The Trump administration announced an arrangement with Venezuela last week that would see the US take control of 65 billion barrels worth of oil fields and a significant share of the country’s production of 800,000 barrels of oil per day—the latest development after an American strike on Caracas abducted the country’s president Nicolás Maduro in January.

According to the White House statement, Venezuela will grant a firm called North American Blue Energy Partners, rights to 17 oil fields for 100 years; that company will give the Pentagon a 35 percent stake in its corporate parent and the State Department the ability to buy 20 percent of its oil, with right of first refusal for the remaining 80 percent. The US government can also veto any appointment to NABEP’s board of directors.

The deal is one of the public-private partnerships that have become customary in Donald Trump’s foreign relations. But its workings in practice, and diplomatic and corporate reactions to the deal, are unclear at best. Just days after the White House announcement, Chevron said it would expand its operations in Venezuela. But Chevron is already the largest foreign oil operator in the country, and others have indicated that the uncertainty of Trump’s plan, let alone how long the process of scaling up production would take, has made them hesitant to invest.

What is clear is that the oil deal is a direct seizure of another country’s resources under threat of force, what political scientist Jeff Colgan, who directs the Climate Solutions Lab at Brown University’s Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs, calls “petro-imperialism.”

“We should be watching to see whether Trump’s own family takes a piece of this thing, as [they] have with so many other foreign business arrangements.”

In March, I spoke with Colgan, who has long studied the role of oil in international politics and war about how the idea of military intervention in global oil markets to support the US oil industry informed Trump’s actions in Iran. A similar pattern is in evidence again in Venezuela.

Trump has publicly signaled that he is interested in making Venezuela the 51st state, and according to reports Tuesday, is seeking more access to the........

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