Venezuela oil push meant to block China, Russia influence: Donald Trump

US President Donald Trump on Thursday cast Washington’s push to revive Venezuela’s oil industry as a strategic gambit to block China and Russia from deepening their influence in the Western Hemisphere, warning that America’s rivals were poised to move swiftly into Caracas’s energy sector had the United States stayed on the sidelines.

Speaking from the White House alongside executives from major American and international oil companies, Trump said US intervention had prevented Beijing or Moscow from seizing control of Venezuela’s vast petroleum reserves.

“If we didn’t do this, China or Russia would have been there,” he said, underscoring what he described as the geopolitical stakes of the effort.

While insisting that the United States remained open to selling oil to China and other countries, Trump stressed that control over Venezuelan production must ultimately align with US strategic interests. “We are open for business in the United States and we are open for business in Venezuela,” he said.

Secretary of state Marco Rubio said Venezuela, under its previous leadership, had become a launchpad for hostile foreign actors, posing a direct challenge to US national security.

“It was not in the national interest or national security of the United States to have in our own hemisphere a country… controlled by an indicted narco trafficker,” Rubio said.

Energy secretary Chris Wright said Venezuela’s prolonged economic collapse had rippled far beyond its borders, fuelling instability across the region. “The corruption and decline of Venezuela has been a crisis for the people of Venezuela,” he said.

Trump also suggested that US military pressure had helped create leverage without tipping the region into open conflict. “Ordering both the tremendous military operation… and then to use the power of our military, not to fire bullets but to stop the flow of Venezuelan oil,” he said, describing the approach as a show of force short of war.

The president likened the strategy to broader US efforts to curb Chinese and Russian influence in other strategically vital regions. “We’re not going to have Russia or China occupy Venezuela,” he said.

Latin America has long occupied a central place in Washington’s strategic calculus, with energy security and great-power rivalry continuing to shape US policy across administrations.

With IANS inputs