President Donald Trump advocated for taking oil as a cost of liberating a country in the chapter “Take the Oil” of his 2011 bestselling book Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again.
After capturing former Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, noting the U.S. would run Venezuela until the time for a peaceful transition, and revealing that U.S. oil companies would rebuild Venezuela’s oil infrastructure, on Saturday, Trump announced on Tuesday that Venezuela will turn over 30-50 million barrels of “High Quality, Sanctioned Oil” to the United States.
“This Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!” he noted.
The country holds 303 billion barrels in its reserves, per the Kobeissi Letter.
Anyone who read Trump’s 2011 book, Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again, is likely unsurprised by U.S. involvement in Venezuela’s oil infrastructure, as its second chapter is titled “Take The Oil.”
In the chapter, the president contends that countries the United States liberates from the rule of a dictator, like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, should compensate America in some capacity for such a “priceless gift.”
Trump writes to start the chapter:
When you do someone a favor, they say thank you. When you give someone a loan, they pay you back. And when a nation like the United States sacrifices thousands of lives of its own young servicemen and women and more than a trillion dollars to bring freedom to the people of Iraq, the least—the absolute least—the Iraqis should do is pick up the tab for their own liberation.
How much is it worth to them to be rid of the bloodthirsty dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and to have gained a democracy in which they can vote and have a freely elected parliament? In reality, that’s a priceless gift, although after being blown to pieces, many people think that they were better off before. When I say they should pay us back, I’m not even talking about cash out of their pockets. All I’m asking is that they give us, temporarily, a few flows of oil—enough to help pay us back and help take care of the tens of thousands of families and children whose brave loved ones died or were injured while securing Iraqi freedom. [Emphasis Added]
Trump’s philosophy in Venezuela strongly echoes the policy he advocated for in Iraq in 2011. On Saturday, he stated that the United States would “run” Venezuela in part because the world cannot risk another Maduro-like dictator filling the power vacuum.
“We can’t take a chance that somebody else takes over Venezuela that doesn’t have the good of the Venezuelan people in mind…we’re not going to let that happen,” the president said at Mar-a-Lago.
In 2011, he advocated against turning power over “to people who hate us, and leave.”
“Call me old school, but I believe in the old warrior’s credo that ‘to the victor go the spoils.’ In other words, we don’t fight a war, hand over the keys to people who hate us, and leave,” he wrote in Time to Get Tough.
“We win a war, take the oil to repay the financial costs we’ve incurred, and in so doing, treat Iraq and everybody else fairly,” he added.
Trump also wrote about the importance of negotiators who “fight fiercely” for American interests when dealing with foreign governments, offering intense criticism of Obama-era “cream puff” diplomats:
Look, I do deals—big deals—all the time. I know and work with all the toughest operators in the world of high-stakes global finance. These are hard-driving, vicious, cutthroat financial killers, the kind of people who leave blood all over the boardroom table and fight to the bitter end to gain maximum advantage. And guess what? Those are exactly the kind of negotiators the United States needs, not these cream puff “diplomats” Obama sends around the globe to play patty cake with foreign governments. No, we need smart people with titanium spines and big brains who love America enough to fight fiercely for our interests.
Trump is set to meet with 17 oil companies at 2:30 p.m. Eastern on Friday in the Cabinet Room on investment opportunities to restore oil infrastructure in Venezuela.
“Following the announcement of President Trump’s historic energy deal with Venezuela, American oil companies will come to the White House to discuss investment opportunities that will restore Venezuelan oil infrastructure,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told Breitbart News on Friday.
“The American people, energy companies, and the Venezuelan people will all greatly benefit from these new, unprecedented investments in Venezuela’s oil infrastructure thanks to President Trump,” she added.
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