In 2007, Hugo Chávez sent men with rifles into the Orinoco Belt. They walked into fields Americans had surveyed, Americans had drilled, and American engineering had made productive, and told ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips to take a minority stake in their own work or get out. Those two got out. Chevron stayed and ate two decades of abuse for it. Chávez then handed what he had taken to party loyalists, ran it into the ground, and left his people eating zoo animals while sitting on the largest proven oil reserves on the planet.
Give President Trump the credit he has earned. Nicolás Maduro is gone. The Strait of Hormuz is open. And Friday night, the President announced Venezuela’s fields are opening back up to American capital. Chevron and Halliburton are moving in with billions. Exxon and ConocoPhillips are still on the sidelines, gun-shy after 2007 and unconvinced that dilapidated infrastructure and a 1999 constitution declaring the oil unsellable are worth the legal risk. Marco Rubio calls it a huge win. On the strategic question, he is right. A hemisphere where the crude comes from Caracas instead of Kharg Island is a hemisphere where the ayatollahs have one less card to play.
To the people clutching pearls about American re-entry: we were there first, we were there legally, and we left at gunpoint. You do not get to seize a man’s property, wreck it, starve your own people with it, and then cry colonialism when he comes back with a contract instead of a rifle.
Unfortunately, the structure of this deal is socialist, and I am not going to pretend otherwise because a Republican signed it.
Read what the Wall Street Journal actually reported. The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, an office built to make national security loans, is taking a 35 percent equity stake in a private company called North American Blue Energy Partners through penny warrants, plus the right to buy a fifth of its production at cost. We get 17 oil fields, 65 billion barrels of oil, and rights for a century. The company will be run by Alejandro Betancourt, a Venezuelan businessman investigated for money laundering in Spain and Switzerland, close to Delcy Rodríguez, and a friend of the President’s.
We have seen this movie three times this year. Washington took roughly 10 percent of Intel, the weakest American chipmaker, and called it the CHIPS Act. Washington took a golden share in U.S. Steel as the price of the Nippon deal. Now the Department of Defense will be a shareholder in a Venezuelan oil venture.
The problems are not theoretical. The federal government is now part-owner of the second-largest corporate holder of proven reserves on earth, which makes it the business partner of a competitor to the American companies it spent months begging to come back. Ed Hirs at the University of Houston asked the obvious question: why is the United States building a rival to the American oil patch? A friend of the President got the concession, which is what we spent four years screaming about when it was a Biden and a Chinese energy company. And when Venezuela’s next government challenges this in court, and it will, the United States is not the referee. It is a litigant with a balance sheet.
This is the same error the socialist left makes, arriving from the other direction. The left wants the state to own the means of production because it distrusts the market. The post-liberal right wants the state to own the means of production because it distrusts the market too, but it calls it national security. Both decide that a bureaucrat should hold the shares instead of the people who built the thing. Coolidge understood that the government’s job is to stay under the playing field and keep it level so David can still beat Goliath. It is not to buy a piece of Goliath.
Notwithstanding all of that, on balance, this is a good deal. It is good for Venezuela, which needs capital, jobs, and an economy that is not a criminal enterprise. It is good for the United States, which needs crude that does not travel through a strait Iran keeps trying to mine. It is good for a hemisphere that spent twenty years watching what socialism does to a rich country.
But the structure is rotten, and rot spreads. A future president should sell the warrants, divest the Intel shares, hand back the golden share, and get the Treasury and the Pentagon out of the equity business.
That same president had better not let up on the harder half of the job, turning Venezuela toward free elections and the West rather than settling for a compliant, unelected government that signs whatever we put in front of it. Delcy Rodríguez was Maduro’s vice president. She is not the destination.
Chávez took it with rifles. We are taking it back with paperwork, which is the better instrument. Let us make sure the paperwork ends up in private hands, where it belonged in the first place. But President Trump deserves credit for a dramatic shift in the right direction.
Somebody wrote the word “non-concur” in a classified binder on August 14, and now you and I and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps can all read about it.
The Secretary of Defense Orders Book comes out twice a month and lays out where every American ship, plane, and soldier is. In the August 14 edition, according to the Washington Post, the heads of European Command, Pacific Command, and Southern Command, along with the Chief of Naval Operations, formally told Pete Hegseth they disagree with extending their forces for the Iran fight and will carry out the order anyway. Admiral Daryl Caudle told him barely a quarter of the Navy’s destroyer fleet is ready to deploy. One person familiar with the assessment summed up the mood of the uniformed leadership as “too much for too long.”
