Tangle - The U.S. oil deal with Venezuela.

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

On Friday, President Donald Trump announced an agreement to make the United States government an investor in the production of Venezuelan oil. Under the reported terms of the deal, the U.S. will take a stake in a private Venezuelan company that will be given the rights to develop 17 oil fields believed to contain 65 billion barrels of oil. President Trump said the deal will help build up U.S. oil reserves, bring down gas prices, and promote investment and production in Venezuela from other U.S. energy companies. Interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez said the deal will economically benefit her country and revitalize its energy industry. Ad-free podcasts are here!Get 20% off your first year of ad-free episodes, exclusive interviews, and deep dives with Tangle’s podcast membership!Share your questions.Next Friday, September 11, we’ll publish a mailbag edition answering reader questions about the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as well as broader questions about other timely news topics, under-the-radar issues, and anything else of interest. You can submit a question here for consideration.You can read today's podcast⁠ ⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠ and today’s “Have a nice day” story ⁠here⁠.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Take the survey: How do you feel about the practical and moral implications of this deal? Let us know.Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast written by: Isaac Saul and audio engineered and edited by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Audrey Moorehead, and Carina Pacheco. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and welcome to September. It's September 1st, and one upside of being an adult, September 1st no longer means the end of summer. I have no school to return.

to no new realities to face. I have three more weeks of long summer nights, warm evenings, ice cream, beaches, laid back Fridays. I do not care what anyone says or if a fall chill has started to poke its head up here in New Jersey. Summer ends September 22nd and not a day earlier. That's where I'm drawing my line in the sand. Today, we are diving into the U.S. Venezuela oil deal, plus an opportunity to submit questions for our reader mailbag and a reader question about the flooding in Nepal. It is a 14-minute read. I'm going to be joined by senior editor Will Kback on today's podcast. I'm going to pass it over to Will, and I'll be back for my take.

Thanks, Isaac. Here are today's quick hits. The Supreme Court ruled five to four that President Donald Trump can continue construction of a new White House ballroom, while challenges to the project continue in lower courts. Chief Justice John Roberts and the courts three Democratic appointed justices dissented. Number two, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has reportedly submitted his resignation and plans to depart the Pentagon in the coming days. Driscoll has reportedly clashed with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over his strategic vision and firings of key military leadership. Number three, the Federal Trade Commission and 22 states sued Amazon for allegedly not disclosing surcharges to its online search advertising auctions, creating deceptively higher prices to advertise on its platform.

For a federal judge granted a Justice Department request to delay a lawsuit seeking to revoke the Food and Drug Administration's approval of Mitha Preston, a drug used in medication abortions. The case will be paused until December 1st or until the FDA finishes its safety review of the drug, whichever comes first. And finally, the prediction marketplace Kalshi issued a lifetime ban to former representative George Santos, a Republican from New York, who allegedly bet on whether he would attend President Trump's State of the Union address earlier this year. So the U.S. is taking control of 65 billion barrels of oil reserves from Venezuela. President Trump announcing what he called the biggest oil deal in world history, saying, quote, this historic transaction, more than doubles American oil reserves, greatly increases our oil supply, and will substantially

lower gas prices for all Americans long into the future. On Friday, President Donald Trump announced an agreement to make the United States government a direct investor in the production of Venezuelan oil. Under the reported terms of the deal, the U.S. will take a stake in a private Venezuelan company that will be given the rights to develop 17 oil fields believed to contain 65 billion barrels of oil. President Trump said the deal will help build up U.S. oil reserves, bring down gas prices, and promote investment and production in Venezuela from other U.S. energy companies. Interim Venezuelan President Delsi Rodriguez said the deal will economically benefit her country

and revitalize its energy industry. In January of 26, the U.S. conducted a military operas. to arrest then Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro and bring him to the United States to face drug trafficking charges. Rodriguez was Maduro's vice president at the time, and she has since served as the country's interim president with backing from the Trump administration. President Trump has said he would work with President Rodriguez

to open Venezuela to U.S. oil companies and rebuild its energy infrastructure, which has suffered from underinvestment and political instability. On Monday, the White House shared that the White House shared that the U.S. government will take a 35% equity stake in the parent company of North American Blue Energy Partners and will be able to purchase 20% of the company's oil at production cost in perpetuity. The State Department will also have the right of first refusal to purchase the remaining 80% of the company's production. The company will have the rights to develop the 17 oil fields

for 100 years. President Trump said the agreement will quote, substantially lower gas prices for all Americans long into the future, while helping to continue to set Venezuela on a course toward tremendous success and great prosperity, end quote. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the deal will, quote, bring nearly $100 billion in private investment, support thousands of high-paying jobs, and drive the reconstruction of the Venezuelan economy, end quote. Some energy experts raised concerns about the deal, citing uncertainty about what role the U.S.

