The idea that Trump would be sanguine in allowing for the funding the Maduro regime through the recertification of Chevron’s Venezuelan oil licenses is abhorrent.
Richard Grennell spiked the proverbial football in the endzone after he successfully lobbied President Donald Trump to renew Chevron’s licenses to drill for oil in Venezuela. In so doing, Grenell helped to free another American citizen held hostage by the socialist regime of Nicolas Maduro. While that is an unqualified good thing, the fact remains that the American hostage was only released because the Trump administration paid off the Venezuelan regime—in the form of renewing Chevron’s oil development license for an additional 60 days.
To be clear, the American energy firm has been lobbying hard for these licenses to be renewed—even though in January, as Trump was returning to power, he and his secretary of state (and interim national security adviser) Marco Rubio declared those leases would be up for review, and would likely be canceled. Instead, however, they were renewed until July.
Trump Is Negotiating With Terrorists
This is an awful move, as it allows for another 60 days of a truly awful regime to continue reaping in windfall profits in America’s hemisphere. It isn’t just that the Maduro regime is morally reprehensible. The real issue is that the regime in Caracas has proven itself to be an actual geopolitical threat to the United States.
It would be one thing if Venezuela was simply a marginalized, petty tin-pot dictatorship in the global periphery that few dared to do business with. Sadly, the regime in Venezuela is at the epicenter of a growing anti-American alliance, nominally led by China and including Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and perhaps even Turkey.
It is believed that Russian Wagner Group mercenaries protect Nicolas Maduro. Indeed, Russians have been spotted on the ground protecting the regime during violent protests. The Kremlin routinely moves its nuclear-capable bombers in and out of Venezuela.
Meanwhile, China has a vast—and growing—economic relationship with Venezuela. Iran uses Venezuela as a proxy for its own malign behaviors in the Western Hemisphere against America’s national interests.
Supporters of renewing the Chevron licenses argue that failure to renew those licenses will force the U.S. firm to abandon its holdings in Venezuela—and give China a massive opening to acquire those American energy assets, flipping Venezuela into Beijing’s orbit. But Venezuela is already in Beijing’s orbit! Maduro’s regime will hate and distrust the United States no matter what. The only way to change that reality is to change the regime in Caracas.
Venezuela Uses Oil Money to Support Crime
Not only that, but the Venezuelan regime routinely leverages both its vast oil wealth as well as its geographical proximity to the United States to gain support from that anti-American alliance. From there, Maduro uses his relationship with that anti-American alliance to insulate himself from the wrath of his neighbors to the north. All the meanwhile, the Maduro regime funds and supports a litany of criminal and terrorist activities that directly threaten the integrity and national security of the United States.
At its core, though, Venezuela’s ability to attract support from these anti-American regimes—and to survive whatever sanctions regime that Washington seeks to impose upon it—comes from its vast oil wealth. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, observed that 2024 had marked a four-year high in both Venezuela’s oil production and orbit. “Given the decrepit state of Venezuela’s oil industry,” the think tank wrote, “this would be an impossible task without the assistance and partnership of Western oil firms.”
Indeed, Chevron admits on its own website that its Venezuelan branch “has invested $100 million locally in onshore and offshore projects since 2006.”
Venezuela’s opposition leadership, however, argues that the Maduro regime has reaped a windfall profit in the form of billions of dollars from joint ventures between Venezuelan state-owned energy firms, like PDVSA, and Western firms, such as Chevron. The opposition claims this makes the Maduro regime somewhere in the ballpark of $500 million per month! As CSIS concludes, “This is real money that Maduro can use to pay off regime insiders and maintain power.”
In March, the Trump administration moved to complicate PDVSA’s ability to earn money off its partnership with Western energy firms. But this is a losing battle.
And who are the regime insiders being paid off by Maduro to remain in power?
It’s people like Hugo Carvajal, who was the former head of Venezuela’s military and became one of the leaders of Cartel of the Suns, a powerful transnational criminal cartel specializing in pushing drugs, human trafficking, and illicit arms into the United States. Carvajal was also the head of Venezuela’s military-intelligence during the reign of Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s political mentor and predecessor who died in 2013.
In fact, the Cartel of the Suns’ leadership is a who’s-who of the Venezuelan ruling elite with deep and pervasive ties to military-intelligence in Venezuela. It functions as a state-owned drug cartel. And the funds for its ongoing operations undoubtedly link, in some way, back to the hundreds of millions of dollars flowing daily into Venezuela from Chevron and other Western firms partnered with the PDVSA.
Tren de Aragua’s Connection to the Maduro Regime
More recently, the violent prison gang from Venezuela known as Tren de Aragua has been all over American news. That’s because, since the border crisis that erupted during the Biden administration, thousands of Tren de Aragua members made their way illegally into the United States.
To call Tren de Aragua a “criminal gang” is to miss the mark. Tren de Aragua is fundamentally a paramilitary force whose aims align precisely with Maduro’s. In fact, many—including the Trump administration—have alleged that Tren de Aragua is organized and controlled by the Maduro regime itself. As someone who lives in South Florida and has many connections with the Venezuelan expat community there, I can personally attest that nearly all Venezuelans here insist that the group is an arm of the Maduro regime in the United States—and is routinely used to harass its dissidents in exile.
It must be noted that the intelligence community has not reached this conclusion. But its intelligence assessment was likely tailored to support Trump’s policy of recertifying these Chevron oil leases for another two months. If it had drawn the opposite conclusion, Trump could not have reasonably renewed the licenses. So the facts may have been changed to fit the theory, rather than the reverse. Incidentally, Trump himself may not have even been aware of this; this would not be the first time his staffers quietly did whatever they—or their lobbyist friends—wanted to, without his approval or foreknowledge.
Trump understandably does not want to be a wartime president, but the idea that he would be sanguine in allowing for the funding the Maduro regime through the recertification of Chevron’s Venezuelan oil licenses is abhorrent—particularly because so much of that money is funneled into transnational organized crime that poses a dire threat to the United States.
About the Author: Brandon J. Weichert
Brandon J. Weichert, a Senior National Security Editor at The National Interest as well as a contributor at Popular Mechanics, who consults regularly with various government institutions and private organizations on geopolitical issues. Weichert’s writings have appeared in multiple publications, including the Washington Times, National Review, The American Spectator, MSN, the Asia Times, and countless others. His books include Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life, and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy. His newest book, A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine is available for purchase wherever books are sold. He can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
Image: Shutterstock / StringerAL.
