Trump's Obsession with Oil: Explaining Trump's Foreign Policy
- Emerald Lo
- 6 days ago
- 9 min read
Cover image by Emerald Lo.
*This article is published in collaboration with Doomscroll Diplomacy, your next one-stop platform for all things foreign affairs. Check out Doomscroll Diplomacy's telegram channel here.
2016 Donald Trump would hate his 2026 self. Trump in his first term avoided foreign wars with conviction, deeming them as endless and a waste of American taxpayers money. Meanwhile, three months into his second term, Trump toppled a regime in Venezuela, alluded to a nuclear war with Iran, threatened to invade Cuba, and ‘liberate’ Greenland.
Even Trump’s most fervent supporters are slowly denouncing him. In his resignation letter, the former Director of National Intelligence, Joe Kent said that he “could not in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran” and that the President no longer understood that “wars in the Middle East were a trap.”
While it may seem that Washington is run by a tyrant who plays fast and loose with the rules, this article attempts to demystify Trump’s foreign policy from a territorial domination and a resource securitisation perspective.
It’s my backyard: The Western Hemisphere
If it has been parroted enough, Venezuela is home to the largest proven oil reserves in the Orococo Belt. The timing of Maduro’s arrests were not coincidental. On January 3rd, three hours before U.S forces descended on Caracas, a Chinese special envoy shook hands with President Nicholas Maduro, reaffirming Beijing’s support for the regime. The bombs that rained after were a warning to China – do not mess with what Washington perceives as their own territory.
Taken from his administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy, Washington views Latin America, Canada, and Greenland (colloquially known as the western hemisphere) as part of U.S’ jurisdiction.
On paper, the National Security Strategy outlines three main goals for the area.
To stop the flow of drugs and narco terrorism
To curb immigration into the U.S
And ensured continued access to key strategic locations.
The paper also emphasises that the U.S would achieve their goals through the dual strategies of “enlisting” friends or “expanding” into the territories. With the latter being a thinly veiled threat of invasion (as seen in Venezuela) lest any country steps out of line. It is clear that the U.S feels entitled to South America, explaining Washington’s fearless invasive policies into the region. To understand such entitlement, we must go back to the 18th century.
The evolution of the Monroe Doctrine into the Donroe Doctrine
In December 1823, during President James Monroe’s State of the Union address, Monroe warned European nations that the U.S would not tolerate further colonisations or puppet monarchs in the American continent. The words were spoken in a time when European powers controlled Canada to the North and Mexico to the South, the Monroe Doctrine was intended as defensive and welcomed as a fierce protection of sovereignty.
President Theodore Roosevelt refined the Monroe doctrine as the right of the U.S to exercise an “international police power”, strengthening its meaning to justify sending the U.S into other countries of the Western Hemisphere. The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe doctrine opened the doors to long-term U.S military occupation in the Caribbean and Central America.
It was invoked symbolically in 1962 by President J. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis to justify the US naval quarantine of Cuba and demand the removal of Soviet nuclear missiles from the island. Nonetheless, these case studies show how the U.S’ consolidation of power in the Western Hemisphere over the years were mostly painted as defensive.
This isn’t a country on the other side of the world, it’s in our area, the Donroe Doctrine. ~President Donald Trump
However, more than 200 years later, in Trump's corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, he twisted the policy into an offensive one, justifying direct intervention in the region. Nonetheless, understanding the U.S attitude towards the region is one thing. Evaluating how Washington operates due to such conditions is another.
To enlist or to expand?
The United States has achieved success in rolling back outside influence in the Western Hemisphere by demonstrating…how many hidden costs…are embedded in allegedly “low cost” foreign assistance. We should accelerate these efforts, including by utilizing U.S. leverage in finance and technology to induce countries to reject such assistance. ~The 2025 National Security Strategy
El Salvador was rewarded roughly $6 million for detaining around 300 Venezuelan migrants accused of gang affiliations.
The former Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernández, was pardoned by Trump despite being originally sentenced to 45 years in prison for conspiring to smuggle over 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S.. Under Hernández’s administration, industries that focused on resource extraction were actively promoted, even though these frequently encroached on indigenous lands.