government will play in the private company's operations and the significant infrastructure upgrades needed to boost Venezuelan oil production. Others questioned whether U.S. oil companies can trust that the deal will persist beyond a leadership change in both countries. And many experts noted that increasing production enough to lower oil prices and refill U.S. reserves could take years. Today we'll survey commentary from the left and right on the deal, followed by executive editor Isaac Salis take. We'll be right back after this quick break. Here's what the left is saying. The left mostly opposes the deal and questions its purported benefits.

Some say the agreement creates disincentives. Others suggest the deal could be positive for both countries. In The Daily Beast, David Rothkopf argued the agreement won't benefit the U.S. in the near or medium term. As with all such Trump announcements, upon closer to... scrutiny. His boasts are empty and misleading. They also mask or neglects to note a much darker side to what has happened, the President's judgment, his intentions, and the likely consequences of the whole endeavor. The deal will not produce enough oil to restore our strategic reserves in the next several years, if ever. Venezuela's oil infrastructure is damaged and insufficient and would require massive investment

and work to ramp up sufficient production. It is not a deal. This is the U.S. illegally seizing the assets of another country via force, an act of bald-faced aggression akin to Russia's seizure of eastern Ukraine with similar economic motives. As a consequence, it tacitly gives license to other nations, like Russia, to use force to attack and steal from weaker neighbors around the world. It is unlikely that any future U.S. administration would support this relationship, thus cutting it short before the U.S. could derive any real benefit. The economist called the agreement a murky deal. Mr. Trump claimed that the arrangement more than doubles American oil reserves. That is misleading. The United States, whose own oil reserves stand at around 44 billion barrels,

will not own the 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil, much though Mr. Trump might wish it did. It appears it will instead become the majority owner of a new company that will have the right to develop and operate 17 Venezuelan oil fields. Any contracts signed will still also, ultimately be with the government of Ms. Rodriguez. She is not a leader chosen by Venezuelans, but the heir to Nicholas Maduro, who flagrantly stole the last presidential election in 2024. The deal raises the prospect that both the Trump administration and the Rodriguez regime might now share an incentive to prevent any elected government from taking office. It was a Venezuelan energy minister who, in the 1970s, memorably described oil as the devil's

excrement. Perhaps it was inevitable that any deal to exploit its potential was never going to be clean. In real clear politics, Leopoldo Martinez Nusete suggested the deal could benefit all sides. For too long, Venezuela has confused maintaining its sovereignty with keeping its oil in the ground, even if its vast oil reserves produced neither investments nor collective well-being. But true sovereignty means establishing rules that turn those resources into prosperity for Venezuelans, including with international partners. That's how to judge the oil deal announced by the governments of the U.S. and Venezuela. The agreement will outlast any occupant of the White House. The same will be true on the Venezuelan side. Obligations will not depend on Delsey Rodriguez's political will, but on institutions,

valid contracts, and rules capable of surviving changes in government. The deal satisfies the many needs of both countries. The U.S. wants to diversify and secure nearby oil supplies amid instability in the Middle East and pressure on its strategic petroleum reserves. Venezuela needs tax revenue and tens of billions of dollars to rehabilitate an industry weakened by years of underinvestment, corruption, mismanagement, sanctions, and loss of technical capacity. The dual country, public-private partnership is novel, ambitious, and potentially a huge benefit to all participants. Now on to what the right is saying. The right is mixed, but many call the deal a win for Trump. Some criticize the structure of the deal. Others question the political effects and legality of the

agreement. In PJ Media, Matt Margolis wrote, this is the kind of deal Trump was elected to make. This deal is a game changer on several levels. Venezuela holds a holds the largest proven crude oil reserves on the planet, somewhere between 303 and 304 billion barrels, or roughly 19% of the entire global total. Locking down majority control of even a slice of that changes the math on America's energy security in a way that few deals could.

