Trump has pulled the US into a joint venture with a leftist kleptocracy |
Russia and China are the net beneficiaries of Donald Trump’s gunboat plunder of Venezuela and the insouciant betrayal of the country’s democratic forces.
Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping lose a strategic pawn – and a costly, incompetent client – but gain the larger prizes of accepted imperial supremacy in their core spheres and the galloping obliteration of US political credibility.
Little now remains of the moral and legal order that we used to call the West.
America’s attack on Venezuela has drawn international criticism, such as from these protesters in South Korea.Credit: Getty Images
Trump may think he has scored a coup by gaining arms-length control over the world’s largest known oil reserves, but the extra-heavy tar sands of the Orinoco Belt are barely worth anything at current global oil prices near $US60 a barrel.
They are likely to be worth even less a decade hence as China, Europe and other oil-importing regions – 80 per cent of humanity – systematically cut petrol and diesel demand.
“We’re going to be taking a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” said Trump. Good luck with that.
The Chavista regime has already stolen anything easy to steal, treating the national oil and gas company PDVSA as a ready cash machine for 20 years, with nothing to spare for maintenance.
The pipelines are half a century old and badly damaged by acid corrosion. The oil facilities are a death trap. Any petroleum engineer who could sell his skills in Alberta, west Texas or Abu Dhabi fled a long ago.
An oppressed skeletal staff today holds the derelict system together under police surveillance.
It would take a decade and tens of billions of dollars to restore output to 3 million barrels a day, the rate of the early 2000s, and at least $US100 billion ($150 billion) to extract serious volumes from the Orinoco – where Sir Walter Raleigh came to grief chasing the fool’s mirage of El Dorado in 1618.
The share prices of Chevron, Exxon and ConocoPhillips have soared on the prospects of windfall profit.
Investors might wish to think about the 6 million Glock 17, Beretta 92 and other handguns at large in the country, and the protection fee that the paramilitary “colectivos” armed with Russian AK-103 assault rifles will exact to let a single barrel move.
Trump’s behaviour will inspire a fresh generation of proto-Bolivarians to read Eduardo Galeano’s classic, Open Veins of Latin America, and some will want to blow up oil rigs as the defining symbol of the returning gringo feo.
One is reminded of Che Guevara, a young Argentine doctor working in Guatemala in 1954 when the CIA toppled a left-wing government as a favour for the United Fruit Company and its well-connected US stockholders. Five years later, Che helped lead the Cuban revolution.
Ten years later, there were rural guerilla........