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 F5From§Eachthe milkman edition — 1 September 2026
Pentagon enters Venezuela's oil business through deal with North American Blue Energy Partners.
As it ran on the front
Let's run the numbers as filed. The Pentagon, per reporting, is now involved in structuring Venezuela's oil trade. The commercial vehicle named in the deal is North American Blue Energy Partners. That's the entity of record. That's what's on the page.
Now, the Department of Defense's stated mission, per its own charter, is national defense — readiness, deterrence, the posture of forces. Nowhere in that charter is there a line item for oil brokerage. So we have a gap: an agency whose authorizing document says defense doing work that, on paper, looks like energy trading. The gap is the whole deal.…
…(cont) When a filing doesn't match the authorizing document, you don't call it diversification. You call it a gap, and you note where the gap sits. This one sits between the Pentagon's budget line and a private partnership's name in an oil arrangement. That's not a metaphor. That's the actual structure being reported.
Ask who benefits from routing Venezuelan crude through a defense-adjacent apparatus instead of an ordinary commercial channel. The ordinary answer is: whoever controls the apparatus controls the leverage, and whoever controls the leverage controls the price, and whoever controls the price is not, historically, the country selling the oil. The other ordinary answer, hon, is the taxpayers who fund the apparatus rarely see the ledger.
We can also note, for the record, that getting into the oil business is not a phrase found in the Department of Defense budget request. It is, however, precisely the phrase used to describe what's happening. When the description and the authorization diverge this cleanly, the honest move is to say so and let the reader draw the line themselves — which, filed plainly: the military is now a counterparty in an oil deal, and the taxpayer is underwriting the counterparty.
The reconciliation, in full: mission says defense, deal says oil, gap says leverage. Whoever wrote this arrangement did not write it for the price at the register to come down — that's not what the structure is built to do, and the filing doesn't say otherwise. The filing never does.
“The Pentagon's in the oil business now — that's not a metaphor, that's the actual reporting, and when the guys with the aircraft carriers start brokering crude, the price at the pump isn't the point, the leverage is. Follow who's named on that deal and you'll find out who the arrangement was actually built for.”
“This is energy security, plain and simple — diversifying supply chains through a trusted partner is standard practice, and the Defense Department has legitimate equities in energy infrastructure that keeps fuel flowing overseas. Is it unusual for the Pentagon to be this involved in a commercial oil deal? Sure, a little, but no, it's fine, it's within their lane.”
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.