Does this actually move the needle for voters? That's the only question that matters nine weeks out from the midterms. Trump and Rubio are promising gas prices will drop substantially over time, and there's a real case for it. More supply, less reliance on hostile foreign partners, and a deal that reportedly costs American taxpayers nothing. But oil deals don't lower prices at the pump overnight. Whether voters feel real relief at the gas station before November, or whether they simply hear about a deal they haven't benefited from, will determine how much credit Republicans actually get before the midterms. If prices do fall in time, Democrats lose one of their

most reliable midterm talking points. In his substack, Eric Woods-Erikson called the agreement a good deal with a bad structure. Unfortunately, the structure of this deal is socialist, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise because a Republican signed it. This is the same error that the socialist left makes, arriving from the other direction. The left wants the state to own the means of production because it distrusts the market. The post-liberal right wants the state to own the means of production because it distrusts the market too, but calls it national security. Notwithstanding all of that, on balance, this is a good deal. It is good for Venezuela, which needs capital jobs and an economy that is not a criminal enterprise. It is good for the United States, which needs crude that does

not travel through a straight Iran keeps trying to mine. It is good for a hemisphere that spent 20 years watching what socialism does to a rich country. But the structure is rotten and rot spreads. A future president should sell the warrants and get the Treasury and the Pentagon out of the equity business. The Wall Street Journal editorial board said the reported details of the deal aren't cause for enthusiasm. Official details of the agreement are scarce. The U.S. will take a 35% stake in a private company run by Alejandro Betancourt, a Venezuelan businessman close to Ms. Delsi Rodriguez. The U.S. investor here will be the Pentagon of all agencies. which will structure the investment through penny warrants that will gain the equity stake without

taxpayer cash. The legal authority for this is far from clear, since the Defense Department is investing in a foreign entity. Can the Pentagon Office of Strategic Capital take such equity stakes? The politics of all this are even more complicated, to put it mildly. The U.S. government is essentially getting in bed with a foreign dictator and her favored capitalist. Any foreign firm that invests will have all three as de facto partners, but Mr. Trump will be out of office in 2029, and the heavy-handed U.S. role might not play well over time in Caracas. The oil deal will prop up Ms. Rodriguez, at least in the short term, and that may be part of Mr. Trump's motivation.

Much still isn't known, but this all looks like an example of the Trump administration extending its creeping crony statism beyond U.S. shores. And that is it for what the left and right are saying. Now I'm going to pass it over to Isaac for his take. All right, that is it for the left and the writer saying, which brings us to my take. Maybe it was about the oil after all. It feels like a lifetime ago, but in the days after the capture and extradition of Nicholas Maduro, there was a lively debate about why the Trump administration did what it did.

The administration's justification was that state-sponsored drug traffickers were bringing massive quantities of cocaine into the country from Venezuela, constituting a coordinated narco-terrorist attack. Following the Maduro operation, the administration also told us that the Venezuelan leader was illegitimate, that he had stolen our oil, that we had to depose him to keep China and Russia out of the Western Hemisphere, and that doing so would be a warning shot to Cuba.

I argued at the time that I could see it as simply all of the above, that Maduro's capture would serve each of these interests, even if the administration's stated reason was preventing drag. drug trafficking. Many writers on the left and Venezuelan officials were adamant that Trump's primary goal was to control Venezuela's oil supply. In common dreams, Kevin Martin wrote, quote, bogus assertions that Venezuela stole U.S. oil raised suspicions. This is not about narcotics trafficking, but rather seizing resources such as oil and minerals, end quote. I was keeping an open mind, but I was pretty compelled by this argument too. Here is one of the 14 points I made in my take.

Quote, if you made me bet all my personal belongings on the administration's true motivations here, cynically, I bet the answer is oil. Venezuela is rich with the kind of oil we can refine in the United States. Iran, Russia, and China were already making inroads, as one Venezuela celebrating in the streets put it. What do you think Russia and China wanted the recipe for a rapist? Trump has been talking more and more about the need to take back oil refineries. He thinks Venezuela stole. This has, for what it's worth, also been the allegation. from Venezuela, that the Trump administration was coming for its natural resources.

It's remarkable, in the most dispiriting way possible, to imagine that in 26, the United States is still risking wars to protect and pursue its own oil interests, end quote. Of course, eight months later, many Americans have moved on, but this latest gambit puts any argument to bed. The administration's primary stated rationale of fighting narco-terrorism seems to have faded into the background. The extradition of Maduro is part of a larger U.S. policy toward Venezuela, which has included blowing up boats in the Caribbean that purportedly carry drug traffickers. It's easy to memory hold this, but the justification for the initial boat strikes was to stop not just cocaine, but fentanyl. Marco Rubio said at the time that Trump wasn't going to allow the U.S.

to be flooded with cocaine and fentanyl. And Trump himself said big bags of cocaine and fentanyl were strewn in the ocean after the strikes on the alleged drug boats. We learned recently that blowing up boats in the Caribbean Sea and extrajudicially killing dozens of alleged drug traffickers has done nothing to solve the problem. Over time, the inclusion of fentanyl and these talking points disappeared because it was never part of the problem. But according to the government's own data from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the strikes have not meaningfully impacted the supply of cocaine.