During his time in office, Hernández championed the creation of special economic zones with their own tax and regulatory frameworks, a move that benefitted Trump-aligned Silicon Valley figures such as Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, who invested in them. However, his successor, Xiomara Castro, a member of the center-left party Libre, repealed the law, putting plans for the zones in jeopardy. Trump's presidential pardon underscores the administration's willingness to openly endorse authoritarian leaders to achieve economic gains, despite its stated goal of curbing drug flow.
At the same time, Washington used tariffs and economic pressure across Latin America—generally around 10% or higher, to push its trade and geopolitical priorities. Countries like Panama were heavily pressured to withdraw from China’s Belt and Road initiative. While Trump holds North American trade hostage to extract concessions from Mexico on immigration policy, which he could then use to reinforce his hardline stance on migrants, refugees, and border security to his base as proof of his effectiveness.
Meanwhile, the Jan 3rd attacks weakened Cuba, a country who has grown dependent on Venezuelan support to keep it afloat. As oil prices soar and the nation’s power grids collapse, Trump has once again raised the possibility of a "friendly takeover of Cuba”, potentially controlling a territory that is historically America’s achilles heel (think Cuban Missile Crisis during the Cold War).
His posture toward countries in Latin America also suggests that his political ideology is highly flexible. Trump feels like the Latin America countries are under his direct authority. Rather than acting out of loyalty to long-standing allies, consistent doctrine, or even his own domestic base, Trump’s mindset enables him to shift positions whenever doing so offers strategic or economic advantage. His invocation of the Monroe Doctrine emphasises this pattern: it functions less as a historically grounded principle than as a convenient justification for expansionist or interventionist policies in the hemisphere.
The Sticky Business of Oil
While the National Security Strategy, published in November 2025, hinted at Trump’s growing distaste for Iran, it emphasized the administration’s broader goal of shifting the burdens of managing Middle Eastern tensions to regional powers and sought to reduce direct U.S. involvement.
However, by early 2026, the situation had escalated into an active conflict. Trump’s administration initiated a month-long war with Iran. A conflict that rapidly destabilized the region, with neighboring Gulf countries, including Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, suffering from the direct effects of retaliation strikes.
This could also be seen as part of the broader tensions simmering over resources and global influence. To understand this resource war, you first have to look at Venezuela and China’s complicated relationship over oil. China has long been one of Venezuela’s biggest customers and investors in its oil sector, with Venezuelan crude once making up a meaningful share of Beijing’s imports even under sanctions.
Glued together by crude oil: Venezuela and China’s decade long friendship
When Former President Hugo Chavez took the country by storm with his declaration of Por Ahora – for now the country was weak but not for long, it was a threat as much as a promise.
Shortly after taking office in 1999, Chavez systematically dismantled democratic frameworks and made true his anti-American sentiments. In 2001, after multiple state visits, China and Venezuela signed eight agreements of cooperation, marking Venezuela as the first Latin American country to establish a strategic development partnership with China.
This China-Venezuela relationship outlived Chavez’s demise in 2015 and the handover of power to Chavez’s chosen successor, Nicolas Maduro Moros. In 2023, President Xi and President Maduro announced that their relationship would be elevated to an all-weather strategic partnership.
Such an alliance between Venezuela and China in the United States’ backyard is reason enough to unsettle Washington. These tensions were further intensified by Venezuela and China’s cooperation in crude oil production, a critical resource for the U.S. economy. Especially after President Donald Trump’s energy policies heavily emphasized fossil fuel production while proclaiming climate change a hoax.
Since 2005, China has awarded $60 billion in state loans to Venezuela. From 2008, China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) signed an agreement with Venezuela's PDVSA to jointly develop the Junin 4 block of Venezuela's Orinoco heavy crude belt. The agreement involves exploiting the belt and building a refinery at a cost of about $2 billion. This secured 85% of Venezuela's total crude production destined for China’s refineries.
In other words, China now dominates oil resources in quantity more than the U.S allies (Saudi Arabia, Canada etc) are capable of providing. Oil resources, no less, that once belonged solely to the U.S prior to 1976 country’s nationalisation of oil.
Trump fight for American oil dominance
Great powers don’t relinquish control over critical resources, and now the world watches in disbelief as American bombs fall on Iran and the Strait of Hormuz – a vital chokepoint through which China depends on for up to 50% of its seaborne oil imports.
The attacks in Venezuela and Iran may well be part of a broader strategy to regain control over global oil flows, undermining China and other emerging powers, especially as they move away from reliance on the U.S. dollar.
