President Trump revealed Saturday that he had been planning for months to invade Venezuela and that the real prize was the nation’s vast oil reserves. The seizure of President Nicolás Maduro as an alleged drug lord was more pretext than purpose.
It was an act of naked, indefensible aggression. There is no other way to describe it. It was, as U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said, “a dangerous precedent.”
That goes double for our own nation. Trump has demonstrated he’ll stop at nothing. He refused to consult Congress or inform the so-called Gang of Eight, the congressional leaders and intelligence committee chairs who are supposed to be told in advance of any U.S. military adventure.
If he’s allowed to get away with that, as he likely will, what’s next? Cancelling the next elections? Declaring martial law?
No sympathy should be wasted on Maduro, the ruthless dictator who was arrested with his wife and brought to New York to stand trial. He stole the last election to stay in power, and continues to plunge his country into political disaster and economic despair.
But the arrests of the Maduros were plainly the cover for a scheme to seize Venezuela’s vast petroleum reserves and exploit them for the benefit of American oil companies.
We know this from Trump’s own words: “We’re going to have our very large U.S. oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”
And to make money for themselves, to be sure.
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