Don’t look now, but Big Oil is making big moves to secure positions in the expanding Venezuelan oil industry as part of the Trump Administration’s plans to revitalize the country’s economy.

On Monday, Chevron officials signed a pair of deals to expand the company’s footprint in the prolific Orinoco Belt as Shell prepares to ink a major deal of its own later this week.

Make no mistake: These deals didn’t happen in a vacuum. They are the direct result of the Trump administration’s bold decision to remove Nicolás Maduro in January, launch a $100 billion reconstruction plan for the country’s shattered energy sector, and push through sweeping reforms to Venezuela’s hydrocarbon law. After years of socialist mismanagement that turned one of the world’s richest oil nations into an economic basket case, sanity is finally returning.

Trump haters in and out of the media snickered that the big oil companies would never make big investments required under the Trump plan. Now, they are proven wrong, yet again. Why? Because, as I wrote here at the time, oil companies are risk takers by nature, and the size of the prize in Venezuela – the holder of the world’s largest oil reserves – would almost certainly overwhelm the potential risks in the final analysis.

The magnitude of that........

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