Why Hasn’t Trump Mentioned Iran’s Oil?
In 1953, when President Dwight Eisenhower authorized the CIA to topple Iran’s elected prime minister, the American public was told a familiar story: Communism was creeping in, the Cold War demanded vigilance, and the United States could not afford another Moscow ally. But beneath the neat narrative of containment was a more tangible obsession—oil. Iran’s enormous reserves were not merely a strategic asset; they were a prize.
Seven decades later, as military action once again engulfs Iran, a different president occupies the Oval Office—but the same obsession hangs in the air. President Trump has rarely considered a foreign conflict without musing, sometimes bluntly, about what the United States might take in return for intervening: Iraqi oil. Syrian oil. Venezuelan oil. Seizing valuable petroleum or other natural resources as repayment for American blood was a central tenet of Trump’s worldview long before he took office. Yet as bombs fall on Tehran and tensions grip both Washington and the Middle East, Trump has not uttered the line that once seemed to come so easily: We should take the oil.
The omission is striking. For a president who has treated natural resources as both leverage and loot, Iran’s oil fields would appear to be the ultimate temptation. Iran has nearly 209 billion barrels of proven crude-oil reserves, making up about 12 percent of the world’s total. Seizing Iranian oil, and combining it with what could come from Venezuela, would add to U.S. energy dominance and deprive China of a vital supply of fuel. But the president has resisted discussing it, at least publicly. Even if Trump is no student of history, is it possible that, in the long American romance with other nations’ petroleum, some lessons of 1953 flicker uneasily in the background?
The question of Iran’s oil hovered over the early days of the current conflict, with Trump-administration officials anxiously watching gas prices rise. U.S. and Arab officials told us that the president has been advised to focus his public comments on the military mission—particularly given the gravity of a conflict that has already resulted in U.S. casualties. “He knows it’s all very sobering,” one senior Arab official said. “It’s bigger than Venezuela.” (Like others we spoke with, the official requested anonymity to candidly discuss policy deliberations.)
Trump and his top advisers have hardly been consistent in their messaging. The administration has offered shifting explanations for why it teamed up with Israel to target Tehran (Iran was on the verge of attacking U.S. assets! Trump was pulled along by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu!) and has been just as muddled in articulating its goals for the conflict (on one day, top officials said the U.S. was not looking for regime change; on the next, Trump said he wanted a role in determining Iran’s next leader). Yet a president known for going off script has remained remarkably disciplined in avoiding any mention of oil.
The military operation in Venezuela was over in hours, whereas the conflict in Iran threatens to stretch to weeks or months. In Caracas, the White House found a willing partner in Nicolás Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who cooperated and gave the U.S. access to that nation’s oil. In Iran, the regime continues to fight even after losing its supreme leader. There’s no sense who his successor will be, much less whether he would be amenable to the U.S. plundering Iran’s resources.
[Read: America can have the oil]
Although Trump has stayed quiet (for now) on trying to gain control of Iran’s oil, his White House is struggling with the economic fallout from the war. For months, the West Wing has had difficulty explaining away stubbornly high prices but has been able to celebrate the low cost of gas. (Trump does so frequently, including in his State of the Union address.) But the attack on Iran—and Iran’s subsequent targeting of the Persian Gulf’s energy sector, including the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s oil passes—has sent crude costs up by nearly $10 a barrel, lifting gasoline prices higher than when Trump took office. The president has been publicly blasé about price spikes, telling Reuters yesterday that “if they rise, they rise.” But White House officials, already daunted by bad polls ahead of the midterms, have considered a number of ideas to counteract the increase, they told us, including a temporary holiday on the gas tax and deploying the military to defend energy infrastructure in the Middle East.
Despite economic worries—which were exacerbated by today’s bad jobs report—White House officials have publicly stuck to their non-oil-related goals for the conflict. Those include preventing Iran from ever having a nuclear weapon, wiping out its navy, and eliminating its ability to be a staging ground for terrorists.
“The Administration’s focus is on achieving the clearly defined objectives outlined by President Trump for Operation Epic Fury,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, told us in a statement.
When U.S. forces seized Maduro from Caracas in a dramatic raid back in January, Trump held a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, his private Florida club, and detailed his intention to send American oil companies back to Venezuela. He wanted to reclaim the riches of projects past—and make a lot of money for both the U.S. and a newer, friendlier Venezuela. Trump promised that doing so would drive down the price of gas, and in the days that followed, he had harsh words for oil companies that objected to new supply potentially flooding the market. The president also warned that if the head of Venezuela’s interim government objected to his plan, that person would face a similar fate as their imprisoned leader. The U.S. showed no deep interest in exploring Caracas’s democratic potential or calling for fair elections. Trump seemed solely fixated on Venezuela’s oil and minerals.
[Read: Trump threatens Venezuela’s new leader with a fate worse than Maduro’s]
Trump’s approach to Venezuela echoed his stance on the 2003 Iraq War. Although he is now loath to acknowledge it, Trump supported the invasion in its first months, before it turned into a quagmire. During his 2016 campaign, Trump promised to end the so-called endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and pledged to avoid any new Middle East entanglements. But even as he denounced George W. Bush for starting the Iraq War, Trump criticized him for not seizing Baghdad’s oil—which, he said, would have been fair repayment for the U.S. occupation of the country.
Trump has long mocked Bush for ruining his presidency by invading Iraq, and his administration over the past week has sought to downplay any parallels between Bush’s misadventures and its own attack on Iran. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told reporters that the U.S. was not looking to pursue the nation-building exercises of the past, emphasizing that the Trump administration intends for this operation to be quick and efficient. But wars do not follow scripts, and there are already signs of a prolonged struggle. The current regime is still in power, although it’s unclear who is in charge, and Tehran has pummeled its neighbors with rockets and drones, straining America’s ability to defend its allies. U.S. Central Command is asking the Pentagon to send more military-intelligence officers to its headquarters to support operations against Iran for at least 100 days—and likely through September.
Two years before the Eisenhower-ordered coup, Iran’s nationalist prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, moved to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, taking control of British-run oil resources. That incensed Britain and threatened Western economic interests. Britain and the U.S. together framed Mosaddegh—who opposed communism—as a potential Soviet ally in the Cold War to justify intervention. Key Iranian military officers, bribed and instigated by the CIA, stepped in to arrest Mosaddegh and suppress his supporters, and the pro-U.S. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was restored to full power. Virtually overnight, the abrupt change in leadership gave the U.S. and its oil companies significant access to Iran’s oil wealth.
U.S. influence helped shape Iran’s oil arrangements for much of the shah’s reign, though the nature of that relationship morphed over time and was often intertwined with broader Cold War geopolitics, but it had unintended consequences. Iran leveraged its oil wealth to pursue its own economic goals, particularly in the 1970s, and the relationships with foreign companies shifted. This would fuel much of the anger against the U.S. when Iranians protested in the streets to overthrow the shah during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The U.S. role in Iran’s coup—code name Operation Ajax—wasn’t confirmed until decades later, by Madeline Albright in 2000. But in a private diary entry dated October 8, 1953, Eisenhower explicitly wrote that the restoration of the shah was a development “that we helped bring about.” He noted that the actions were “covert” and that the U.S. would be “embarrassed” if the plot ever became public.
There is little subtlety about Operation Epic Fury, right down to its name. Trump, bolstered by his success in Venezuela, has reveled in killing Iran’s supreme leader and is drawn to accomplishing things that his predecessors could not. The oil is tempting. But American intervention in the Middle East can yield unintended consequences for presidents. Bush is a cautionary tale, one that Trump knows. But so is Eisenhower.