Wright: US has 'a lot of leverage' in Venezuela after oil deal reached

Sixty-five billion barrels is not a rounding error. That's the number worth sitting with before anyone gets distracted by the diplomatic theater around this deal. Chris Wright saying we have "a lot of leverage" over Venezuela isn't spin, it's arithmetic. When you control access to the outside market for a country's chief export, you're not asking nicely anymore. You're setting terms.

For years the conversation about Venezuela was all sanctions and statements, gestures that let politicians feel tough while Maduro kept running the country into the ground and shipping his oil out through Chinese and Russian middlemen anyway. This is a different animal. If the U.S. genuinely controls the sale pathway, that's actual pressure, the kind that shows up in Caracas's bank accounts, not just in a press release. Whether the Trump administration uses that leverage to squeeze concessions on migration, on Chinese influence in the hemisphere, or on Maduro's own grip on power, remains to be seen. But having the leverage in hand beats not having it.

The skepticism should be pointed at execution, not the premise. Deals like this have a way of getting messy fast: who exactly profits, which American companies get first crack at the barrels, and what Maduro extracts in return for playing along. Those details matter more than the headline. A government that has spent years cozying up to Havana and Beijing doesn't hand over control of its most valuable resource for nothing.

Still, there's something refreshing about an administration that treats energy as the actual lever it is instead of a talking point. Oil is leverage. Pretending otherwise, as Washington has for a decade, only helped our adversaries fill the vacuum.