US vs Venezuela

[Kalam]

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https://twitter.com/trend_bullish/status/2011046798312554803

--This is something that Zeihan has been saying for a long time about Venezuela. Decades of neglect, mismanagement and corruption by Chavez and Maduro have basically destroyed the oil infrastructure that was in place before nationalization. It would have to be completely rebuilt from scratch, which would be a giant investment of tens of billions of dollars. And Venezuela's political/social situation makes this a completely untenable process.

Zeihan has been predicting for awhile that Venezuela is on a progression towards collapse and anarchy, and the Trump administration's actions are only accelerating this process.

Unfortunately Venezuela has the same problem most of the rest of the the Third World has, in that it is filled with Third Worlders, who collectively dont have the intelligence, organizational capabilities or liberal ethos to make a complex industrial society work. If we are ever going to get the Third World to work, at some point everyone has to just acknowledge that these places need to be run by Europeans or East Asians. Unfortunately, the opposite is happening in that the West is importing and empowering Third Worlders and their pathologies, so the West is falling apart like the Third world, instead of the other way around.

I said the oil was a fade the day this maneuver went down.

Here’s a Zeihan test. Does he say anything about rare earths?

There was no plan. Trump declared himself the "Acting President of Venezuela" and his doctors shook their head.

--Nothing related to Venezuela. But obviously that is a Zeihan honeypot subject he talks about a lot.

He gets enough stuff wrong, I think it is fair to acknowledge when he gets something right; and from the second Trump turned his eye on Venezuela, Zeihan has been adamant this was a fade, as you say.

Again, I keep saying. For whatever reason Trump REALLY doesn't like the IRGC. It is something he actually personally cares about, unlike most of his foreign policy where he doesn't really care and can just be bribed.

And consistent with this ethos, it seems the only real objective was to disrupt IRGC operations with Venezuela (drugs, oil, terrorism) and no real plan or interest beyond this.

[desertrunner]

U.S. completes first sale of Venezuelan oil, valued at $500 million, official says

Parts of the articles I found interesting-

Proceeds from the sale are to be split among Venezuelans, U.S. companies and the U.S. government, at the discretion of the federal government, the White House has said.

The president met with a number of top U.S. oil executives at the White House last week to discuss their needs and concerns. At that gathering, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods told the president that his company had its assets seized under two previous waves of nationalization in Venezuela, and reentering a third time "would require some pretty significant changes from what we've historically seen here and what is currently the state." He called the country "uninvestable" until changes are made to the country's legal system and commercial structure.

ExoonMobil is one of the favorite stocks I own, so I am watching to see how this plays out.