Trump Meant It Literally When He Said He Was Taking the Oil
· The Atlantic
“We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” Donald Trump said when he announced the capture of the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in January. And lo and behold, it has come to pass.
Trump announced last week that he had made a deal with Venezuela to develop its oil reserves. Well, not so much a “deal” as a payment by Venezuela of tribute at gunpoint. In a social-media post, Trump announced that the oil “is a Gift from Venezuela to the People of the United States.” This is a surprisingly generous offer from a country that is much poorer than the United States and, like most countries, disinclined to hand over its wealth to foreigners as a present.
Visit syntagm.co.za for more information.
Venezuela’s elected representatives did not approve this deal, because Venezuela’s representatives have not in fact been elected. The country also did not hold a referendum to approve it. Instead, after capturing Maduro, whom Trump had accurately denounced as a dictator, Trump installed one of Maduro’s cronies, Delcy Rodríguez, to govern in his place, in which capacity she has displayed roughly the same level of respect for democratic norms and civil society as her predecessor.
Trump’s Venezuelan-oil heist has received far less attention than either his ballyhooed promise to avoid foreign wars or his ongoing quagmire in the Persian Gulf. Yet this operation reflects Trump’s foreign-policy instincts in their most nakedly amoral—which is to say, quintessential—form.
[Gisela Salim-Peyer: The hostile corporate takeover of an entire country]
The Trump administration laid the groundwork for its intervention by painting Maduro not only as a despot but also as the leader of a criminal syndicate. The Justice Department indicted Maduro and his allies for having “acted as leaders and managers of the Cartel de Los Soles,” a derisive nickname for the country’s kleptocratic rulers.
Trump, however, apparently viewed regime change as a way to exploit this arrangement rather than transform it. His invasion followed the logic not of an American president promoting democracy or regional security, but of a mobster angry to discover that a small-time crook is running a racket in his territory without giving him a taste.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, The New York Times reported in July, “has become the de facto viceroy of Venezuela, holding sway over a sovereign nation in a way that no American official has since L. Paul Bremer III arrived in Baghdad in 2003 to run U.S.-occupied Iraq.” A salient difference is that Bremer’s occupation was intended to establish the grounds for free and fair elections, which did eventually take place. Trump, in stark contrast, casually told the Times in January that he expects the United States to run Venezuela for years.
The new oil deal makes that outcome more necessary and therefore more likely. Rodríguez has tied herself to a policy that is toxic to both the left and the right sides of Venezuela’s political spectrum. Left-wing Chavismos despise foreign exploitation, and the opposition resents the Chavismos’ corruption. Exposing Rodríguez’s regime to free and fair elections creates a high risk of electing a government dedicated to unwinding Trump’s deal, which gives both her and Trump a strong motive to postpone such voting.
When Trump deposed Maduro, some right-of-center analysts credited him with taking the first step in what they imagined would be a democratization project. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board celebrated the capture as “an act of hemispheric hygiene against a dictator who spread mayhem far and wide,” as did The Washington Post’s (headline: “Justice in Venezuela.”)
Both editorials mixed praise for the operation with caveats that the important work of transitioning to a legitimate government lay ahead, while fretting that Trump was confusing the issue with loose talk about running the country and extracting its oil. “The president often shoots from his hip in these press conferences and would be wise to reconsider,” the Post proposed. “Mr. Trump also talked about ‘the oil’ far too much,” the Journal cautioned, adding, “Sooner rather than later, Venezuela needs another election.”
[Read: The bizarre partnership between the U.S. and Venezuela]
It all sounded a bit like congratulating Michael Corleone for taking a stand against organized crime by murdering the heads of the Five Families, while urging him to clarify his intent to focus the family business on selling olive oil at market price.
Venezuela’s constitution expressly prohibits the sale of its untapped oil reserves to foreign interests. But Trump’s oil deal is designed to survive democratic scrutiny. Its “structure was deliberately intended to bind future Venezuelan governments to the agreement and make it difficult to unwind,” as The Wall Street Journal characterized the explanation given by a source involved in the deal. The Journal’s reporting suggests that Trump’s Venezuelan partners may not hold the highest regard for legal niceties. Alejandro Betancourt, the Venezuelan businessman who leads the private company partnering with the Trump administration, has been investigated for, though not charged with, money laundering. Diego Arria, a former Venezuelan ambassador now in exile in the U.S., told the Journal that the U.S. is working with Venezuelan government figures who are wanted in the U.S. for drug trafficking and other crimes.
They are, in other words, Trump’s kind of partners. The president seems to despise democratically elected leaders (witness his current tantrum against Canada’s prime minister, or his yearslong feuding with South Korea, the European Union, and other erstwhile U.S. allies). He has always gotten along swimmingly with criminals (since his early days engaging in social and business dealings with mobsters in New York) and dictators (such as Vladimir Putin, whom he simply cannot quit). Trump’s favorite brand of partner combines disdain for the law and democratic norms with an absolute dependence on Trump.
Trump has been saying for years that a vital objective in any foreign conflict is to seize the enemy’s oil. Indeed, he has been saying for years that he has been saying this for years. “I’ve been saying it for years. Take the oil,” he told The New York Times in 2016.
Trump has shown time and again that his obsessions, even his most childish and comically sinister-sounding ones, are often quite earnest. In Venezuela, he is finally fulfilling a lifelong scheme.