President Donald Trump has no shame in admitting what he wants to get out of attacking Venezuela and threatening other energy resource-rich nations. “We’re gonna get the oil flowing the way it should be,” he said January 3rd, soon after his administration stunned the world with what many policy experts and Democratic lawmakers are calling an unlawful incursion into Caracas that led to the arrest of President Nicolás Maduro.
Trump’s fixation on so-called “energy dominance” is also more pretext — on top of federal drug trafficking charges against Maduro — for a plain-old power grab. “Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again. Won’t happen,” Trump added. Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, and others better watch out, Trump and other senior officials have warned. And White House adviser Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday that it’s been the “formal position of the US government” under Trump “that Greenland should be part of the United States.”
In other words, the US will try to take whatever it wants — borders be damned — whether that’s Venezuela’s oil, Greenland’s rare earth elements, or some other nation’s sovereignty. If you’re in Trump’s inner circle, like the fossil fuel industry and tech oligarchs that backed his ascendancy, you might be able to share in the spoils. It’s a terrifying time for other countries with something shiny the US might covet. And even if you’re not directly in Trump’s crosshairs, people around the world will likely have to grapple with the political and environmental ripple effects of whatever global game of chicken his administration plays next.
“We’re entering this really uncertain, scary moment”
“We’re entering this really uncertain, scary moment where this aggressive, toxic way of doing business is being put on the table,” says Catherine Abreu, director of the International Climate Politics Hub.
Abreu, who is half Venezuelan and lives in Canada, first heard news about the US attack on Caracas from her family. “There’s a lot of uncertainty and fear and mixed feelings, I would say, on the ground in Venezuela … as many Venezuelans have been protesting against [the Maduro] regime for years and want a change in Venezuelan government, but want that change to come from the Venezuelan people,” she says.
Very soon after her family reached out, Abreu heard about the attack from worried colleagues in the climate movement who were “alarmed by the fact that this was being done in large part in the name of the interests of expanding United States oil and gas production.”
Venezuela holds the world’s largest oil reserves, but only produces around 1 percent of global crude oil supply. This is because of years of neglect and mismanagement since the 1970s, when the country nationalized its oil industry. Now, Trump says, “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies … go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken [oil] infrastructure.”
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said Wednesday that the federal government is in talks with American companies to ramp up oil production in Venezuela, and that the US plans to control future oil sales in the country. The US has also seized two tankers believed to have carried or attempted to carry Venezuelan oil. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have said that Venezuela will turn over 30 to 50 million barrels of oil, which the US plans to sell at market price.
To be sure, there’s a lot of uncertainty around whether American companies will want to take their chances investing in a resurgence of Venezuelan oil production with so much instability still in the country. The US is already the world’s biggest oil producer, with more than 20 million barrels each day. Venezuela produces less than a million barrels of oil a day currently, and it would take more than $50 billion in investment over 15 years just to get that figure up to a steady 1.1 million barrels a day, according to research firm Rystad Energy.
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