Questions mount on Trump’s Venezuela oil deal

What happened

President Donald Trump late last week said his administration had reached the “BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY” with Venezuela. The agreement, later confirmed by acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez, gives the U.S. rights to 65 billion barrels of the country’s oil reserves. Trump on Sunday described the oil as a “Gift from Venezuela,” and said it would start refilling the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve “very shortly.” But “no text of any agreement has been released,” The Associated Press said, and “many questions” remain unanswered.

Who said what

Trump has been withdrawing oil for “months to keep prices from rising even higher” during the Iran war, and the strategic reserve “now sits at its lowest level since 1982,” The New York Times said. But refilling the reserve with this Venezuelan oil is “something of a pipe dream.” Experts have “repeatedly warned that Venezuela’s dilapidated oil infrastructure will take years and billions of dollars to repair,” the AP said, and it’s unclear “who would pay for infrastructure investments.”

The details we know “aren’t cause for enthusiasm,” The Wall Street Journal editorial board said in an op-ed. The Trump administration, through the Pentagon, is “essentially getting in bed with a foreign dictator and her favored capitalist,” energy company CEO Alejandro Betancourt.

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What next?

Oil companies “will remain cautious even if the terms of the deal, once released, pass legal muster,” Bob McNally, an energy adviser to former President George W. Bush, told the AP. “A future president could withdraw, and Caracas has twice thrown foreign investors out.”