The Pentagon Has No Just Title to Venezuela’s Oil

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.

In my Second Treatise of Government, I defined political power as the right to make laws with penalties for the regulation and preservation of property, by which I there meant lives, liberties, and estates. By this measure, to dispose of a nation’s chief resource is a very high act of political power; it fixes the terms on which millions must labour, eat, and hope. Such power is not to be justified by its own ambition, nor by the advantage of neighbouring states, but only by the consent of those whose lives and estates are thereby put at hazard. The question is not whether some officer has signed, or some interim ruler affixed a seal, but whether a free people, equal one with another, could in reason be thought to have agreed.

Here we are at once in the dark. We are told of an “interim President” of Venezuela; we are not told by what rule she was chosen, how long her commission is to last, or whether those subject to this bargain have given their express or so much as their tacit consent. We are told that a figure long enmeshed in Venezuela’s oil business, and named in reports of corruption and money‑laundering, stands as architect and salesman of the agreement; we are not told what impartial inquiry has cleared the ground of private advantage masquerading as public good. Consent so clouded is not consent in the sense I ever defended, but a kind of convenient silence into which great powers are apt to read whatever permission they please.

Let me recall the baseline. In the state of nature, as I once put it, men are in a condition of perfect freedom and equality, guided by the law of nature, which is reason, teaching that no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. If a Venezuelan, left in this natural state, might have laboured upon his country’s common stock of land to draw forth oil, and by his industry joined something of his own to it, then that oil, so far as his labour reached, would be his property. A government that claims to improve this condition must show that its arrangements leave him, and those like him, more secure in their lives and estates than they would be under no such bargain. If, instead, a distant defense bureaucracy becomes master of the field, we must ask whether the ordinary Venezuelan is not placed nearer to servitude than to security.

The special danger here lies in the nature of the body that assumes control. A commercial company, though often rapacious, is at least subject, in principle, to civil courts and known laws. A department of defense, armed and funded to wage war, is accustomed to act by prerogative, on reasons of security that cannot be fully shown, and to be judge in its own case when interests conflict. When such a body becomes chief steward of foreign wealth, the people whose resource is at stake are left, not under a standing rule administered by an impartial judge, but under the discretion of those who may always allege some strategic necessity to silence complaint. Absolute arbitrary power seldom calls itself by that name; it more often comes cloaked in the language of protection and investment.

I do not deny that there are emergencies in which rulers must act beyond or even against the letter of standing law, for the evident preservation of the community. I called this prerogative, and I allowed it, but only as long as it manifestly serves the public good and remains revocable at the people’s pleasure. Yet I see here no open declaration of a Venezuelan peril so pressing as to justify dealing away majority control of their oil to a foreign military arm; I see instead a mixture of defense industry, financial office, and a controversial intermediary, moving under considerable opacity. When prerogative becomes the settled method of disposing of another nation’s inheritance, and those most affected are neither adequately informed nor plainly consenting, it ceases to be prerogative and hardens into tyranny in the making.

Where, then, stands right? If it should appear, in the course of time, that this bargain joins a long train of abuses, whereby foreign and domestic powers together drain Venezuela’s wealth while her people remain poor, voiceless, or repressed when they protest, then the case is clear in my old terms. Those who thus dispose of a people’s property without their consent put themselves into a state of war with that people, who are thereby absolved from obedience with respect to that usurped power. The dissolution of such arrangements need not dissolve society; it merely returns to the Venezuelans the authority that was always theirs, to constitute a legislative of their own choice, and to say, with effect, that their oil is not another nation’s prize. The world will call this disorder; reason will know it for justice.

uncertainty_note":"I lack the fuller facts that only time and investigation can supply, and can therefore judge this affair only by its visible lineaments of opaque power, contested authority, and absent popular consent."}```}```