Trump Wants Venezuela's Oil. Getting It Might Not Be So Simple

The administration has made it clear that Nicolás Maduro's capture was tied to Venezuela's vast oil reserves. Much less certain is how US companies will actually access them—or if they even want to.

President Donald Trump has made it clear: His vision for Venezuela’s future involves the US profiting from its oil.

“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies—the biggest anywhere in the world—go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure,” the president told reporters at a news conference Saturday, following the shocking capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife.

But experts caution that a number of realities—including international oil prices and longer-term questions of stability in the country—are likely to make this oil revolution much harder to execute than Trump seems to think.

"The disconnect between the Trump ...