Opinion: There’s Nothing Slick About Trump’s Venezuela Oil Grab

JIM WATSON / Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images This column is being republished with permission from its original home on Substack.

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President Trump is boasting that he has concluded a great “deal” with Venezuela that would refill our depleted strategic petroleum reserves, reduce gas prices, and produce a long-lasting boon to America.

As with all such Trump announcements, upon closer scrutiny, his boasts are empty and misleading.

They also mask or neglect to note a much darker side to what has happened, the president’s judgment, his intentions, and the likely consequences of the whole endeavor.

Dig still deeper, however, and understanding the true nature of what has happened and where it may lead offers a direct path to better grasping the true risks of the Trump presidency, the origin of those risks, and how they tie directly into the core existential questions facing our society.

Trump said that what was worked out with Venezuelan authorities would give the U.S. access to 65 billion barrels of oil.

Additional reporting indicated it would be done as part of a deal with a private Venezuelan oil company, North American Blue Energy Partners, owned by a Venezuelan businessman named Alejandro Betancourt Lopez.

The U.S. would become a part-owner of that company and the new organization would receive, as a consequence, massive investment that could unleash oil production that would be enough to fill the U.S. strategic reserves, now at their lowest levels in decades as a consequence of tapping into them to make up for oil supply shortfalls related to the president’s illegal Iran War .

Trump, being Trump, hailed the deal as historic, world-changing, and observed it was being done in cooperation with the Venezuelan government headed by interim President Delcy Rodriguez, the U.S.-installed successor to former president Nicolas Maduro , who the U.S. seized in a raid on January 3 of this year.

Since the time of that raid, Trump has promised that it would be paid for in part by giving the U.S. access to Venezuelan oil.

Before announcing this deal, the U.S. obtained that oil through seizures of oil tankers and other acts of piracy.

Here are just some of the problems with Trump’s assertions about the arrangement, its nature and specifics: The arrangement is very likely in violation of international law, Venezuelan law and possibly U.S. law.

One cannot in circumstances like these seize national assets like oil fields through military conquest.