When it comes to U.S. policy toward Venezuela, the “what” is far clearer than the “why.” In recent weeks, Americans have seen Donald Trump threaten the South American country, designate Nicolás Maduro’s regime a foreign terrorist organization, try to shut down Venezuela’s airspace, deploy more weapons and military units to the Caribbean, and more recently, announce a blockade of all “sanctioned oil tankers” entering and leaving Venezuela.
But as the United States moves closer to a military confrontation, the reason for the developments has been elusive. Does this have something to do with drug trafficking? Or maybe immigration?
This week, the ambiguities were resolved in no uncertain terms. As The New York Times summarized:
President Trump and his top advisers could not be more blunt in their claims: The United States created Venezuela’s oil industry. Venezuela stole American oil fields through nationalizations. Now, the United States wants those assets back.
In a 214-word rant published to his social media platform late Tuesday afternoon, the Republican referred several times to Venezuela’s “theft” of “assets” that he said belong to Americans, which he concluded “must be returned to the United States, IMMEDIATELY.”
A day later, his phrasing was more direct.
“They took all of our oil from not that long ago, and we want it back,” Trump said. “But they took it, they illegally took it.”
As my MS NOW colleague Zeeshan Aleem explained, the American president was referring to Venezuela’s nationalization of its oil sector, starting in 1976. At the time, the Venezuelan government took control of private assets belonging to multinational energy corporations, but the idea that the country “took all of our oil” is bizarre, since Venezuela’s natural resources never belonged to the United States.
In the years that followed, the Venezuelan policy advanced in a variety of way, including Hugo Chávez’s seizure of oil fields in 2007, but it’s still difficult to imagine a credible defense for Trump’s latest posture. Time will tell what the administration is prepared to do next, and whether Trump intends to follow through on his suggestion that he’s prepared to order military strikes on targets inside Venezuela “very soon.” But as the American public confronts the possibility of another war for oil, Politico reported that Trump administration officials have already asked U.S. oil companies whether they’re interested in returning to Venezuela if and when Maduro should be ousted. “So far,” the report added, ”the answer is a hard ‘no.’”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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