How Donald Trump sees the world as a giant game of Risk

Whenever Donald Trump does something outlandish—whether it’s musing about folding Canada in as a 51st state or, more recently, meddling in Venezuela—there is never a shortage of people ready to insist the U.S. president is playing four-dimensional chess. He’s always several moves ahead of his opponents, they argue. He’s baiting his enemies. It’s all part of a master plan that somehow only reveals itself in hindsight. Every sudden pivot is retroactively reinterpreted as strategy. Every contradiction becomes proof of MAGA cunning. Clearly, there’s a game going on here. It just may not be chess. If anything, Trump’s so-called “Donroe Doctrine”  to assert global energy dominance is looking a lot more like Risk—the classic board game where success is measured by territory held and rivals boxed in. Big maps! Bright colours! Entirely on brand. “If you look at a Risk board, two of the most important countries on the map are Venezuela and Greenland,” said Rory Johnston, the oil markets analyst behind Commodity Context. “They’re the two elements that basically [provide] access [to] North America. So it literally is a Risk board.” During Friday’s press briefing on his meeting with oil and gas executives, Trump confirmed securing Venezuela and Greenland would, in his mind, fortify the continent from China and Russia. Seen through that lens, Trump’s declaration of a “national energy emergency” from a year ago starts to look less erratic, even if it remains fundamentally at odds with how energy markets actually work. 2025 executive order It’s hard to remember now, given that January 2025 already feels like ancient history in Trump years. But on his first day back in the White House, the president signed more than two dozen executive orders, outlining his administration’s priorities on everything from immigration to energy. The documents on “unleashing” American energy, declaring a related emergency, and exploiting Alaska’s “extraordinary resource potential” are worth a second read today, if only for how clearly they reveal what Trump thought the real problem was. “Our nation’s current inadequate development of domestic energy resources leaves us vulnerable to hostile foreign actors and poses an imminent and growing threat to the United States’ prosperity and national security,” a proclamation reads. It goes on to describe how America’s energy infrastructure—from drilling and pipelines to refineries and the electrical grid—are dangerously insufficient and increasingly exposed to geopolitical manipulation. Energy, in this telling, is a strategic asset that’s under siege. The country must—under an “imperative”—move quickly to expand and harden its energy ecosystem from coast to coast, using emergency powers if needed. Imperial vision meets market reality At the time, the executive orders were widely interpreted as Trump sketching an imperial vision of  “drill, baby, drill” that in part recasts Canada as a resource hinterland waiting to be absorbed. The president said as much himself, repeatedly floating the idea of America’s northern neighbour as a 51st state, only to contradict it moments later by insisting why his country—already the world’s largest oil producer—didn’t need Canadian oil at all. The latest military shenanigans in Venezuela feel like a leap in the opposite direction, at least geographically. But by the rules of Risk, the move tracks. If Canada and Greenland represent the northern flank to be covered by assimilation and the “Golden Dome” continental defence concept, Venezuela is the southern anchor that needs to be conquered. In that sense, Caracas looks like a tidy setup. It sits at the edge of North America’s energy sphere and its oil reserves are the largest in the world. The heavy crude it produces appears, on paper, to slot neatly into refineries along the U.S. Gulf Coast. In market terms, though, the logic is far shakier. Venezuelan oil is difficult and capital-intensive to produce. Years of underinvestment and corruption have hollowed out the country’s infrastructure—not just in the energy supply chain, but across the economy. Forget new pipelines to move oil, there aren’t even enough reliable roadways to move humans. Estimates of what it would take to rehabilitate Venezuela’s export capacity seem to balloon by the hour, rising from tens of billions of dollars right after Nicolás Maduro was captured to figures approaching $200 billion by mid-week. And despite a persistent myth to the contrary, U.S. refineries are not sitting around desperate for more heavy barrels. “The U.S. market’s already oversaturated with heavy sour crude,” Johnston