It seems that America would do virtually anything under the sun in its quest for oil. The scramble blinds the US to respect for sovereign borders or international law.
When, earlier in the year, President Donald Trump threatened that Washington would “take control of Venezuela’s massive oil reserves” and “recruit American companies to invest billions of dollars to refurbish the country’s gutted oil industry”, the normal world dismissed these as just trademark Trumpian gaffes.
To their utter shock, the comic in the Oval Office topped his cake with an unusual icing — the arrest of a foreign head of state, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who was captured in Caracas and swiftly spirited off to New York to face trial.
Venezuela is reportedly “sitting on a massive 303 billion barrels worth of crude — about a fifth of the world’s global reserve”.
Now the brains trust at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue have shifted their gaze to Iran where, in the process, a double strike of Israeli-US bombardments claimed the life of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The axis of evil forged between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a bad omen for world peace.
It was the self-same Netanyahu who congratulated Trump on his “bold and historic” action when Maduro was removed, Hollywood-style, from Caracas.
If we didn’t know better, we’d hazard a guess that Trump was taking up cudgels on behalf of Israel, who have always had an axe to grind with Iran.
But we know that attacking Iran has always been a bucket-list item for Trump, on his second return to high office.
During the presidency of Barack Obama, the most cerebral argument in Trump’s war of words with the first black potus was that Obama would start a war with Iran because he was “weak”.
He repeated this assault on the person of Obama in several subsequent tweets on the social media platform that is now X.
Raining bombs on Tehran elicited an angry outburst from the Iranians, who unleashed a torrent of their own strikes on Israel and several Middle East states housing US military bases.
Trump’s justification for striking Iranian nuclear facilities is said to have been a unilateral decision, with no congressional approval.
So too was the seizure of Maduro.
All Trump and his cheerleader Netanyahu have done is drag the rest of us to the precipice of World War III, a move all abstemious global voices should condemn in the strongest possible terms.
All Trump and his cheerleader Netanyahu have done is drag the rest of us to the precipice of World War III, a move all abstemious global voices should condemn in the strongest possible terms