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This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The middle-of-the-night kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro shocked the world on Saturday. Military helicopters bombed Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, as U.S. special forces breached Maduro’s residence, captured him, and flew him to New York to stand trial on unproven charges of narcoterrorism. President Donald Trump has offered several justifications for Maduro’s ouster, including the collapse of Venezuela’s oil industry. But the very conditions Trump has been pointing to were exacerbated by the actions of past US presidents—including Trump himself. If the Venezuelan oil industry is in tatters, it’s at least partially because of US policies dating back at least a decade. 

On Wednesday, Trump’s Department of Energy put out a “fact sheet” stipulating that the US is “selectively rolling back sanctions to enable the transport and sale of Venezuelan crude and oil products to global markets.” This outcome is doubly ironic because U.S. sanctions are one of the reasons the Venezuelan oil industry is diminished in the first place. The announcement also states that the US will market Venezuelan oil, bank the proceeds, and disburse the revenue “for the benefit of the American people and the Venezuelan people at the discretion of the US government.”

“They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping.”

Maduro first drew the ire of President Trump in........

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