As the Washington Post reported, drug traffickers have simply changed their boats and routes and response to U.S. strikes. Furthermore, Pentagon officials told lawmakers that the purity of cocaine is not changed, indicating that supply of the drug has remained steady. Maybe drug trafficking is still a priority of the U.S. relationship with Venezuela, but if it is, then the Trump administration seems to be unwilling to accept the reality that doing the same thing over and over will not produce different results. Of course, targeting Maduro for his role in the cocaine trade doesn't make much sense either, since Venezuela does not produce crops used to make cocaine, and the drug is primarily traffic through other countries. What has come of the Maduro extradition is this. The U.S. is now

taking an ownership stake in the second largest corporate holder of proven reserves in the world, behind only Saudi Aramco. Now, maybe the Trump administration didn't initially have plans to unlock all this oil. Maybe this was an extemporaneous move following the Iran war, rising energy costs, and the now choked off straight of Hormuz. Perhaps Trump really was serving many interests at once by extraditing Maduro, and the administration has ceded defeat on stopping drug trafficking to focus on the price and supply of oil. Yet, from the outside looking in, the simplest read is that it was about the oil all along. Not narco-terrorists, not ousting a dictator, not Russia, not China or Cuba, but oil. That all needed to be set up front in order for us to speak plainly about the net result of the boat strike

campaign. Senator Tim Kane, the Democrat from Virginia, senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, reviewed classified intelligence on the boat strikes, and then said the strikes have likely killed individuals who are not involved in narco trafficking. If that's the case, then the U.S. government has been killing innocent people extrajudicially for alleged drug trafficking with so far no positive impact on our own drug crisis. Simultaneously, we captured a foreign leader, however despotic and awful, arrested him, extradited him, and exaggerated him, and and then executed a kind of regime-change resource extraction under the same guise of fighting drug trafficking

when really we came for and stayed for the oil. As for the deal itself, to say final details are still fuzzy as charitable, given both sides have communicated some disparate facts, but it's got potential. For Venezuelans, this has the upside of injecting capital into and stabilizing the market for their most crucial natural resource. After years of mismanagement, I can see the upside there.

For Americans, the benefit is less straightforward. Trump needs to convince some U.S. oil firms to invest. Then he needs those firms to help scale up production and build out the infrastructure to get that oil to the United States. In the meantime, we'll be propping up Venezuela's newest dictator with most of Maduro's administration in place, and the Pentagon appears to be the agency taking all of this on at a time when the war in Iran rages, weapon supplies are depleted, and threats abound from Russia and China. That's all to say nothing about the administration taking equity stakes in 31 private companies and thrusting itself into partial ownership of a foreign nation's oil reserves.

As Scott Linsacombe, a Cato Institute director, said, quote, this isn't even creeping socialism anymore. Still, this arrangement has a decent chance of creating a huge influx of oil into the United States, which could mean cheaper fuel, cheaper energy, and more prosperous Americans. I imagine this arrangement will end up kind of like, Trump's first term Title 42 immigration restriction policy. A Democratic presidential candidate for 28 will hammer the Trump administration on it, but if that candidate ends up in office, they will not immediately undo it. Yet the cost is substantial. I acknowledge that Maduro is a leader who killed, tortured, and sexually abused his political opponents. He repressed democracy,

stole his country's 2024 election actually, and destabilized our hemisphere. But consider what we gave up to the oppose him. We've undermined international law, set a new standard for how we act when diplomacy fails, and created the expectation or reaffirmed the widely held belief that our high-minded moral projection about spreading democracy or fighting terrorists was really just cover for more cheaper oil. Not only that, but moving forward, we're now in bed with the new Venezuelan regime, which does not appear meaningfully different from the old one, save its pliancy to Trump. Just as we win the fruits of their natural resources, they now exert new economic leverage over us, especially in a future where we become more dependent on Venezuelan oil.

As you might suspect, I'm not particularly keen on this trade-off. I'd much rather have cheap oil through the system that existed a year ago, when gas was a dollar less a gallon. It was by no means perfect, but we didn't have an ambient unending war in Iran. We hadn't struck and killed boaters in the Caribbean on scant or non-existent evidence, and some semblance of a moral high ground still existed with regards to our policies toward Venezuela. It's hard to defend that moral high ground now, even if I'm glad to see Maduro gone, and even if this gambit might quote-unquote work to cheapen oil and line American government coffers. For some, that trade-off will be worth it. For me, not so much.

