On Friday, US president Donald Trump proudly announced that his administration had made a deal with Venezuela’s interim president Delcy Rodriguez to take control of over 65 billion barrels of the country’s proven oil reserves.
In what he called ‘the biggest deal in world history’ Trump claimed this would lower the price of petrol and diesel in the US ‘at no cost to the American taxpayer’.
Details of this take-over of Venezuela’s vast oil deposits have not been released but it is believed that the US has secured 50-year leases on 17 oil fields with the option of renewing them for a further 50 years.
This would give the US control of over a fifth of Venezuelan oil reserves for 100 years.
Rodriguez called this take-over of her country’s oil wealth by US imperialism a ‘historic milestone in bilateral relations between Venezuela and the US’ that would ‘usher in a new era of recovery, growth, production, security and prosperity for our people’.
Rodriguez was vice-president to the democratically elected Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro.
In January, the US kidnapped Maduro, who is currently being held in jail awaiting trial on the pretext of ‘narco-terrorism’.
Rodriguez was permitted to carry on as ‘interim’ president as long as she acts completely under the control of US imperialism, and for the advancement of Trump’s drive to colonise the entire world for exploitation by American capitalism.
Trump was desperate to claim a ‘deal’ that could be presented to a hostile US working class as a ‘victory’ that would inevitably offset the economic catastrophe of inflationary price increases caused by the failed war against Iran.
Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, who Trump gave the job of cobbling together this ‘deal’, said it demonstrated how ‘President Trump’s bold foreign policy is driving America First wins: Securing stable reserves and low-cost oil in our hemisphere and lowering gas prices here at home.’ Rubio’s claims will be treated with derision by US workers.
The illegal kidnapping of Maduro is widely seen as the template for Trump’s attempt to carry out regime change and crush Iran with the equally illegal US-Israel war launched on February 28th.
Despite all the devastation and deaths caused by US and Israel’s unprovoked attack Iran didn’t just survive but fought back in a war that exposed the weakness of US imperialism and its Zionist ally.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the defeat of all attempts by the US to reopen the vital supply line for oil and gas has rebounded on the world, driving forward energy costs and prices across the world and impacting severely on the US.
In an attempt to deal with the economic carnage inflicted by his ‘bold’ foreign policies of an unwinnable war, Trump is desperately claiming that the US seizure of Venezuela’s oil deposits offers a way out of the crisis engulfing his administration.
The scale of the crisis is enormous in terms of the US strategic reserves of oil and petroleum.
Since the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the US emergency stockpile of crude oil has shrunk to a 40-year low.
At the start of the year, the US held 415 million barrels. This month, this had shrunk to 300 million barrels – their lowest levels since 1982.
Trump’s latest claim that petrol prices will fall immediately and the US will replenish its dangerously diminished stock of crude by stealing Venezuela’s oil supplies, has been dismissed by experts who have repeatedly warned that the country’s oil infrastructure has been severely dilapidated following years of US economic sanctions and blockades.
Meanwhile, the giant oil companies Trump wants to plough billions into for rebuilding the oil infrastructure, in the hope of profits in the future, are reluctant to risk their money, given the ‘political uncertainty’ they are facing from the Venezuelan people rising up against the US seizure of their mineral wealth.
The working class in the US, UK and Europe have the power to put an end to the constant wars for oil and control of the world’s resources. They must rise up and bring down the bankrupt capitalist system with the victory of the World Socialist Revolution.
