Trump Breaks a Lot of American Traditions. He’s Keeping This Awful One.
Slate · L · trust 55/100
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On Friday, Donald Trump announced an agreement that would effectively let the U.S. take over a chunk of Venezuela’s oil reserves. The move, which the president called “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY,” is a particularly brazen resource grab from a nation he now effectively controls. Here’s what you need to know.
Trump may have been angling to take Venezuelan oil from the start. Last year, he dispatched U.S. warships to the Caribbean, allegedly to disrupt drug-trafficking operations coming from Venezuela. Then the U.S. imposed a blockade on the South American country to pressure its autocratic leader, Nicolás Maduro. In January, Trump dispatched U.S. Special Forces to abduct Maduro and his wife; the two are currently imprisoned in New York on drug-trafficking charges. (The overnight operation reportedly killed at least 80 people in Venezuela, including soldiers and civilians, while injuring several U.S. service members.)
Yes, Trump did claim some humanitarian motives: “We want peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela,” he said after Maduro’s ouster. But in the next breath, he laid out a very different objective: “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” he declared . Recent events suggest that the latter goal was closer to Trump’s heart. Many of the problems that plagued Venezuela under Maduro—including a lack of free and fair elections—remain. But on Friday evening, the president announced an agreement that will give the U.S. government and a private company access to a portion of the country’s underground oil reserves.
Trump is spinning this as a major win. But how big a deal is it, really?
Trump is once again playing up a vague international agreement as a watershed moment. (Stop me if you’ve heard something similar before.) The deal jointly gives the U.S. government and an unnamed “private business” 100-year rights to about a fifth of Venezuela’s known oil reserves, which are the largest in the world. The U.S. will reportedly get 55 percent of the deal’s effective output, including an ownership stake and rights to buy oil at cost—meaning priced according to the cost of producing it plus a set markup. But some of the specifics may continue to shift. We don’t even have any official text from the agreement yet.
Details aside, a state-run oil company sounds … a bit like socialism?
It does! And there are other sketchy aspects too. Trump’s initial announcement didn’t name the “private business” the U.S. will partner with. But the New York Times, citing people familiar, reports that it’s North American Blue Energy Partners , Venezuela’s second-largest private oil producer. NABEP is controlled by the family of Alejandro Betancourt López, a Venezuelan businessman with a dubious past. He has faced criminal money-laundering probes in Spain and Switzerland (although he hasn’t been charged) and once got Venezuelan government contracts to build power plants despite having no experience doing that kind of work. Betancourt is an ally of Delcy Rodríguez, the Trump administration’s handpicked interim president of Venezuela, and has become something of a go-between since Maduro’s ouster. In return, the State Department has tried to get foreign governments to lay off him, even giving Betancourt a U.S. visa to meet with Trump officials.
Despite those whiffs of corruption, the deal could let the Department of Defense acquire shares in NABEP, the Wall Street Journal reports . Trump has also waved off the irony of a president who rails against communists, socialists, and Marxists turning the government into an investor, claiming that the deal will replenish U.S. oil reserves and lower gas prices. Trump certainly has reasons to hope so. The war of choice he launched against Iran has depleted U.S. petroleum stockpiles to their lowest level in decades and driven the average price Americans pay at the pump above $4 per gallon .
OK, so will this deal actually lower gas prices?
It might. But Trump hasn’t put a timeline on how quickly that will happen—perhaps because it could take years. Given its ramshackle extraction infrastructure, Venezuela currently produces only about 1 percent of daily global supply. The cost of a barrel jumped after the U.S. and Iran resumed shooting at each other over the weekend, which suggests what’s happening in Venezuela is a minor factor behind what Americans are paying for gas.
It’s also unclear how long Trump’s agreement will last. A future Democratic administration might renege on it, and it could face legal challenges in Venezuela as well. Although Rodríguez has argued that the deal will benefit the country without diminishing its control over its own natural resources, Venezuela’s constitution explicitly labels its oil reserves “ inalienable and not transferable .” Other oil producers are yet another wild card. Trump and Rodríguez say they want Chevron, Shell, and other oil companies to increase operations in Venezuela. But a Venezuelan company with a U.S.-government stake would immediately become a de facto competitor.
Sorry, isn’t this all pretty brazen? It looks as if we came in promising democracy but have pretty transparently seized control of Venezuela’s oil.
Ulterior motives have been a through line of U.S. foreign policy for centuries. James Polk sent troops into disputed territory near the Rio Grande in 1846, then used their defeat as a pretext to forcibly annex part of Mexico in fulfillment of Manifest Destiny. More recently, the George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq can’t be separated from that country’s abundant oil reserves. But in most of those earlier cases, presidents at least hid behind principle. The current…
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