No. of Recommendations: 6
Why would Trump want Venezuelan heavy sour produced? He could be butt hurt because Canada would not bow down to him. The scheme may be to replace Canadian heavy, sour, with Venezuelan. That would hurt Canada, because they don't have means to move that much crude to the coast, so it could be exported. Is Trump that petty and vindictive? Yes!I think that's overthinking it. Trump views international politics in very transactional terms: there are opponents and not-opponents, resources that we control and resources that we don't control. Strong countries can dominate weak countries, and a rule-based system that constrains strong countries is bad for the strong countries. Venezuela has resources that he thought should be under U.S. control was governed by an opponent, and the only thing stopping him from taking action was a rules-based system that he doesn't care much about. Thus...we take Maduro out of the country.
The oil isn't important because of some 4D chess game to hurt Canada. It's just important because oil is a very valuable natural resource, and Venezuela's got the world's largest reserves. So that oil needs to be controlled by the U.S. Nothing more complicated than that.
I mean, it's a bad analysis for supporting what we did, because the U.S. doesn't control Venezuela materially more today than we did a few days ago. Rubio's walking that back even further today:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested Sunday that the United States would not take a day-to-day role in governing Venezuela other than enforcing an existing “oil quarantine” on the country, a turnaround after President Donald Trump announced a day earlier that the U.S. would be running Venezuela following its ouster of leader Nicolás Maduro.
Rubio’s statements on TV talk shows seemed designed to temper concerns about whether the assertive American action to achieve regime change might again produce a prolonged foreign intervention or failed attempt at nation-building. They stood in contrast to Trump’s broad but vague claims that the U.S. would at least temporarily “run” the oil-rich nation, comments that suggested some sort of governing structure under which Caracas would be controlled by Washington.
But Rubio offered a more nuanced take, saying the U.S. would continue to enforce an oil quarantine that was already in place on sanctioned tankers before Maduro was removed from power early Saturday and using that leverage as a means to press policy changes in Venezuela.https://apnews.com/live/us-venezuela-trump-maduro-...
