President George W. Bush said he was invading Iraq to keep America safe. But critics saw a hidden motive: oil.
“No blood for oil!” became a global rallying cry, and Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, accused Mr. Bush of seeking “to control the Middle East oil.”
The Bush administration rejected the charge and was determined to refute it. After invading and occupying Iraq in March 2003, Bush officials were careful to leave Iraqis in control of their oil industry, and they never sought special treatment for American firms.
As foreign investors moved in, the biggest winners by far were not U.S. companies but Chinese ones.
American presidents have long been accused of plotting to control foreign oil. But while the United States has built relationships and even intervened abroad for oil, it has never simply seized control of another country’s oil reserves.
“I can’t think of a military operation that the U.S. engaged in to actually take oil from anybody,” said Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security.
Until now.
Immediately after U.S. forces captured Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, in January, President Trump announced plans to take control of the country’s oil industry.
Since then, Mr. Trump has forced Venezuela’s government to begin “turning over” as many as 50 million barrels for sale by the United States and is pressuring American firms to start drilling in the country, which sits on the world’s largest proven oil reserves.
“The people of the United States are going to be big beneficiaries,” Mr. Trump said at the White House last month. (Mr. Trump says that some oil revenue will be returned to Venezuela, but not how much.)
Venezuela’s parliament passed legislation in late January opening the country’s mostly state-run oil sector to more foreign investment, a decision critics note was made as U.S. warships floated near Venezuela’s coast.
“You are taking their oil at gunpoint,” Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, told Secretary of State Marco Rubio at a hearing in late January. Mr. Trump is selling “stolen oil,” Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, has charged.
Mr. Trump’s fixation with Venezuelan crude is somewhat puzzling, given that global oil prices are relatively low, and that the United States is now a net energy exporter no longer dependent on foreign oil supplies.
Despite that, analysts say that Mr. Trump is confirming some of the worst suspicions about U.S. motives worldwide. He also risks infuriating ordinary Venezuelans, who could oppose American efforts to drill their oil — possibly with violence — and resist a political alignment with Washington.
“One lesson that emerged from Iraq,” said Meghan O’Sullivan, a former Bush administration official who worked closely on Iraq policy, “was how toxic the oil narrative can be — and how potent it can be in fomenting anti-Americanism.”
Critics say Mr. Trump’s plan revives bitter memories of colonial exploitation and flagrantly violates international law, including a 1974 United Nations resolution that asserts that every country has full rights to “all its wealth, natural resources and economic activities.”
In China, a foreign ministry spokeswoman said last month that Mr. Trump was “bullying” Venezuela to give up its oil. Spain joined with five Latin American countries, including Mexico and Brazil, in denouncing “the external appropriation” of Venezuela’s natural resources as illegal.
Mr. Trump has sought to turn the tables, charging that Venezuela “took our oil away from us” and “stole our assets” in 2007 when it increased state control over its oil industry and forced two of the three U.S. companies operating in the country to abandon their projects at considerable expense.
Whether that is Mr. Trump’s true motivation is unclear. He has asserted a U.S. right to “take the oil” from other countries, from Iraq to Syria to Libya, although he has not previously done so.
That is a sharp break from decades of precedent, Ms. O’Sullivan said.
“America has, by and large, focused on ensuring access to oil and the smooth functioning of global oil markets — which is different from physical control of oil,” she said.
A C.I.A. Coup for Oil
Oil has shaped U.S. foreign policy at least since 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt imposed an oil embargo on imperial Japan to check its aggression in Asia. Japan responded by attacking Pearl Harbor, which dragged the United States into World War II.
The war’s industrial nature showed that national security depended on access to oil. By 1946, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff were warning about the risk of “an oil-starved war” should the United States lose access to Middle East supplies. That mind-set gave birth to America’s courtship of Saudi Arabia, where huge oil reserves were discovered in 1938.
Iran also emerged at the time as a major Western oil supplier. But a crisis erupted in 1951 when Iran’s new prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, nationalized his country’s oil industry. Worried that Mr. Mossadegh could cut off the West and “deny Iranian oil to the free world,” as a National Security Council policy memo later put it, the Eisenhower administration joined with Britain, which had lost a major oil stake in Iran, in fomenting a 1953 coup that overthrew the Iranian leader.
