"Take the Oil"

"No, this was not Donald Trump's stated objective for Operation Absolute Resolve, the January 3 seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, but rather his September 2016 reference to the US military presence in Iraq. "You know, it used to be to the victor belong the spoils," he told Matt Lauer of NBC's Today show. "Now, there was no victor there, believe me.... But I always said: Take the oil.""

"And this was hardly the first time Trump spoke about seizing foreign oilfields. In a 2011 interview with George Stephanopolous, he said the US should "take it," referring to Iraqi oil. A few days later, amidst the anti-Gadhafi uprising in Libya, Trump said, "I would just go in and take the oil." Indeed, seizing foreign oil for America's presumed benefit has been an obsession of Trump's for some time."

Donald Trump has repeatedly promoted seizing foreign oil, citing Iraq and Libya and now applying that stance to Venezuela. Venezuela possesses about 303 billion barrels, the world's largest reserves, but sanctions and mismanagement have devastated its oil industry. Trump proposed that very large US oil companies would invest billions to repair the damaged oil infrastructure and generate profits. He stated that Venezuela's state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela, SA (PdVSA) would be forced to return control of fields nationalized in the 1970s to US companies that once held them. The stance reflects nostalgia for mid-20th-century US petroleum dominance.

Read at The Nation