That is the third leak in a sequence. First came the reporting that our defensive stocks were being burned through, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimating about 65 percent of Patriot interceptors expended between February and July and THAAD inventories down at least 38 percent, and a U.S. official telling ABC News both are “extremely low.” Then came Reuters, reporting the Army has used “virtually all” of its ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles. Now come the generals and admirals telling the Secretary of Defense, in writing, that we cannot keep this up.
Whether every detail in those stories is accurate matters less than what a cornered adversary does with them.
Brett McGurk, who served four presidents and is nobody’s Republican partisan, argued at CNN this week that for the first time, Iran is genuinely losing. He has the better of the argument. The blockade reimposed in mid-July has stopped Iranian oil exports, shipping through Hormuz has recovered to two-thirds of prewar levels, energy prices have stayed stable, and the Iranian economy is set to contract more than 5 percent this year, with inflation near 70 percent. Tehran’s entire theory of this war was to raise the gas price until the midterms made President Trump quit. That theory is collapsing.
A regime watching its leverage evaporate has just been handed a public inventory of our shortages. It has every incentive to move first, and to move where it hurts, which is Gulf energy infrastructure, with assistance by Hezbollah against Israel, Iranian proxies in Iraq against the United States and Saudi Arabia, and the Houthis in Yemen shutting down the Red Sea. If the leaks are accurate, they tell the Iranians when to go. If they are false, they are bait, and a desperate regime is precisely the kind that takes bait. Either way, the odds that Iran tries to break our economic stranglehold through military pressure on our allies went up this weekend.
The military’s warning is narrower than the headline suggests. The commanders are not telling Hegseth that they cannot fight Iran. They are telling him they cannot hold more than 50,000 troops on alert indefinitely for a conflict with no anticipated end date, which is the phrase Admiral Caudle used. The Army and the Air Force actually concurred with extending their forces. The objection is to open-ended attrition, not to force.
That points in the same direction as McGurk’s analysis does. If Iran is losing and knows it, and if the uniformed leadership is telling the Secretary of Defense that slow and indefinite is the one thing we cannot sustain, then the answer to an Iranian first move is not another six months of tit for tat. It is fast and overwhelming, aimed at ending this regime’s ability to do any of it again, with Israel turned loose to finish what it started in February, and our partners in the region authorized to move with us. The generals have not argued against that. They have argued against the alternative.
If the leaks are accurate, the civilian leadership within the Pentagon has badly mismanaged this war. Multiple people in the administration confirm what people inside the defense industry told me months ago: nobody ever sent the signal to ramp up production. The Pentagon never gave that order to Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman before the shooting started, possibly out of fear of tipping off Beijing and Tehran. Congress has funded the government by continuing resolution since the Obama years, and you cannot sign multiyear production contracts against money that expires in six weeks. Since the 1993 “last supper,” the Pentagon dinner where Les Aspin and Bill Perry told defense executives that shrinking post Cold War budgets would support only half of them, deliberate government policy has consolidated the primes into system integrators running 8 to 9 percent margins. An interceptor costs roughly $4 million and can take two years to build. You cannot decide in the fifth month of a war that you would like more of them in the sixth.
The isolationist right is quietly content with all of this, because an America that runs out of missiles is an America that comes home, which is what they wanted anyway. The progressive left wants defense budgets starved to reach the same place by a different road. Xi Jinping is taking notes on how long our magazine lasts.
The commanders who wrote “non-concur” did their jobs. They told the truth up the chain in the one place they are supposed to tell it, and President Trump deserves real credit for a blockade that is working and for reopening the Strait when much of Washington said it could not be done. The failure sits upstream of all of them, in the years nobody picked up a phone and told a factory to start building. Now the word is on the front page where Tehran can read it, and we are about to find out what the Iranians do with it.
The Vice President has patently refused to offer up much criticism of Tucker Carlson.
In the past three weeks, Abdul El-Sayed has had to distance himself from Hasan Piker because he invited Piker to campaign with him and Piker is a raging anti-American a—hole who is also an antisemite and Mao fan.
History shows Tucker Carlson lobbied for J.D. Vance to be Donald Trump’s running mate. History shows Tucker Carlson’s son worked for J.D. Vance. History shows time and time again J.D. Vance has refused to distance himself from Tucker Carlson or condemn Tucker Carlson’s rhetoric.
Now, Tucker Carlson, who is on the record insisting J.D. Vance is his preference for the presidency, is also insisting President Trump needs to be immediately removed from office.
Just based on the same standard the press has for Abdul El-Sayed, you’d think they’d ask the Vice President about Tucker Carlson. And, like El-Sayed, will Vance refuse to really condemn Carlson as E-Sayed has refused to condemn Piker? Or will Vance finally get a Sister Souljah moment?
