The Defense Department’s Office of Strategic Capital, founded by the Biden administration to give loans to bolster the U.S. defense industry, is helping lead President Trump’s oil deal.
Page F4From§Eachthe midnight edition — 1 September 2026
Pentagon diversifies into Venezuelan oil business, naming corporate partner North American Blue Energy Partners.
As it ran on the front
The filing under review names the Department of Defense as a party to a Venezuelan oil arrangement. The counterparty is a company called North American Blue Energy Partners. Line one of the mandate reads: national security. Line one of the ledger reads: oil. These two lines are being run through the same department, which means, for accounting purposes, the mandate and the ledger now share a filing cabinet.
A defense department's stated purpose is to defend. An oil deal's stated purpose is to produce and move crude. The gap between the two is not large — one document, one deal, one named partner — but the gap is precisely the size of a company most readers had never heard of before this week. North American Blue Energy Partners does not appear in prior defense appropriations. It appears now, attached to a foreign oil arrangement, run through a military department, at a moment when that department's public rationale is Venezuelan instability.…
…(cont) Reconciling the two documents produces an observation: the agency tasked with security is now also the agency structuring the oil deal. That is not a contradiction the filings explain; it's a fact the filings contain. Whether the department is providing security for an oil deal or the oil deal is providing cover for a security posture is a distinction the paperwork does not make, because the paperwork does not have to.
What the paperwork does make clear is where the money runs. It runs from Venezuelan crude, through a named corporate partner, into a ledger kept by the United States military. Every gallon that travels that route eventually reaches a retail pump, priced the way retail pumps price things, with the corporate partner's margin built in before the driver ever sees the number on the sign.
The mandate says defense. The ledger says oil. Reconciled together, hon, they say the same department is now running both columns, and only one of those columns was ever supposed to answer to a budget hearing.
“They send the military in for 'security' and walk out with an oil contract — that's not foreign policy, that's a stickup with better lighting, and you're the one paying at the pump either way.”
“This is energy diplomacy, plain and simple, the Pentagon isn't running an oil company — it's just, structurally, part of the deal, which I guess means it kind of is.”
The receipts
The Trump administration's plan to take a stake in tens of billions of barrels of Venezuelan oil reserves will hinge on a private company called North American Blue Energy Partners, the White House announced Monday.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.