, Trump and Rodríguez can put forward contradictory and divergent narratives without jeopardizing their alliance, while capitalizing on the momentum to shape narratives and thereby rally their support bases and internal coalitions.

This is the only way to explain why Trump insinuates that he directly controls Venezuelan reserves to soften the blow of the Iranian quagmire from which he cannot extricate himself, while Rodríguez contradicts him in a public address, in which she reaffirmed that her government has not relinquished ownership of its oil and that it has signed an agreement that is broadly beneficial and defining for the country’s economic future, leveraging U.S. capital and technology.

In this way, the White House tenant is trying to kill two birds with one stone: 1) undermine internal pressure within the Republican Party calling for the acting president’s head before the midterms; and 2) to incentivize oil companies to inject capital and invest heavily under the promise of lucrative returns in the medium and long term, using Caracas’s strategic alignment and the Pentagon’s participation as a shareholder in the oil exploration project as a hedge against risk.

On the other hand, Miraflores is also killing its own birds by exploiting the purely rhetorical nature of the bilateral pact. On the one hand, it downplays public criticism accusing it of handing over oil to the U.S. under regressive conditions—which imply a return, in an adapted form, to the humiliating concession model (leasing oil fields in exchange for a tax burden favorable to corporations) that defined the Washington-Caracas energy relationship for a third of the 20th century.

Furthermore, the Venezuelan government reinforces the narrative of economic recovery as its programmatic roadmap, with a structural strategy based on the assumption that the purported material benefits derived from preferential and advantageous trade with the U.S. will translate into political and social legitimacy through improved wages and public services—which could, through the careful management of numbers and expectations (at least that is the intention), eventually dissolve the political contradiction posed in terms of sovereignty.

The current picture is one of extreme uncertainty. The degree of confidence among oil companies remains to be seen in light of the danger that the agreement could be reversed after Trump leaves office in 2028, as well as the complexities that may arise when harmonizing contracts with the new Hydrocarbons Law passed 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 together, mutually benefiting from converging on a starkly transactional and profit-driven logic, blessed and endorsed by the otherworldly powers of the postwar God of Money: the US dollar.

The one-way trip into the unknown

From now on, Trump cannot overthrow Rodríguez if he wants to retain a lifeline in the face of the lost battle to control the Strait of Hormuz, which is under Iranian control; nor can the latter break free from the strategic alignment with Washington if she wishes to remain electorally competitive and survive as a political force—one that is currently accelerating a complex process of internal transformation, ideologically and programmatically, toward the orbit of the economy and results-oriented politics.

In the years to come, perhaps August 28, 2026, will be interpreted as the date on which, strangely enough, Venezuela returned to 1908—the year in which a triumphant Juan Vicente Gómez, having defeated Cipriano Castro (public enemy number one under the Roosevelt Corollary), laid the foundations of the modern Venezuelan state by applying a feudal-oil doctrine of “open arms” to Western companies, first British and, after the 1920s, primarily American.

But perhaps it will also be remembered as a turning point marked by elites who replaced politics and the republican vision with the courtship of an emperor obsessed with power.

The oil agreement may be materially beneficial for Venezuela; it may also, in fact, signal a return to the humiliating times of Gómez, whose rise to power, over a dying Castro—who lacked social support and was besieged by the U.S. empire—was encouraged, promoted, and later defended by a US establishment that was ecstatic over the adaptation of the Monroe Doctrine, led by Theodore Roosevelt who loved to quote the proverb: “Speak softly and carry a big stick….”

The agreement can rightly be called historic—a view on which Rodríguez and Trump fully agree. But not because of its technical and fiscal characteristics, but because, politically, it implies the harsh acceptance that Venezuela’s ruling elites have nothing more to offer the Caribbean nation than a lucrative oil deal for the U.S., tempered by the consolation that the revenue from extracted barrels will be enough to lift us out of the devastation caused by sanctions and economic mismanagement.

What this pact reveals is, precisely, the failure of the Venezuelan elites, who are now at such a point of weakness and lack of autonomy that the distinctions between adversaries and enemies across the political spectrum hinge on who is closest to Trump, who gets his backing and who gets to negotiate with him. Within this web—obscured by neutralizing technical language—the future of the Bolivarian Republic is being shaped, amid its bitter journey through an inverted pyramid of legitimacy that has transformed the head of the White House into the guiding force of the national landscape.

In the deep void left by technical narratives, reality operates at its actually existing vertices, with a war of narratives favoring the elites in their goal of reducing politics to administrative discussions of taxes and royalties, while simultaneously concealing the harsh truth of a nation that has lost control of its destiny—a destiny now decided in English and in the metropolis of the Trump empire.

Perhaps accepting the truth as it is may be a first step toward facing a future full of questions and doubts—ones that cannot be resolved through partisan slogans, unfulfilled promises, or narratives that erase history and its lessons.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Venezuelanalysis editorial staff.

Translated by Venezuelanalysis.

Source: Diario Red

Sept. 1 (UPI) — Two oil tankers were struck by unknown projectiles on the Strait of Hormuz while the renewed fighting between Iran and the United States sends oil prices on the rise again.

One Saudi Arabian and one South Korean oil tanker were hit by projectiles within minutes of each other on Monday night, the UK Maritime Trade Operations Centre reported. The organization said no casualties or environmental impact have been reported.

The strikes followed President Donald Trump warning of further escalation in the war with Iran.

The United States launched strikes on Iranian troops in Larak Island on Sunday, causing Iran to retaliate with strikes on U.S. bases in Jordan. Trump said in a TV interview on Monday that he planned to respond by hitting Iran “hard.”

Dr. Majid Al-Ansari, spokesman for the Qatari Foreign Ministry, said on Tuesday that the nation will re-up its efforts to bring the United States and Iran back to the table to discuss a peace agreement.

“This escalation will not benefit anyone,” Al-Ansari said. “We are all affected by this escalation. Therefore we urge the parties, first, to exercise wisdom and return to the negotiating track, and we continue and intensify our efforts with our mediation partners to ensure a return to this track.”

Meanwhile, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said Iran would be open to returning to peace talks if the United States moves in that direction.

Oil prices increased by 2% early Tuesday on the back of escalating conflict between the United States and Iran. Brent crude oil, the international benchmark, was up 2% to $92 per barrel while West Texas intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, was trading for $88 per barrel.