Rubio defends Venezuela oil deal by invoking the Chinese and Russian firms it replaced

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended a contested oil agreement in Venezuela this week by framing it as a strategic trade-off rather than a reward for an unpopular government, telling reporters that the alternative to American involvement was Chinese or Russian control of the same fields.

The deal grants North American Blue Energy Partners, a US-backed company, 100-year concessions over 17 Venezuelan oilfields holding an estimated 65 billion barrels of proven reserves. Rubio said most of those fields had previously been operated or controlled by Chinese or Russian firms. "Whether it was us or the Chinese or the Russians, someone was going to be in business with these people because these are productive fields," he said. "So, we think they're better off being in business with us than somebody else." He separately called the arrangement a strategic advantage, giving the United States guaranteed access to reserves in a future crisis.

The agreement was struck with Venezuela's interim government, led by Delcy Rodriguez, who served as Nicolas Maduro's vice president before his departure from power. Its corporate parent has also given a 35 percent equity stake to the US Department of War's Office of Strategic Capital, which the White House has said could be worth hundreds of billions of dollars in value and dividends over the life of the concessions.

Much of the controversy centers on who controls the American side of the arrangement. North American Blue Energy Partners is led by Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt, who has previously been investigated by US and European authorities over his dealings with past Venezuelan governments, though he was never charged. Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who returned to Venezuela from exile last week to cheering crowds, has accused Betancourt of "obscene corruption" and said he profited from the country's electricity crisis through government contracts that never fixed the chronic power shortages. She has largely directed that criticism at Caracas and at Betancourt rather than at President Donald Trump, questioning why what she calls an "illegitimate regime" was the one authorized to sign away the fields in the first place.

The arrangement has also run into resistance in Washington. Senate Democrats wrote to Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in September objecting to doing business with an oligarch under investigation for money laundering and tax evasion, arguing the deal is unlikely to lower energy costs for Americans and risks complicating, rather than aiding, Venezuela's path toward a democratic transition.