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So, it was a war for oil after all.

On social media Friday, President Trump announced that the United States and Venezuela have struck an agreement for “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY.”

The whole thing is appalling, starting with the all-caps.

I have no love for the Venezuelan regime, run by, in Trump’s words, “the Highly Respected Interim President” Delcy Rodriguez. But this is a “deal” that Rodriguez couldn’t refuse. We invaded her country, abducted her criminal-dictator boss, Nicolás Maduro, and made her our satrap.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Venezuela and the U.S. will work through two intermediaries to get the oil flowing. The Venezuelan partner is Alejandro Betancourt, head of North American Blue Energy Partners. He’s been investigated, though not charged, for money laundering in Spain and Switzerland. He’s also one of the most famous “Bolichicos,” a nickname for the young businessmen who’ve gotten rich from their ties to the socialist, murderous, criminal dictatorship (it’s a portmanteau of “Bolivarian” and “Bourgeois”).

And who is the American partner? Well, the Pentagon, of course. Trump couldn’t get American oil companies to invest billions in Venezuela’s decrepit oil industry. (At a White House meeting in January, Darren Woods, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil infuriated the president by describing Venezuela as “un-investable.”) So, the commander in chief tapped the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital to take a 35% stake in Betancourt’s firm, securing the right to buy 20% of all production “at cost.” Created in 2022, the OSC was intended to use loans and loan guarantees to help develop vital industries. Now, it’s the primary backer of the “history’s biggest oil deal.”

We’ll see how legal this is. You can be sure someone will be going to court over it. After all, the U.S. government will be working with a criminal regime, under implausible statutory authority, to buy oil at below-market rates while undermining our own oil producers.

I won’t shed many tears for the oil companies, even if the administration pulls this off. Then again, I don’t think they will, at least not any time soon. Trump boasts that this will help lower gas prices. Maybe. Someday. But even this scheme’s biggest boosters acknowledge that if it all goes swell, it will still take years to get the relevant oil fields producing, and years to retrofit American refineries to take Venezuela’s subpar oil. So, if Trump thinks prices at the pump are coming down before the midterms, or even........

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