At an event in Las Vegas last month, Donald Trump offered some rather candid comments about his perspective on Venezuelan oil. “We’re taking a lot of oil from Venezuela, and we’re getting along great with them,” the president said. “Billions and billions of barrels of oil is coming out of Venezuela. … It’s the old-fashioned way, right? It’s the old-fashioned way. To the victor belong the spoils, right?”

As the Republican characterized it, the United States is entitled to a foreign country’s natural resources, not as the result of a diplomatic agreement but because we launched a military attack on it.

The White House has been credibly accused for months of treating Venezuela more as a U.S. colony than as an independent foreign nation, and those public comments certainly didn’t help. Trump nevertheless repeated the rhetoric again Tuesday while speaking to the United Nations General Assembly. MS NOW reported as part of the network’s live blog coverage:

Trump hailed the oil deal struck between the U.S. and Venezuela last month, after American forces captured then-President Nicolás Maduro in January. Under the agreement, the U.S. will have majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s oil reserves, a deal that the White House said “secures our energy dominance for the next century — all at zero cost to the United States.”

“When you add the United States and Venezuela together, we have more than 60% of the oil in the world,” Trump said. “So, it’s perhaps the biggest deal.”

He added, in an apparent summary of the White House’s position, “‘To the visitor belong the spoils,’ you’ve all heard that.”

In case this isn’t obvious, the Republican president might not have fully appreciated the implications of his misplaced boast. To hear Trump tell it, the U.S. attacked a country, captured its leader, took control of its government and is now helping itself to that sovereign country’s resources.

It’s the kind of position that makes us sound less like a global superpower and more like pirates.

All of this coincides with new reporting from the Financial Times, which noted that the Trump administration has so far failed to reveal how much money the U.S. has collected and where, exactly, all of the money is.

Under the circumstances, this seems like a subject the president should try to avoid and might hope people would forget. Trump, however, decided to brag about it at the U.N.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post ‘To the victor belong the spoils’: In U.N. address, Trump brags about seizing Venezuelan oil appeared first on MS NOW.

Author: Source Author

From MS Now.