The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Venezuela Offers Trump an Oil Bribe || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: January 14, 2026

Venezuela's pseudo-newish-kinda leader, Delcy Rodríguez, just offered President Trump 30-50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil. Let's just call a spade a spade, because this is an overt political bribe.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/3Lwn8a2

Hey, all, Peter Zine here coming from Colorado. Today, we're talking about the bribe that Donald Trump announced last year, light. There's no other word for it. He went on truth social and said that Venezuela was going to give or sell. Details were a little fuzzy. Somewhere between 30 and 50 million barrels of crude to the United States to be sold into U.S. markets, to be accepted U.S. ports, to be processed by U.S. refineries, and that he personally would manage the sale and handle the proceeds personally as the president of the United States. States for the benefit of Venezuela and the United States. Details TBD. Two things here. Number one, it's really weird to have a sitting president be really proud of a bribe,

but here we are. It's a weird world these days. Second, the mechanics of why this is happening. The new president of Venezuela, Rodriguez, is attempting to flat out bribe the American president. This is not the first time she's tried this. She came back in 2019. Remember, she's also the oil minister. and tried to give money to his election campaign.

Didn't work then. Now, seems to be working. But she is trying to get the American stamp of approval that she is the thug in charge. She is not any better than Nicholas Maduro or Hugo Chavez. She simply is bending with the political wins right now. She's established a far tighter crackdown in just the last three days than Nicholas Maduro ever did, even at the height of the elections. She wants everyone to realize that she is in charge and she has Trump's behind her.

for her new reign of tyranny, and of course she was selected because she was very good at looting the system. So it's a really interesting political bedfellows, whether or work or not, depends on a thousand different things that I can't predict right now. But let's talk about that oil. The way oil systems work is you have a production well. It goes into a pipeline. It goes to a refinery. The refinery processes it. And then it goes on, typically by truck, train, or some other method of transport to end use.

And the trick is you have to maintain a flow all through there, because if you have a hang-up at one step, the pipeline will then have to divert its shipments off into, say, a storage tank, and storage tanks can only use so much. And for a country like, say, the United States, where we use something like 17 million barrels a day, you're talking about a lot of flow-through. Well, if you're an exporter, if you don't necessarily refine your crude, it's even more important then because there's no place to offload. There's no local demand center that is strong enough to absorb a lot of the raw crude. So your only options then are tanks. And that's the situation that Venezuela is in now. You see, a couple weeks ago, Trump administration announced a full embargo on basically anything that wasn't Chevron. And in doing so, tankers stopped arriving in Venezuela, so they had to start diverting all of their export flows to storage tanks. Now, Venezuela has more storage tanks than most exporters, mostly because it's not the exporter it used to be. They used to export three million barrels a day. Now it's less than one, which means they actually had a fair number of

tanks. But after two weeks, those have basically become full. And we're now in the point that in the next day or three, if they can't release that crude onto tankers to take it away, they're going to have to shut down production because there's no place else to put it. That's the 30 to 50 million barrels. Gives you an idea of how little control the Venezuelans have over the intellectual property of their own system. They don't know if it's 30 million or 50 million. They just need someone, anyone to take it in any price. Otherwise, they have to shut everything down. And here is Donald Trump. So, Rodriguez offers Trump the bribe. Trump seems very grateful. And we will find out in the next 48 hours whether or not the tankers will actually take it and carry.

to the United States and whether U.S. refineries will accept crude that the president has very explicitly said is still under sanction. There's a lot of legal questions there. And the people who would help untie those legal questions are the experts and the people who basically do ethics investigations in the United States government, and they have all been fired. So a lot of people are going to have to make a lot of really difficult decisions on legal liability very, very, very soon. But that's the nuts and bolts of the issue. If this doesn't work out the way that Rodriguez and Trump have identified, then the tankers don't come. The oil stays in the tanks and the entire Venezuelan oil sector basically shuts down with the exception of what they can refine themselves, which is less than a quarter of a million barrels a day.

So this could buy them some time to figure out something else, or we could be at the end of Venezuela as an oil power right now. Thank you.