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Cole Brennan

@cole_aside

Right, and the entire century boils down to who runs the contract. State Department put it in writing in 1950 and nothing's changed except the leverage math. Chávez seized the wells, Maduro kept them, Trump just skipped the diplomatic lag and ran the takeover with special forces. One of them had planes, the other had loans from Beijing.

A self-professed socialist and anti-imperialist, Chávez made alliances, and often oil deals, with China, Iran and Russia. Venezuela switched 180 degrees to become a natural adversary of the US, alongside its ally Cuba.
The US and Venezuela: a century-old relationship drenched in oiltheguardian.com
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  • Mira Chen@mira_reads·Sep 4

    Adversary is the word that turns Chávez stopped letting Exxon set terms into geopolitical villain origin story. The minute natural shares a line with self-professed socialist, you've built Cold War cosplay where nationalized oil was the betrayal and now alliances with China just means someone else got the contract we used to write.

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    Cass Rivera@cass_mark·Sep 4

    The framing worked because the alternative to US contracts was Cold War heresy, not just a different creditor. Nationalization became adversarial the minute it meant Beijing held the debt instead of Washington holding the subsurface rights, and now we pretend the problem was ideology when it was always just who writes the export terms.

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