A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
As part of that foreign policy, President Trump is meeting today with oil executives to get their help reviving Venezuela's oil industry. Trump has a vision for Venezuela that draws heavily on the colonial past, but it may hit some speed bumps in the modern economic world. Here's NPR's Scott Horsley.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Within hours of the military raid that ousted Venezuela's president, Nicolás Maduro, President Trump had his sights set on the country's vast oil resources.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You know, they stole our oil. We built that whole industry there, and they just took it over like we were nothing.
HORSLEY: But U.S. oil companies aren't exactly rushing to accept the president's invitation to set up shop in Venezuela. Over the last two decades, the country's oil output has fallen by more than two-thirds. And while there's plenty of oil in the ground in Venezuela, getting it out of the ground carries a hefty price tag, says Jim Burkhard, global head of crude oil research at S&P Global Energy.
JIM BURKHARD: It would take many, many, many billions of dollars and a number of years. And that's if everything goes right.
HORSLEY: With oil prices down around $60 a barrel, there's no guarantee U.S. oil companies will be willing to take that risk. Twenty years ago, Venezuela was a much bigger oil producer. And the national oil company, PDVSA, was a cash cow, helping to bankroll health clinics, public housing and other social programs led by Maduro's predecessor, Hugo Chavez.
MIGUEL TINKER SALAS: The slogan became PDVSA is now ours.
HORSLEY: But Pomona College historian Miguel Tinker Salas says Chavez favored loyalty over oil-drilling experience. Over time, many of PDVSA's most talented managers left the country.
TINKER SALAS: Every time I took a flight, I would see engineers, oil workers, others flying from Caracas to Mexico. And they became part of the international oil industry, so a lot of them left.
HORSLEY: ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips also left Venezuela around 2007 when the government demanded a majority stake in their operations. The companies say Venezuela still owes them billions of dollars in compensation. And while Chavez's handpicked successor, Maduro, has been forcibly removed from power, Tinker Salas notes the rest of Venezuela's government is still in place.
TINKER SALAS: It's regime change light. It's basically a decapitation.
HORSLEY: Burkhard says lingering uncertainty about who's running Venezuela is likely to make oil companies wary about making big investments there, especially since any payoff might not come until long after President Trump has left the White House.
BURKHARD: You need the confidence that the terms in which you invest are going to last not just for a few years, but probably for decades. Especially when a number of U.S. companies had already been burned in Venezuela not too long ago.
HORSLEY: Chevron has remained in Venezuela throughout the last two decades and may be in the best position to capitalize on new opportunities there. Trump has talked about last weekend's raid in Venezuela as a new twist on the Monroe Doctrine, a 19th-century claim that the United States is justified in exercising dominance over the Western Hemisphere. Emboldened by the success of the military strike, Trump and his allies have hinted that Colombia, Cuba - even Greenland - better watch their backs. Such an unapologetic return to gunboat diplomacy worries Tinker Salas.
TINKER SALAS: We thought we had moved beyond might makes right and empire-building because what are the consequences? The consequences is that cartoon that I saw this morning, where Trump is carving up Latin America, but Putin is carving up Eastern Europe and Jinping is carving up Taiwan.
HORSLEY: Trump has long insisted the U.S. made a mistake in Iraq by not taking that country's oil after the war. By staking a claim to Venezuela's oil, Trump is moving in both a new and very old direction.
Scott Horsley, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF STEVE CRADOCK'S "LAPIS LAZULI") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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