It has been a little over a week since President Donald Trump invaded Venezuela, captured one of its political leaders, and began an operation to seize its oil. One of Trump's former officials warned that the plot is backfiring.
In an exclusive interview with Newsweek, Trump's former national security advisor, John Bolton, cautioned that the president shouldn't let concerns about oil overshadow the toppling of Nicolás Maduro’s regime. While Maduro was seized and taken to the U.S., the rest of his government remains in charge of Venezuela. Maduro was voted out of office in 2024. The leading candidate, María Corina Machado, was blocked from running altogether.
Trump completely dismissed the idea of working with Machado after she won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, which Trump had campaigned for. Machado has since offered to give the peace prize to Trump or "share" it with him if he allows her opposition forces to govern.
Bolton said this “marks a 180-degree turn from the policy in the first Trump term, which was to work with the Venezuelan opposition." He explained that being welcomed into a country by its opposition “legitimizes our action."
While Trump informed oil companies what he was doing, he never coordinated with them ahead of time to find out whether they were willing to invest in Venezuela.
“If I were an oil company executive being pressured by Trump to invest billions of dollars of capital expenditures to revive Venezuela's oil infrastructure, I would want a regime in place committed to the rule of law,” Bolton said.
"We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country," Trump said on Saturday.
The expectation is that it will cost about $183 billion over 35 years to rebuild the Venezuela oil infrastructure, the report said, citing the research intelligence company Rystad Energy. Trump claimed that the U.S. oil giants "want to go in so badly."
Bolton explained that the stability of a government “is the sort of thing that colors any American company considering investment in Venezuela.”
“They’re just not going to be eager to go in and deal with a regime that 20 years ago nationalized what was left of U.S. oil investments that earlier governments had nationalized in 1976,” Bolton added.