Which nation has the biggest oil reserves in the world?

The last time I checked, the country with the biggest oil reserves in the world was Venezuela. This statement tends to come as a shock to many people who imagine that the nation with the biggest oil reserves in the world is Saudi Arabia or some other such arab/middle east nation. So, as it turns out, the nation with the biggest oil reserves in the world is actually in Latin America, namely Venezuela.

Yet when I came to learn that Venezuela has the biggest oil reserves in the world was at a time that there were severe shortages of oil in that nation! It was actually at a point when, as the news reports went, Venezuela was importing the materials it needed to reactivate its oil refineries. The official narrative was that Venezuela was experiencing oil shortages because of ‘mismanagement of its oil industry’. But I couldn’t help noticing that at that time, Venezuela had basically fallen out with the west, and sanctions placed on it. And I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps the shortages of oil in Venezuela had more to do with the sanctions placed on it, as opposed to the ‘mismanagement of its oil industry’. As anyone who has ever lived in a nation under some sort of sanctions will tell you, those sanctions tend to be very devastating. More poignantly, Venezuela at that time seemed to have opted to follow the path of socialism, and as experience has shown, nations that try to follow that path tend to face all manner of hurdles.