said. “They actually don’t need any more. They actually can’t take any more than what they are currently getting from Canada and others.” Flooding the market…at the margins Unlike plastic armies, oil barrels can’t simply be stacked wherever a player chooses. Most experts agree that Venezuelan oil is unlikely to displace Alberta crude anytime soon. To even attempt it, Johnston argues, “you would need to basically force those barrels into the market.” Trump appears hell-bent on doing just that. His rhetoric has consistently framed Venezuela as a prize to be reclaimed, backed by moves to seize tankers bound for anywhere but the Gulf Coast. Yet even before sanctions collapsed Venezuela’s production, only about a third of its exports were headed to the U.S. The rest went elsewhere—not because American refiners rejected socialist oil, but because the market said no. “Trump is making this into the most bravado-esque way of doing it,” Johnston said. “He’s like, ‘Oh yeah, the U.S. is going to market all of Venezuela’s oil for it.’ “But all he needed to do was lift the sanctions. He literally reimposed them this year. If he just lifted the sanctions, Venezuelan oil would go back to the United States, back to U.S. allies, and back to all the places it was going before.” For Venezuelan oil to actually make a meaningful dent, Johnston argues it would require more than military force and an industrial miracle. Even then, the likely result for Canada would be wider price differentials, heavier discounting, and more Alberta crude quietly re-exported once it reaches U.S. ports. This would hurt Canada’s bottom line and erode some trade leverage, but it wouldn’t gut the resource sector. It might benefit a handful of U.S. refiners, but it wouldn’t strengthen American shale, and it’s unclear how much money would be left to benefit Venezuela over the long run. Lower prices mean less revenue, and less revenue means even less money to reinvest in production. And if this is Trump’s strategy for out-flooding OPEC+, Johnston struggles to see how it works. “When you look at Venezuela’s realistic production growth capacity, it’s not that much,” he said. “OPEC+ added twice that volume back into the market in the second half of last year alone. This Venezuela stuff is, at least at this stage, a sideshow.” It means Canada still has time to get its house in order. If Ottawa and the provinces choose to use it, that window could be spent resolving the infrastructure bottlenecks that will meaningfully reinforce our most powerful leverage in energy exports. The catch is that the most obvious export opportunity sits with the same country Trump is working to shut out—China. What’s the end game here? Which brings us back to the board game. As with many of the president’s maximalist moves, there are flashes of immediate advantage amid a great deal of chaos. This episode in Venezuela has already benefited ExxonMobil, which operates next door in Guyana. For years, the two countries have been locked in a territorial dispute that also involves offshore resource rights. Interpreted narrowly, the U.S. incursion could be seen as multifaceted. It deters Venezuelan aggression while shoring up confidence in Guyana’s oil boom. Except Trump doesn’t seem satisfied. He now wants ExxonMobil to invest in Venezuela. It’s true that foreign oil companies are still owed billions from assets expropriated under Hugo Chávez, so the intervention could be framed as a recovery mission of sorts. But Exxon’s claims in Venezuela are marginal relative to its balance sheet, and nowhere near large enough to justify sinking billions into what Johnston calls a “dilapidated, insecure, kind of insane political risk” compared with its crown jewel operation in Guyana. Nevertheless, despite calling Venezuela “uninvestable” today, the company’s executive, alongside leaders from some of the world’s largest oil and gas producers, offered effusive praise to Trump on Friday. None of it makes total sense as energy policy, market strategy, or even corporate leverage—unless the objective isn’t efficiency or returns at all. “We always come back to Occam’s Razor…Trump’s basically looking at a map and saying, ‘My Arrakis! My Dune!’ He’s just the emperor,” Johnston said in reference to the sci-fi epic Dune, where imperial dominance hinges on controlling a single resource-rich planet. In the meantime, allies are once again left riding the volatility. No one is quite sure whether the next move is strategic, hostile, friendly, or just another roll of the dice.   Editor’s note: President Trump threatened to block ExxonMobil from Venezuela about 12 hours after this article published.