#oil-geopolitics

#oil-geopolitics

We've known about the mendacity for years consider the 30,573 documented falsehoods from the president's first term, culminating in the big lie, his claim to have won the 2020 election but the examples of bracing candour are fresher. This week both began and ended with the US president speaking the shocking truth. At a press conference to celebrate his capture of the Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, Trump announced that from now on the US would run that country,

Donald Trump is hardly the first US president to look south and conquer. Over the last century, no fewer than a dozen of Trump's predecessors embraced the belief that democracy and profit in Latin America were only one successful coup d'état away. But the particular strain of imperial ambition that Trump appears to have set loose with this weekend's raid in Venezuela appears simultaneously to be deeply atavistic and uniquely Trumpian. And it's one that doesn't look set to die down anytime soon.

In the early hours of January 3, the US military launched a coordinated bombardment of key targets in Caracas, while a special Delta Force team-no doubt acting on CIA-gathered intelligence-located and seized Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, who were holed up in a fortified compound. They were helicoptered to the USS Iwo Jima battleship deployed in the Caribbean and then flown to New York, where Maduro and his wife face a brand-new indictment for engaging in a "narco-terrorism conspiracy," conveniently issued January 3, 2026.