One of the recurring themes of Donald Trump’s national security strategy is his plan to “take the oil” in Iraq and from areas controlled by Islamic State (Isis) extremists. It would drain Isis’s coffers and reimburse the US for the costs of its military commitments in the Middle East, the candidate insists.

At a forum hosted by NBC on 7 September, Trump suggested oil seizure would have been a way to pay for the Iraq war, saying: “We go in, we spend $3tn, we lose thousands and thousands of lives, and then … what happens is we get nothing. You know, it used to be to the victor belong the spoils.”

He added: “One of the benefits we would have had if we took the oil is Isis would not have been able to take oil and use that oil to fuel themselves.”

The idea predates Trump’s presidential campaign. As far back as 2011, he was telling the Wall Street Journal that this was his policy for Iraq. “You heard me, I would take the oil,” he said. “I would not leave Iraq and let Iran take the oil.” And he insisted to ABC News that this did not amount to national theft.

“You’re not stealing anything,” Trump said. “We’re reimbursing ourselves … at a minimum, and I say more. We’re taking back $1.5tn to reimburse ourselves.”

As a security strategy, this presents huge problems from almost every angle, according to military, strategic, legal and oil experts. First of all, there are issues of principle and legality. Trump’s frequent invocation of the “spoils of war” seems to hark back to a bygone age of conquistadors and plunder-based imperialism, illegal now under the laws of war.

“In international law, you can’t take civilian goods or seize them. That would amount to a war crime,” Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh Burke chair in strategy at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. “Oil exports were almost the only Iraqi source of money. So you would have to pay for government salaries, maintain the army, and you have triggered a level of national animosity far worse than we did. It would be the worst kind of neo-colonialism. Not even Britain did that.”

In international law, you can’t take civilian goods or seize them. That would amount to a war crime Anthony Cordesman

Jay Hakes, the author of A Declaration of Energy Independence, about the relationship between US national security and Middle Eastern oil, was similarly unsparing.

“It is hard to overstate the stupidity of this idea,” he wrote on Real Clear Energy. “Even our allies in the Middle East regard oil in their lands as a gift from God and the only major source of income to develop their countries. Seizing Iraq’s oil would make our current allies against Isis our new enemies. We would likely, at the least, have to return to the massive military expenditures and deployment of American troops at the war’s peak.”

Hakes pointed out that Gen Douglas MacArthur, who Trump professes to admire, did the opposite when he oversaw the occupation of Japan: MacArthur brought resources in to help fend off starvation of the population.



“By giving up the spoils of war, MacArthur and the United States earned the respect of the Japanese and the world, helping legitimise America’s status as leader of the free world,” he argued.

Trump may also have an exaggerated notion of how much oil is at stake when he suggests it might have helped pay for the Iraq occupation. The Iraqis he said “have among the largest oil reserves in the world, in the entire world”. Iraq is estimated to have the fifth biggest reserves, but the bulk of that oil is not under Isis’s control.



“The territory that [Isis] holds just does not have much oil under it,” said Jim Krane, an energy studies fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston. “In Iraq, most of the Iraq oil reserves are in the far south, around the Persian Gulf. There is some in the Kurdish north, but the Kurds swept in and took that area near Kirkuk.



“Syria is not a big oil producer,” Krane added. “It produced 400,000 barrels a day before the war. And 27,000 barrels in 2015. That is minuscule. There is not a lot of oil production that [Isis] controls. When oil was $100 a barrel, that was one thing, but nowadays it’s not a lucrative business.”

The US military has already targeted Isis’s small-scale oil refineries and oil convoys as a way of cutting off that income, but Trump clearly has something else in mind – actually seizing the oil fields with troops.

“We would leave a certain group behind and you would take various sections where they have the oil,” he said at the forum.

That “certain group” would have to be pretty big to hold and protect the oil fields, according to Chris Harmer, a former navy officer and naval aviator, and now a military analyst.

“It would take close to 100,000 troops plus the equipment, the airborne patrols, to secure the oilfields and extract the oil,” Harmer said. “Theoretically it would suck up all the deployable assets we have. Forget about the Pacific, forget about Africa. They would just have one purpose – sucking up oil assets in the Middle East.”

The military footprint would have to be even larger to actually get the oil out.

It's hard to overstate the stupidity of this idea … Seizing Iraq’s oil would make our allies against Isis our enemies Jay Hakes

“You’d have to occupy most of Syria to get the oil out of the country, since the Syrian export pipelines travel from the oilfields in eastern Syria all the way to the Mediterranean coast, right across the central breadth of the country,” Krane said.

“It wouldn’t do you much good to just capture the oilfields. If you wanted to steal the oil, it would take a full military occupation of Syria to control the full length of the pipelines, so you could move the oil to market. At a minimum, that would mean occupying the city of Homs in central Syria, as well as the main Syrian oil terminals at Banias and Tartus. All that is in addition to occupying rebel-held areas such as Deir ez-Zour where the oilfields lie.”

Nor would be it be an in-and-out deployment. When he says “take the oil”, Trump clearly has the reserves in mind. That would take years.

“There is no physical way you can take oil reserves any faster than you can pump the oil,” Cordesman said.

The costs of the military operations would far exceed any revenue that could be extracted.

“If you commandeered every bit of it it wouldn’t be a very cost-effective way to fund an occupation,” Krane argued. “And that’s before you start getting people shot and sending them home in body bags.”