The United States did not try to seize control of Iranian oil, however. The N.S.C. memo, written a few months after the coup, said the U.S. government should help Iran remain an “independent” nation, in part by supporting the development of its oil industry.
It was a case where national interest and profit motive overlapped. American and British oil companies would profit handsomely after the coup from doing business with Iran’s pro-Western shah, as noted by critics who cite the episode as proof of American greed and treachery.
After decades of official U.S. denials, the C.I.A. in 2013 finally admitted its role in toppling Mr. Mossadegh.
Blood for Oil
In his 1980 State of the Union address, President Jimmy Carter made a dramatic declaration: America would fight a war for oil.
“Our excessive dependence on foreign oil is a clear and present danger to our nation’s security,” Mr. Carter explained. Thus, any attempt by an outside power to control the Persian Gulf and its oil “will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America,” and would “be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
The Carter Doctrine, as that position came to be known, was prompted by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan months earlier. U.S. officials worried that Soviet troops might continue west, into the oil fields of neighboring Iran.
That did not happen. But a decade later, the United States would launch its first oil war.
In August 1990, Iraq invaded its oil-rich neighbor Kuwait. President George H.W. Bush quickly decided to respond with force. He argued that it was vital to defend global order. But he did not hide his economic motive to free Kuwait’s oil fields from Mr. Hussein’s control. “We cannot permit a resource so vital to be dominated by one so ruthless,” Mr. Bush said.
His secretary of state, James A. Baker, explained why: “If you want to sum it up in one word, it’s ‘jobs.’”
After U.S. forces liberated Kuwait, Mr. Bush made no effort to take control of any oil. He even declined grateful Kuwaiti offers of preferential treatment for American oil companies.
“The U.S. could have commandeered Iraqi or Kuwaiti oil and didn’t,” Mr. Fontaine said.
Iraq: W.M.D. or Oil?
Even so, when Mr. Bush’s son George W. invaded Iraq in 2003, many skeptics dismissed his main rationale — a false claim that Mr. Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction — as a cover story for the secret goal of controlling Iraq’s oil.
Fueling the suspicion was Mr. Bush’s past as a former Texas oil man; his vice president, Dick Cheney, had run the energy giant Halliburton.
Bush officials disputed the charge. “That’s just not what the United States does,” Mr. Bush’s defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, told an interviewer shortly before the invasion. “We never have, and we never will.”
A litany of shifting explanations and misstatements from Bush administration officials invited doubts about their motives. But experts say there is extensive evidence showing that U.S. officials never tried to commandeer Iraq’s oil or win special treatment for American firms, and actually took steps to limit their own role in the country’s postwar oil industry.
“This idea that the war was meant to be a permanent oil grab is false,” said Emily Meierding, an assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and the author of “The Oil Wars Myth: Petroleum and the Causes of International Conflict.”
Before the invasion, she said, a team of White House officials drew up plans for Iraq’s oil industry. “They were very clear that Iraq’s resources belonged to the people of Iraq, that oil production should belong to the Iraqis and that the U.S. should transfer control to the Iraqi people as soon as possible,” Ms. Meierding said, noting that she was speaking only for herself and not her institution.
American companies including Exxon Mobil did sign early contracts with the country’s new government. But high risks and disappointing results caused them to retreat. (Exxon Mobil recently signed a deal to return to Iraq.)
But their Chinese rivals moved aggressively, and the dominant player in Iraq’s oil sector today is the China National Petroleum Corporation.
A Lesson for Venezuela
The mere perception that America was stealing Iraq’s oil inflicted severe damage there, Ms. O’Sullivan said, helping to fuel a bloody insurgency against American forces and undermining public trust in Iraq’s U.S.-backed government.
That might be a cautionary lesson for Mr. Trump. U.S. oil executives already say the risks and costs of doing business in Venezuela are daunting. Those obstacles could grow if Mr. Trump’s approach angers Venezuelans who might otherwise be sympathetic to the United States.
The Venezuelan people “are extremely sensitive to any perception of foreign exploitation,” Ms. Meierding said. “So they’re going to want their industry to revive, and they know they’ll need foreign investment. But they are not going to accept direct U.S. control, at least for the long term.”
Ms. Meierding suggested what may be the main reason countries do not wage wars for oil more often.
“People will resist an occupation for their resources, and resist forcefully,” she said.
Michael Crowley covers the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The Times. He has reported from nearly three dozen countries and often travels with the secretary of state.
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