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.
Page F4From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 1 September 2026
Pentagon expands into Venezuelan oil business as U.S. finalizes oil deal with same country.
As it ran on the front
Let's run the org chart against the deal memo, because they don't match. The State Department handles foreign relations. The Commerce Department handles trade. The Pentagon builds and maintains the military. That's the filing. The table says the U.S.-Venezuela oil deal runs through North American Blue Energy Partners, and the outlet covering how it got structured isn't the trade desk, it's the one asking how the Pentagon got into the oil business.
I don't have a line item for 'Department of Defense, barrel of crude, quantity: unspecified.' I checked. It isn't in the appropriations language anybody's shown me. What I have is two headlines, filed the same week, about the same country, from two different desks — one calling it an oil deal, one calling it a Pentagon operation. When two desks file on the same transaction and use two different verbs, hon, that's not redundancy. That's two people describing the same envelope from opposite ends of the table.…
…(cont) Here is what reconciles cleanly: a defense apparatus, sized and funded to defend, is now a counterparty in an energy transaction with a country the United States does not have normal diplomatic relations with. That's not a subsidiary function. That's the primary business of an agency whose primary business used to be something else entirely. I'm not going to speculate about why the oil business needed a military escort instead of a trade attaché. I'm just going to note that it did, and that the paperwork for one now runs through the other.
The gap, if you want to call it that, isn't a rounding error. It's an entire department's stated mission sitting next to its actual, current activity, and the two not lining up. I've seen smaller gaps than this get flagged in a school-district audit. This one has its own beat reporter, and its own subcontractor, and its own name on the paperwork, and none of that changes what department the letterhead still says at the top of the page.
“The Pentagon's in the oil business now, running paper through a company called North American Blue Energy Partners, in a country we don't have normal relations with. When the military starts doing the trade desk's job, that's not diplomacy, that's an occupation with an invoice.”
“This is just smart energy security policy, the Department of Defense has logistics capabilities the State Department doesn't, and if that overlaps with a foreign oil transaction that's called efficiency. Is it unusual for the Pentagon to structure an oil deal? I mean, when you put it that way — yeah, actually, it kind of is.”
The receipts
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.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.