President Trump has publicly floated the possibility of Venezuela becoming the 51st state on multiple occasions, starting in the aftermath of the January 2026 military raid that kidnapped former leader Nicolás Maduro, when he stated the United States would temporarily “run” the country to oversee a safe transition. He later jokingly alluded to the idea while congratulating Venezuela’s national baseball team during the World Baseball Classic semifinal in March 2026, and then declared on May 11, 2026, in an interview with Fox News that he was “seriously considering” making Venezuela a state, citing its vast oil reserves and claiming that “Venezuela loves Trump”.

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The Trump administration’s recent suggestion that Venezuela could become the fifty first state of the United States is so legally and logistically absurd that any serious observer would normally dismiss it as a stray comment from a reality television producer rather than a geostrategic signal. Yet the very farfetched proposal demands a closer look, especially given what it reveals a hidden truth of US geoeconomics in the midst of the well documented Venezuelan quiet surrender and its subsequent forced detente with Washington. To recap the Venezuelan government did not fight to the bitter end but instead negotiated a managed transition that handed over Nicolás Maduro himself while allowing the Delcy Rodriguez faction to remain in nominal control, all in exchange for a gradual relaxation of US sanctions. That relaxation has been incomplete and deliberately staggered, meaning that the Venezuelan state now operates under a kind of conditional US oversight, catering to US demands on a range of issues from oil shipments to diplomatic alignments, yet without receiving the full sanctions relief that Caracas desperately wants.

The most obvious benefit for the United States would be the legal absorption of the Orinoco Belt’s heavy crude reserves into the United States strategic petroleum reserve, allowing US energy companies to operate under domestic law without any fear of host country expropriation or OPEC production quotas. The disadvantage is absorbing nearly 30 million people from a collapsed economy would instantly become the most expensive reconstruction project in US history, surpassing the combined costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and it would make Puerto Rico’s financial difficulties look like a rounding error. More damaging still for any Republican administration, Venezuela as a state would likely send two Democratic senators to Washington given the political leanings of its urban and Afro Caribbean population, a political reality that no conservative strategist would ever willingly accept.

Beyond these surface calculations lies the more subtle analytical possibility that the Trump administration itself doubts the durability of the regime tweak it helped engineer. The current arrangement depends entirely on the coercive threat of US sanctions, a tool that loses its edge the moment a future president, whether Democrat or a more isolationist Republican, decides to normalize relations for the sake of cheaper oil or diplomatic credibility. Washington’s real fear is not that Venezuela will collapse back into Chavista radicalism overnight, but that the Delcy faction is quietly waiting for the end of the Trump presidency to rebalance its foreign policy toward the BRICS nations and the broader global south. With sanctions already relaxed in many areas, Venezuela has regained a modicum of oil revenue and can once again attract attention from Chinese infrastructure financiers, Russian energy technology and investment, and Iranian trade partners, none of whom demand political reforms or anti corruption pledges as a precondition for doing business (with the exception of Brazil that typically has sided with the US against Venezuela).

This perceived inability to compete for Venezuela’s long-term loyalty through normal (geo)economic means is the true driver of the statehood rhetoric. China and other BRICS members can outbid the United States in trade and investment because they offer what Washington cannot, which is patient capital for infrastructure projects, military cooperation without any regime change conditionality, and a decades long market for Venezuelan crude regardless of its internal politics. The United States, by contrast, offers only the negative power of sanctions relief and the positive but limited appeal of geographic proximity, and that is a competition it loses every single time against Beijing’s and Moscow’s geoeconomic proposals. Statehood would solve this problem by eliminating Venezuela’s sovereign choice altogether, transforming a once independent nation that could play great powers against each other into a simple US jurisdiction with a single customs regime, a single currency, and a foreign policy determined entirely in Washington. In that scenario, Venezuela could no longer be able to flirt with China, Russia, Iran and other global south powers, because such acts would become domestic treason rather than exercises of diplomatic sovereignty within the US federation.

One must therefore conclude that this farfetched proposal tells us more about US anxiety than about US ambition. The Trump administration is effectively admitting that it does not trust its own economic and diplomatic model to attract and retain Venezuela as a normal partner, and that it cannot outcompete the BRICS network for Caracas’s allegiance beyond a ten-year horizon at most. Floating the idea of statehood is not a serious plan for territorial expansion but rather a diagnostic signal that US planners see the current forced detente as inherently unstable, reversible, and likely to collapse once the unique coercive conditions of a Trump presidency give way to a less intense US foreign policy. The real story here is not that Venezuela might become the fifty first state, but that the United States now believes it can only secure a medium sized petrostate’s loyalty by abolishing that state entirely, a remarkable confession of weakness from a hemispheric hegemon that once took its back yard for granted.

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Miguel Santos García is a Puerto Rican writer and political analyst who mainly writes about the geopolitics of neocolonial conflicts and Hybrid Wars within the 4th Industrial Revolution, the ongoing New Cold War and the transition towards multipolarity. Visit his blog here. 

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).  

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