At an event in Las Vegas earlier this month, Donald Trump offered some rather candid comments about his perspective on Venezuelan oil. “We’re taking a lot of oil from Venezuela, and we’re getting along great with them,” the president said. “Billions and billions of barrels of oil is coming out of Venezuela. … It’s the old-fashioned way, right? It’s the old-fashioned way. To the victor belong the spoils, right?”
In other words, as the Republican characterized it, the United States is entitled to a foreign country’s natural resources because we launched a military attack on it.
The White House has been credibly accused for months of treating Venezuela as more of a U.S. colony than an independent foreign nation, and those public comments certainly didn’t help. Neither did Friday afternoon’s announcement from the Republican administration. MS NOW reported:
President Donald Trump announced Friday that the United States reached an agreement with Venezuela giving the U.S. majority control of a venture with access to more than 65 billion barrels of the South American country’s proven oil reserves. The sweeping deal would dramatically expand U.S. access to one of the world’s largest petroleum supplies. […]
Trump called the agreement “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY” in a Truth Social post, adding that the deal would come “at no cost to the American Taxpayer” and more than double American oil reserves.
Even before considering the substantive details, it’s worth emphasizing that the agreement between the U.S. and Venezuela wasn’t exactly reached through negotiations between two sovereign nations.
Six months after a brief U.S. military operation led to the detention of Venezuelan then-President Nicolás Maduro, which was followed closely by Trump’s curious boast that he and his administration were “in charge” of the foreign country, The New York Times published a striking report last month that noted that Secretary of State Rubio is, for all intents and purposes, “running” Venezuela, serving as the country’s “de facto viceroy.”
The Times reported, “The U.S. Treasury receives the revenue from most of Venezuela’s exports, then disburses it to Venezuela through the country’s banking system, a relationship akin to parents handing out allowances to children. Mr. Rubio and his team set the conditions on what that money can be spent on, and by whom.”
The White House’s new “deal” to take even more of Venezuela’s natural resources necessarily reprises unavoidable concerns about neocolonialism — a point that has not gone unnoticed in Caracas.
What’s more, while Trump talks about using Venezuelan oil to replenish the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, that’s far easier said than done.
But let’s also not overlook the nature of the deal itself. The Wall Street Journal reported:
President Trump spent months declaring his ouster of Venezuela’s leader had secured the country’s oil for America. When U.S. energy companies resisted investing at the speed and scale he wanted, his administration devised an extraordinary solution to turn his vision into reality: make the U.S. government itself an investor.
The agreement announced Friday evening would transform the U.S. government from a broker of American oil investments in Venezuela to an investor itself.
As Republicans peddle absurd hysterics about the perils of a looming domestic “communist” threat, Trump is once again claiming a direct government stake in a private company, led by a controversial businessman named Alejandro Betancourt.
If that weren’t quite enough, the Journal’s article noted that the U.S. Defense Department will “help finance the oil venture and reap the rewards of its future output,” even though this appears to fall far outside the Pentagon’s traditional responsibilities.
The American president may want people to see this as “the biggest oil deal in world history,” but that doesn’t mean it is the best oil deal in world history.
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