We'll be right back after this quick break. All right, that is it for my take, which brings us to your question's answer. This one's from Reggie in Boston, Massachusetts. Reggie said, how much of the flooding in Nepal is because of climate change? I see a lot of people saying this online, but I'm not sure how true that is. Okay, so for some background, authorities and scientists believe a massive glacier caused the deadly flooding in Nepal and China last week when it broke off a mountain along the country's border and fell thousands of feet into the river below, triggering a flood wave.

The death toll from the disaster has now surpassed one. thousand people. As with other natural disasters, the conditions that cause events like the glacier collapse are becoming more likely due to climate change, but we can't attribute this event specifically to a warming planet. That's what we learn from talking to climatologist Zee Kossfather about the Canadian wildfires, and that's the broad takeaway here. Let's start with this. The Himalayas are getting warmer and the Langtang region where this glacier collapse has been getting warmer even faster. The Langtang region has consistently been losing ice mass since the 1950s, and about half the mass its loss since then has come in the past 25 years. So, why can't we just say climate change caused this collapse

definitively? Because we don't have a forensic analysis of the event yet and can't say exactly what triggered it. Theoretically, a world that is richer in glaciers is also a world with more possibilities for glacial collapses. And to be sure, glaciers have been collapsing for centuries without any apparent linkage to climate change. In 1962, a glacier broke from Peru's tallest mountain with no apparent trigger. Then, during an earthquake in 1970, another ice wall broke off the same mountain and killed 25,000 people. Of course, the difference here is that this sudden glacial collapse wasn't triggered by a seismic event, but it was so dramatic that the collapse itself triggered a seismic event instead. Maybe that was due to something specific with this glacier,

but the contextual evidence is pretty clear. As Housefather has said, the collapse happened on a mountain warming at around 0.29 Celsius per decade in summer, immediately after four consecutive summers that all rank among the five warmest in an 86-year record, during an August that was running warmer

than any complete August on record, in a valley that has lost ice at an accelerating pace, and in a region where human influence is very likely the main driver of glacier retreat. All right, that is it for your questions answered. I'm going to send it back to Will for the rest of the pod, and I'll see you guys tomorrow.

Have a good one. Peace. Thanks, Isaac. And now here's a story about this day in history. Shortly before midnight, April 14th, 1912, the RMS Titanic, then the largest ocean liner in service, and known as the unsinkable ship, struck an iceberg on her maiden voyage.

A little under three hours later, she sank into the sea. Of the roughly 2,200 people aboard 1,500 died, and the survivors were rescued by the RMS Carpathia hours later. After the disaster, many immediately turned their attention to the possibility of finding the ship's wreckage. Survivors and family members hoped to lay loved ones to rest. Others wanted to recover the ship's treasures. However, for decades, technological limitations and a poor understanding of the ship's location at the time it sank, prevented serious searches. That changed in 1985 when two research institutions, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and the French National Institute of Oceanography,

tested new underwater imaging technologies by searching for the Titanic's wreckage. Led by Dr. Robert Ballard and oceanographer Jean-Louis Michel, the team of the team, team set out to search a 100-square-mile field where the ship ultimately came to rest. Throughout July and August, the team searched most of the field with little luck. With 12 days left to search, the team adjusted its strategy. Rather than searching for the Titanic's hole, they zeroed in on the debris trail they believed would lead them to the wreck. Then, on September 1st, 1985, their efforts paid off, and they found her wreckage.

The discovery of the Titanic marked a major mile. in underwater exploration technology and in historical interest. Discovering the Titanic proved the effectiveness of the two organizations' new technology, which had been developed for military research purposes and has since been used to locate other deep sea wrecks. And finally, here's our Have a Nice Day story. When British Columbia residents heard distressed animal sounds from a dock on Vancouver Island, they discovered three young otters caught in an abandoned fishing net.

They freed two of the otters to reunite with their mother in the water, but the fishing net was wrapped around the third otter's neck, restricting its breathing. Gordon Mellish, a retired commercial fisher and carver, cut away the net and began CPR, and then mouth-to-mouthed on the otter's small snout. Before long, he noticed the otter had started to regain consciousness. Quote, it was so neat to have that moment, Melish said. then I just told her, get rest, get better, and make sure you make it back home.

The Vancouver Sun has this story and we'll drop the link to it in today's show notes. All right, that is it for today's edition. Thanks as always for being with us and we'll talk to you tomorrow. Until then, peace. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Law. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing. editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will Keeback and associate editors Audrey Moorhead and Bailey Saul.

Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at retangle.com.