Image Source: Unsplash

Let’s take a look at the world oil reserves situation in the wake of Trump’s move on Venezuela.

source: Visual Capitalist (with RLH calculations)

First of all, from what I’m seeing and hearing and reading, Trump is saying “we are going to run Venezuela” and “make a smooth transition.”

This is Trump in his own words with my highlights in bold and some notes in brackets:

“Each boat [the ones we’ve been blowing out of the water] kills 25 — on average, 25,000 people. We knocked out 97 percent.

“And those drugs mostly come from a place called Venezuela. And we're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. So we don't want to be involved with having somebody else get in, and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years.

“So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. And it has to be judicious, because that's what we're all about. We want peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela, and that includes many from Venezuela that are now living in the United States and want to go back to their country.

“It's their homeland. We can't take a chance if somebody else takes over Venezuela that doesn't have the good of the Venezuelan people in mind. We've had decades of that.

“We're not going to let that happen. We're there now. And what people don't understand, but they understand as I say this, we're there now, but we're going to stay until such time as the proper transition can take place.

“So we're going to stay until such time as — we're going to run it, essentially, until such time as a proper transition can take place. As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust — a total bust for a long period of time. They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping and what could have taken place.

“We're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country. And we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so. So we were prepared to do a second wave if we needed to do so.

“We actually assumed that a second wave would be necessary, but now it's probably not. The first wave, if you'd like to call it that — the first attack was so successful, we probably don't have to do a second, but we're prepared to do a second wave, a much bigger wave, actually. This was pinpoint, but we have a much bigger wave that probably won't have to do.

“This partnership of Venezuela with the United States of America — a country that everybody wants to be involved with because of what we are able to do and accomplish — will make the people of Venezuela rich, independent, and safe. And it will also make the many, many people from Venezuela that are living in the United States extremely happy. They suffered.

“They suffered. So much was taken from them. They're not going to suffer anymore.”

That’s Trump in his own words. He is saying at the outset that the United States has responded to a crime by Maduro—to wit, poisoning our people by sending contraband into our country—and he has established a math for it: 25,000 dead American victims per boat.I don’t know what calculations will be run from here but that’s the basis for calculating damages.He then identifies the oil assets of Venezuela as important and valuable and points out that they have been poorly, if not recklessly, managed, and that our oil companies are going to take that over and fix it. The implication is obvious that this will be the source for making good on the damages from the drug racket, and that that will come from the value-added of proper American know-how.

He concludes by saying that the people of Venezuela are now free and liberated from these oppressive drug merchant tyrants who have run them into poverty and that the United States will restore the country to wealth, freedom and prosperity and act as a sort of international trustee guaranteeing no one interferes with that assignment.A moral mandate and obligation as only America can do.

The background context from here is all my opinion but I’m backing it up with facts about who has the oil reserves. So I cooked up this spreadsheet that shows where all the reserves are worldwide and I’ve highlighted the top ten. Number one is Venezuela and number 10 is the USA.Together these ten nations have nearly 90% of the world’s oil reserves.And about a quarter of that 85%-90% is now under Trump’s control.

I see this as Trump’s counterpart to Putin with Ukraine.And it’s a masterful counterpart.Instead of being a big mean bully and announcing that Ukraine is rightfully and historically a “natural part of Russia,” and barging in and killing people and seizing the assets and taking the real estate, Trump is using the commission of a crime to justify (1) stopping the crime (2) removing the criminals and making them stand trial (3) saving a nation from oppression by these criminals and protecting them, restoring order and prosperity.It’s like saving the girl in a James Bond movie.This is Ian Fleming come to real life.

And on the way by, it just happens to be the case that this also causes a huge shift in dynamics insofar as who has been counting on supplies from Venezuela that now Trump and American oil companies will now have control over, including Europe, India, Russia and China. On top of that, it was the Rockefeller family operations starting with Esso who originally developed Lake Maracaibo and all the refining infrastructure going way back to the end of World War II. So the American oil business knows this territory intimately and can take it over again and hit the ground running in practically no time, and can refine on site which hasn’t been the case since Chavez welched on French interests who abandoned operations when Venezuela failed to pay their bills. Since then, Venezuela has had to go outside for refining, a lot of that Russian, very cumbersome and costly.

Bottom line, no more pacing around waiting for Putin to give ground on Ukraine…no more BS from Europe and NATO (lately threatening Putin with using his own frozen assets to back up Zelenskyy) …no more veiled threats about incorporating Ukraine into NATO and thus rope-a-doping Uncle Sam into an Article-5-triggered world war….

It’s perfect…or is it? The big variable is Putin and how crazy he is. He has already been ballyhooing his “flying Chernobyl” weapons and nuclear-fueled missiles.In just the past few days he has moved nukes into Belarus by rail.

The deck is now reshuffled and all the furniture, slot machines and poker tables in the casino have been totally rearranged. The world calculus of geopolitics has been quantitatively changed by orders of magnitude because everything is a function of oil and who controls it and Venezuela has a whoppingly important list of nations who want it, depend on it. Trump has cast himself as the humanitarian benefactor backed by US military might and Putin just looks like a brutish selfish thief. He is “UN-proofing” the situation preemptively and you will see this kind of rhetoric coming out of Foggy Bottom immediately in my opinion.

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