No matter a project’s value or virtue, real estate developers have to follow law. But real estate developer-President Donald Trump took out the old US Latin America playbook and landgrabbed Venezuela on Saturday, throwing the notion of sovereignty and geopolitical sobriety out of the window.
One was reminded of FDR’s apocryphal remark in the 1930s about supporting ruthless Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza: ‘He may be a son of a b****, but he’s our son of a b****.’ Except Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro was clearly not America’s chosen baddie.
While Trump may have been drumming up ‘menace’ to America’s citizenry of Venezuela’s drug cartel-Maduro’s version of Saddam Hussein’s WMD for George W Bush-the real reason for invasion is, as openly claimed by Trump, oil.
Some fun facts about Venezuela: It has the biggest proven oil reserves in the world, some 303 billion barrels, almost the combined reserves of Saudi Arabia and the US.
Production is low, and it’s a difficult grade to refine. Trump’s announcement that ‘very large’ US oil companies will ‘go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure and start making money for the country,’ sounds almost evangelical. But at the heart of the matter is panic about debilitation of the dollar.
In 2018, after Maduro announced that Venezuela would ‘free itself from the dollar,’ the country began accepting renminbi, euros, rubles-its foreign minister even proposing, in 2018, that India buy its oil with rupees. By ‘running’ Venezuela, Trump plans to firm up the sliding petrodollar.
For ‘neo-neocon’ Republicans, many upset with the president’s waffling on immigration and visas, this would be fuel in the GOP tanker in a difficult electoral landscape.
The US’ return to Cold War-style regime puppeteering, and selective suspension of sovereignty of countries, overtly reveals Trump as a kindred spirit of Xi and Putin. What’s sauce for Venezuela should now be heartily seen by Beijing and Moscow as sauce for Ukraine and, yes, Taiwan. Real estate developers just got a go-ahead for land grabs on a nation-state scale.
