US Reaches Deal for Majority Control of Venezuelan Oil Reserves

The takes

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  Adam Smith

  1723–1790, Scotland (the Scottish Enlightenment: Kirkcaldy, Glasgow, Edinburgh)

  When the War Office Buys the Well

  Putting a nation’s soldiers in charge of another nation’s oil is not prudent statecraft but a costly confusion of roles, whose true price will be paid far from the negotiating table.

  That a government’s war department should acquire majority control over more than sixty‑five billion barrels of a foreign nation’s oil is, even to eyes long accustomed to mercantile projects, a novelty. We are told that the Pentagon, through an office contrived to assist its own defence industry, is to help lead this Venezuelan venture. The transaction is announced as a triumph of strategy and statecraft; the visible benefits are paraded, the flags are unfurled, the barrels are counted. Yet, as I argued in the Wealth of Nations, in publick affairs the benefits present themselves in a small number of brilliant points, while the costs lie dispersed, obscure, and long delayed, like a mist that thickens as the spectators disperse.

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  John Locke

  1632–1704, England (writing amid the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution)

  The Pentagon Has No Just Title to Venezuela’s Oil

  When a foreign military arm claims majority control over a people’s chief resource without their clear, free consent, it is not commerce but usurpation, and the right of resistance quietly awakens.

  That a man styled president of one country should announce, almost in passing, that his government has struck a bargain to acquire majority control of another people’s vast oil reserves would once have been thought a fable. Yet I read that the United States has reached such a deal with Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodriguez, and that more than sixty‑five billion barrels of proven oil now stand under Washington’s majority command, with the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital “helping lead” the transaction. When the department of war becomes a merchant in so great a stock of wealth, it is not a matter of trade alone, but of power, and therefore of political right.

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• 

  Niccolò Machiavelli

  1469–1527, Florence (republican secretary and diplomat, then exile, amid the Italian Wars)

  A Republic Playing Prince in Venezuela’s Oil Fields

  By using the Pentagon’s machinery to gain majority control over Venezuela’s oil, the United States behaves like a new prince in a shattered province—strong in appearance, but exposed wherever its force and foundations do not match.

  I begin from the effectual truth, not from speeches. The United States, under President Trump, has announced an agreement with Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodriguez, by which Washington gains majority control over more than sixty‑five billion barrels of proven oil reserves. The Pentagon, through its Office of Strategic Capital, and figures from the defense industry help carry this enterprise. Around them moves a businessman, Alejandro Betancourt, praised for success in oil yet earlier named in corruption reporting. As I wrote in *The Prince* (trans. W. K. Marriott), how men live is far from how they ought to live; he who neglects what is done for what should be done ruins himself, not his rivals.

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