For more than a quarter-century, Venezuela was not merely poorly governed. It was captured by Cuban communist intelligence services. Russian arms entrenched it. Chinese loans stripped the country of sovereignty while the Chávez–Maduro regime looted Venezuela, wrecked the currency and filled the prisons. The result was a failed state: mass exile, political prisoners, electrical blackouts and a platform for America’s enemies in the Western Hemisphere. That history is what critics of the new U.S.–Venezuela energy agreement prefer to forget.
Last week, President Trump announced a historic oil partnership with Venezuela’s interim government. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth negotiated it. Interim President Delcy Rodríguez confirmed the core terms: 17 strategic fields holding more than 65 billion barrels, a production target above 1.5 million barrels a day, more than $100 billion in private investment and large fiscal flows to Venezuela. Whether the final term is a generation or a century-scale U.S. stake, the meaning is the same. The United States has taken a secured interest in the resource that once financed communism in Cuba and subversion all over Latin America.
Previously, Venezuela’s oil was “sovereign” on paper and enslaved in practice — used to pay Cuban handlers, Russian weapons and Chinese debt while Venezuelans fled. Sovereignty without property rights, honest courts and a state that cannot be flipped by the Cuban communist regime is an empty word.
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Critics on the left call the deal colonialism. Hard-line Chavistas call it betrayal. Parts of the opposition call it illegitimate because an interim government signed it. Democratic Socialists who treated Maduro as a diplomatic inconvenience suddenly discovered constitutional piety about hydrocarbons. They share a fantasy: that a weak, cash-starved, institutionally gutted Venezuela can stay free if Washington keeps its distance.
History says otherwise: A vacuum in Venezuela is not filled by angels. It is filled by Cuban, Russian and Chinese intelligence, along with the criminal networks, like the Tren de Aragua, that grew up under the Venezuelan socialist regime and extended through the Western Hemisphere. That axis produced the torture chambers, the refugee crisis and the political prisons.
A long-term U.S. commercial stake — backed by American security interests — is insurance. It raises the cost of a second communist capture. It makes it harder for a future corrupt regime to re-nationalize the industry overnight and resume shipping the crude to Cuba in exchange for rebuilding the repressive apparatus. American companies built much of that industry in the 20th century before Chávez confiscated it. The decay that followed was communist plunder. Reopening the oil fields under American capital and strategic oversight is how you prevent the next plunder.
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The deal must not become a substitute for liberty. Oil that merely finances the same repressive regime is not reconstruction. It is a richer dictatorship. Secretary Rubio has been clear since January, after the capture of Nicolás Maduro, that the United States would not occupy Venezuela. It would use leverage.
The plan has three overlapping phases: stabilization, so the country does not collapse into war; recovery, so Western firms enter on fair terms and the wrecked industry can be rebuilt; and transition, so Venezuelans recover a government that is representative and no longer an outpost of the Castro regime. That is the Donroe Doctrine in practice: the Monroe Doctrine updated for an era in which the threat is not a European monarch but the communist powers that treated Venezuela as a forward operating base. Trump had the courage to remove the dictator. Rubio now has the leverage to keep the country from sliding back.
Let’s look at the results on the ground.
Maduro is gone. Oil once sold at discounted rates to bail out U.S. adversaries is being pulled toward market terms. Hundreds of political prisoners have left their cells, a feat that years of “engagement” failed to accomplish. An amnesty process exists to rebuild a nation fractured by a socialist dictatorship.
None of this is finished, but all of this was unthinkable under the policies the critics now miss. Those critics were content with failure dressed as prudence: mild sanctions, dialogue with a regime that denied an election it stole and humanitarian gestures that let Cuban intelligence run Venezuela. They complain after a few months that the current progress is imperfect, but they would have waited another decade for a “perfect” transition that the Cuban regime would never have allowed.
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The oil agreement is a foundation, not a finish line. Every remaining political prisoner must be released, even as human-rights groups still count hundreds behind bars. Venezuela should also complete the dollarization that its citizens are vocally calling for. Venezuelans abandoned the Bolívar because socialism destroyed it. Formal dollarization would lock in stability, invite diaspora capital home and make it harder for a future government to finance repression. Oil proceeds must be fenced off from the old patronage machine and audited. And stabilization cannot become a permanent excuse. Venezuelans need an electoral calendar and courts that are not controlled by the ruling, Diosdado Cabello-led socialist party.
Let’s be clear: The agreement is a major strategic and economic bet, but its precise duration, legal foundation and long-term enforceability remain unsettled.
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To those who shout “sovereignty”: a nation whose oil financed Cuban tutelage was not sovereign. Partnership with the only superpower that has the capital, the technology and the interest in enabling Venezuelans to be free is how sovereignty becomes real.
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To those who say the interim government lacks legitimacy for long contracts, they are right that legitimacy must be completed at the ballot box. They are wrong that the alternative is idle oil fields and an open door to Cuba, China and Russia. Contracts can be ratified by a future democratic congress. Collapse cannot.
Attacks on Marco Rubio are attacks on the only U.S. Secretary of State who has delivered results in Venezuela. Now is the time to finish the job, empty the prisons, dollarize, audit the revenue and push for free elections. Do that, and this agreement will be remembered not as a bargain with a remnant of Chavismo, but as the moment Venezuela shut the door on communism.
