This country has larger oil deposits than Saudi Arabia, I am therefore struggling to wrap my head around why they are where they are.

Can anyone here break down for me what set of circumstances led them here.

No shallow answers please, I would like economic reasoning coz I already know that the US is out to get them, but that won't work for me coz the US is also out to get Iran yet Iran with the exact same circumstances is fairing much better.

How inept does a populace have to be to find themselves in their current predicament.

Why can't they sell to China, I am sure China has the muscle to counter the west atleast economically.

Well its actually an interesting story, I wouldn't finish typing in a day, but I'll sum it up best I can.

**The US is not out to get Venezuela, they are against President Maduro and want him ousted in favor of Guiado. Their chances of success seem bleak by the day owing to the Russian and Chinese involvement which has seen the two countries send a small number of troops to the nation. This is different from the Iran case where both countries are on polar opposites a situation prompted by Iran's ambition to obtain nuclear weapons.

1. Hugo Chavez, the former president Killed off the private sector, through expropriations and nationalization. As soon as the man laid eyes well fairing businesses, he would order the same be nationalized to mean it became government business. FYI the expropriations covered everything from hotels to retailers The end result? No revenues as most of the businesses were now government enterprises and we all know the government doesn't tax itself.

2. Chavez also started a number of welfare programs that saw the country burn through resources. Unnecessary and unwarranted employment was the norm just to maintain political support of the people. the wage bill ballooned exponentially.

3. The foreign exchange rate was skewed to the benefit of The presidents and their men.
4. Venezuela's oil quality is not the best.

5. And most important, The extraction of oil is an expensive affair, \\especially in Venezuela due to the geology and what not (i'm no geologist)//?? as a result, and keeping in mind that Venezuela has no money, it cannot afford to extract it. And of course this is precipitated by the current Oil Prices which make any attempt to extract the oil, a fools errand as it will cost more to extract than they can sell it for.
and so, the worlds largest oil reserves remain buried.

We now have a working simulator @Obi and your question can be answered.

Firstly, I'd like to say that an economy is defined as the character of supply of goods and services and livelihood among the members of a body politic and given a certain objective system in mind. That is, there exists a universal system of the political economy that is applicable to all countries and Kingdoms. The basis of such a philosophy is another long story that goes back in time even before the pyramids were constructed. The system has a mathematical and geometric elaboration in the Pythagorean tradition, through Plato and Euclid and perhaps declining completely by the time of Sir Isaac Newton, at least in the 'West'.

In the Indian sub-continent the fundamental system was modeled as the chess board or 'Chaturanga'. This system is based on the atom and number in a probabilistic universe. It is possible to provide proof for this claim, but for now I hope you can assume, safely that such proof actually exists.

Therefore we can use the chessboard as model and simulator of any political system, since we can derive the inner science and philosophy that describes the Kingdom and it's citizens and the optimal philosophy that holds it together.

Measuring your question - plus my reformulation then we ask the following critical questions:

1. What is the nature of the political philosophies of the specimen economies with respect to the optimal rules of the political economy?

2. What has been the trend of moves in the political economy under observation?

3. How successful is the Political economy in question in deciphering the hidden forces whose metaphor is 'black'?

4. What realities in terms of SWOT analysis exist on the board?

5. What synoptic decisions are capable of being made?

These are some of the questions that we can use for each of the countries you mentioned. On this basis we discover that for example, Saudi Arabia, being the center of Islamic philosophy is stronger in terms of cohesion than Venezuela which is still struggling to find a cogent philosophy.

The latest moves may be traced from Hugo Chavez to Maduro and their opposition and we see that the socialist regime hasn't been too successful with the citizenry because they haven't been able to regulate prices and economic supply as an autonomous entity. This could be a hint as to why Russia has had to come to the rescue since the OPEC trends tend to have a larger global impact on the balance of power.

Venezuela hasn't been very successful in the deciphering of 'black'. Hugo Chavez was a fun of Noam Chomsky and even quoted the latter oftenly, but the ideas in Chomsky are only starting to be widely considered and developed. Countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia and even the US don't have similar problems. They have managed to be very clear on black as compared to Venezuela.

Since there hasn't been a lot of philosophical clarity in Venezuela, it is difficult to bet money on the Bolivarian system to sustain or even visualize the SWOT. The US or S Arabia and Iran hold out better.

Hence Venezuela.

Thanks but I have to honestly admit to getting lost

I may point out that this is because in terms global demand, the Venezuelan supply isn't of value. Otherwise they could be given loans and guarantees...

Or how do Venezuela and DRC compare and contrast?