Logan McMillen’s Jacobin piece dissects Trump’s Truth Social announcement of “the biggest oil deal in world history” — US partial control of ~65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil, negotiated by Marco Rubio with interim president Delcy Rodríguez. The essay’s spine is historical: it dismantles the Washington myth that Venezuelan resource nationalism was a Chávez invention.

The deal’s mechanics are as alarming as its scale:

  • Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital takes a 35% ownership stake in the new extraction entity plus rights to 20% of output at cost — unprecedented in US history
  • Reported 100-year lease across 17 fields (Orinoco Belt, Lake Maracaibo); Rodríguez’s address said 25 years — and no written documents existed at all
  • Oil revenues deposit in a US Treasury account; US officials decide what gets disbursed back to Caracas
  • PDVSA stripped of its operating role under opaque “productive participation contracts”; Venezuelan oligarch Alejandro Betancourt reportedly runs operations
  • Venezuelan Right and Left — rarely united — both call the country sold out

McMillen’s key move is the deep history:

  • Oil nationalism was a cross-ideological consensus built over decades: 1943 Hydrocarbons Law → 1976 nationalization under Carlos Andrés Pérez → 1999 Constitution, which says plainly that the oil belongs to the Venezuelan people
  • Historian Miguel Tinker Salas reads the deal as a return to dictator Juan Vicente Gómez’s low-rent concessions to foreign oil trusts a century ago
  • The deal breaks the social contract in which oil rents funded national development — many in Latin America read it as the end of the Fifth Republic
  • US sanctions and Venezuela’s own elite restructuring (oversight shifted from parliament to the executive) cleared the ground beforehand

The takeaway is pointed: backroom resource grabs strip away the polite fictions of US foreign policy in the hemisphere — and chaining both countries to fossil fuels is a climate disaster at the moment they should be diversifying. McMillen closes by noting that a people who tasted the fruits of socialism don’t quietly endure a century of humiliation: blackouts, inflation, and food shortages layered on extraction are “the precise material conditions revolutions are made of.”