As countries increasingly move away from the dollar, the IMF’s share of global foreign exchange reserves has fallen to just 58%. Meanwhile, nations like China and Russia are conducting trade in their own currencies—yuan and rubles. In 2025, Brazil and China signed a yuan-real trade agreement, and India began purchasing Russian oil in rupees. Even Saudi Arabia, which once firmly upheld the petro-dollar system established by the 1974 agreement, has started accepting yuan for oil. With China and Russia pushing forward their own cross-border interbank systems, backed by over 4,800 banks in 185 countries, the U.S. is losing its grip on global oil financing.
Meanwhile, Iran is working to unite major oil producers under the BRICS framework, which controls nearly 40% of global petroleum output, and Enbridge is spearheading projects for central bank digital currencies, enabling immediate settlement in local currencies. These moves directly challenge the U.S. dollar’s supremacy in the global energy market, forcing Washington to respond aggressively. By attacking critical suppliers like Venezuela and Iran, the U.S. aims to regain its position at the center of global oil financing and halt the momentum behind de-dollarization. In other words, the fight over the Strait of Hormuz is a fight for a friendly ally in the Middle East who will help maintain U.S economic dominance and systematically weaken China.
Conclusion
Trump’s foreign policy boils down into two questions: Does this benefit the United States? (And if yes,) Can the U.S control this? Be it from a resource or national security viewpoint.
Whilst Trump is not the only president in history with such ambitions, he is the only president who has admitted his intentions with such candor. Therefore, analysts cannot look at his foreign policy from an ideological standpoint. His administration, after all, has a track record of acting first and covering their backs later.
It would make more sense that we evaluate his actions from an economic mindset. (We understand Trump has wedged a lot of crazy in between his goals and his actions - as the saying goes, if you can’t convince, just confuse your enemy). The escalation of conflict in these regions makes much more sense when we read it as a broader attempt to secure influence over global oil routes and resource-rich states at a time when China and Russia are increasingly challenging U.S. power in trade and finance. Therefore, even when Trump’s decisions appear impulsive or erratic, they can still be understood as part of a larger effort to preserve American economic leverage in an international order where control over resources remains a central source of power.
References
Baer, D., & Brown, E. (2026, April 7). Unstrategic Ambiguity: Trump’s Erratic Approach Leaves Europe Guessing. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2026/04/unstrategic-ambiguity-trumps-erratic-approach-leaves-europe-guessing
Cadell, C. (2026, January 3). China condemns U.S. strike in Venezuela, hours after diplomat met with Maduro. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/01/03/venezuela-maduro-china-beijing-oil/
Coto, D., & Rodriguez, A. (2026, January 6). Cuba, reliant on Venezuelan oil and support, faces uncertain future after U.S. removes Maduro. PBS News. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/cuba-reliant-on-venezuelan-oil-and-support-faces-uncertain-future-after-u-s-removes-maduro
Embassy of the People's Republic of China in the Republic of Zimbabwe. (2004, August 18). President Jiang Zemin Meets Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias(25/05/2001). https://zw.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng//zt/zgdwzc/200408/t20040816_6850207.htm
Ewers, E., & Tabatabai, A. (2026, April 15). How the Iran War Confirmed, Contradicted, and Complicated U.S. Policy. Council on Foreign Relations. https://www.cfr.org/articles/how-the-iran-war-confirmed-contradicted-and-complicated-u-s-policy
Hoffman, J. (2026, March 20). A Strategic Failure in Iran. Cato Institute. https://www.cato.org/blog/strategic-failure-iran
Parraga, M. (2010, October 11). Venezuela approves Chinese role in Orinoco oil block. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/venezuela-approves-chinese-role-in-orinoco-oil-block-idUSN11154188/
Rodríguez, A. (2026, March 23). Cuba begins to restore power after nationwide grid collapse. The Associated Press. https://apnews.com/article/cuba-blackout-energy-ba0e5a5df1f428dbf26656d23a16a772
Trump, D. (2025, November). National Security Strategy of the United States of America. The White House. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf
Ventura, L. (2025, March 1). US Pressure Pushes Panama Away From China. Global Finance Magazine. https://gfmag.com/news/us-pressure-pushes-panama-away-from-china/
Xinhua. (2023, September 15). Xi, Maduro announce elevation of China-Venezuela ties. International Poverty Reduction Center in China. https://www.iprcc.org/article/4EhQDI9Oil1
Comments