Over the weekend, the U.S. military raided Venezuela, captured its leader, Nicolás Maduro, and flew him to New York to face criminal charges. “We're going to run it,” President Trump said on Sunday, referring to South America’s fifth-largest country. “We're in charge.”

It was a dizzying turn of events — not least because many Americans seemed confused about why it was happening at all.

Since then, some have settled on a simple explanation for Trump’s Venezuelan incursion: oil. And unlike his predecessor George W. Bush, who denied that petroleum had anything to do with his 2003 invasion of Iraq, Trump has done little to dispel this theory.

“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,” the president told reporters on Saturday. “We're going to take back the oil that, frankly, we should’ve taken back a long time ago.”

Writing late Tuesday on social media, Trump said Venezuela would soon be “turning over” about two months worth of oil — 30 to 50 million barrels — to the U.S.

But is oil the real reason Trump raided Venezuela? And can the U.S. actually just “take back” the oil? Experts say the situation is a lot more complicated than it might look — and there could be forces other than fossil fuels at work. Here’s a reality check on the various rationales making the rounds.

Oil

Why it makes sense: Crippled by years of sanctions and economic mismanagement, Venezuela currently produces little oil — less than 1% of what the world uses. But its proven reserves are vast: an estimated 303 billion barrels, more than any other country’s. American oil companies originally tapped those reserves, but all of them except Chevron left after Hugo Chávez seized power (and their assets) around the turn of the century. Now Trump wants the American energy giants to return and start pumping “a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground.” Some of that oil money would go to Venezuelan people, in Trump’s telling. The rest would go to the U.S. as “reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country” — a suitably “America First” outcome.

Why it doesn’t make sense: Experts say there are three reasons why toppling Maduro doesn’t actually help the U.S. oil industry. The first is that the political situation in Venezuela is far too volatile for any long-term investment. “This isn’t like standing up a food truck operation,” one source told CNN. The second is that Venezuela’s oil sector is in such a state of disarray that it would cost a staggering $183 billion through 2040 to restore peak production, according to estimates published Monday by the consulting firm Rystad Energy. Finally, crude is so cheap right now — just $57 a barrel — that oil CEOs, and their shareholders, are reluctant to gamble on risky projects. Adding millions of barrels of Venezuelan oil to the global marketplace would only lower prices more.

Narco-terrorism

Why it makes sense: A U.S. court indicted Maduro on drug trafficking charges in 2020, and he and his wife faced nearly identical charges when they appeared in court on Monday. The claim, as Trump put it over the weekend, is that “Maduro was the kingpin of a vast criminal network responsible for trafficking colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs into the United States” and that he “personally oversaw the vicious cartel known as Cartel de los Soles.” Because of this, the administration is arguing that Maduro’s capture was actually a law enforcement operation, meant to eliminate an “imminent threat” to the U.S., rather than a military operation (which would require approval from Congress). “You don’t get to avoid justice for drug trafficking in the United States because you live in a palace in Caracas,” Vice President JD Vance wrote Saturday on X.

Why it doesn’t make sense: Experts have questioned both the legality and the substance of this argument, noting that Venezuela does not send illicit fentanyl to the U.S. and remains a relatively minor player in the global narcotics trade. Just last month, Trump pardoned a former Honduran president who’d been convicted of trafficking narcotics to the U.S. — undercutting his stated commitment to imprisoning Latin American leaders who export drugs. And on Monday, the Justice Department dropped its claim that Venezuela’s “Cartel de los Soles” is an actual group — let alone a “terrorist organization” that Maduro “personally oversaw.”

Democracy

Why it makes sense: Maduro was widely considered a dictator. A former bus driver turned socialist union leader turned vice president, he succeeded Chávez after his death in 2013. Under Maduro, Venezuela has been plagued by electoral fraud, extrajudicial killings, corruption, economic hardship and hunger. Millions have fled poverty and persecution. In Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election, tally sheets gathered and preserved by tens of thousands of volunteers across the country showed opposition candidate Edmundo González leading Maduro by almost 40 percentage points and winning every state. Independent analyses later validated these results. Yet Maduro clung to power anyway, cracking down on dissent. On Saturday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Venezuela could only achieve a legitimate “system of government” through Maduro’s ouster, followed by “a period of transition and real elections.”

Why it doesn’t make sense: During his press conference Saturday, Trump didn’t mention democracy or González. He dismissed the idea that opposition leader María Corina Machado — the winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize — could take over in Maduro’s wake, claiming that “she doesn't have the support within, or the respect within the country.” Instead, Trump has decided to leave Vice President Delcy Rodríguez in charge along with the rest of Maduro’s regime — as long as they comply with U.S. demands. Rodríguez is “essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” Trump said on Saturday — adding on Sunday that “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”

The “Donroe Doctrine”

Why it makes sense: The Monroe Doctrine is a United States foreign policy from 1823 that told European powers to stop colonizing or interfering in the Americas and established the U.S. as the Western Hemisphere’s dominant power. In November, the Trump Administration unveiled a “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine: that America has the right to “restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere” by denying “non-Hemispheric competitors” — namely, China — the ability “to own or control strategically vital assets.”

In practice, this has meant renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, pledging to seize the Panama Canal, threatening to take control of Greenland and bombing boats from South America — not to mention tariffs, sanctions, pressure campaigns and economic bailouts across the Americas. “Trump’s approach appears purely pragmatic: What is in it for the United States?” the New York Times recently explained. “Ample natural resources, strategic security positions and lucrative markets are all in play.”

Seen in this light, Maduro’s forcible ouster — and the increased control over oil, immigration and security that the U.S. might derive from it — looks like just the sort of raw, regional power move the “Donroe Doctrine” describes.

“You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, said Monday on CNN. “The U.S. is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere. We're a superpower, and under President Trump we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”

Why it doesn’t make sense: In 2016, Trump campaigned against “nation building,” arguing that America must “stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about.” Just one month ago, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted that was still the case. Trump’s “War Department will not be distracted by democracy-building, interventionism, undefined wars, regime change … and feckless nation-building," Hegseth vowed.