Few figures better embody the morality—or its absence—of the Trump Administration than the Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt. In his native country, he is known as a bolichico, a reference to the class of politically connected opportunists who grew conspicuously wealthy in the shadow of the Bolivarian revolution led by the demagogic President Hugo Chávez. Betancourt is believed to have been an unindicted co-conspirator in a U.S. federal investigation, around a decade ago, into the embezzlement of more than a billion dollars from Venezuela’s state-owned oil company through various channels, including Florida real estate; though he escaped criminal indictment—and has denied any wrongdoing—other associates, including a cousin, did not. Last year, Betancourt, who was then based in the U.K., faced travel restrictions amid an ongoing probe by authorities in Switzerland, where he was wanted as part of a money-laundering investigation linked to Swiss bank accounts. (When contacted by reporters, his lawyers point out that he has not been charged with or found guilty of any crime.) But, as a Washington Post story recently reported, Trump Administration officials appear to have intervened in that case; the Swiss extradition request to Britain was dropped in May, allowing Betancourt to travel to the United States multiple times. And now we may understand why: this week, Betancourt emerged as a key intermediary in what President Donald Trump styled “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY”—an agreement brokered with the interim government of Venezuela, led by President Delcy Rodríguez, which, according to a White House fact sheet, confers majority control of “more than 65 billion barrels of proven oil reserves in Venezuela” to the United States, with hundred-year concessions for seventeen oil fields.
The deal is astonishing, though perhaps not surprising: since January, when the U.S. successfully carried out an operation to capture Chávez’s unpopular successor, Nicolás Maduro, Trump has made it clear that Venezuela’s vast troves of oil were at the heart of his interests—even as his aides stuck to a different script about Maduro’s regime as a narco-trafficking threat. While Maduro sits in a New York City jail, Rodríguez, his former Vice-President, has turned into a willing Trump client. Betancourt, according to reports, played an integral role in clinching this arrangement. Now Betancourt’s company, North American Blue Energy Partners, based in Barbados, could be one of the first private firms to directly participate in Venezuela’s oil industry since it was nationalized half a century ago. It will be the prime vehicle through which the concessions granted to the U.S. will be administered, in conjunction with the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital. The potential scale of what it has been granted could make the company one of the biggest oil titans in the world.
In a televised address, Rodríguez hailed the “endless” benefits awaiting Venezuela’s oil industry, which, after years of cronyist mismanagement, is desperate for foreign investment and modernization. Trump cast the deal as an unqualified win for the American people, consolidating U.S. control over the hemisphere’s greatest store of untapped petroleum—and, as a consequence, supposedly lowering gas prices for American consumers. But energy markets weren’t as enthused: oil prices went up in the days after Trump announced the deal, a rise stoked in part by continued hostilities over the Strait of Hormuz which are a consequence of Trump’s decision to wage war on Iran. Even in the best of circumstances, it could take years for the Venezuelan supply to help replenish the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve—depleted by both this Administration and its predecessor—and possibly a hundred billion dollars in new investment to ramp up Venezuelan output and develop its uncultivated oil fields.
The deal, though, offers a clear distillation of Trump’s world view. It’s materialist, transactional, and wholly untethered to any concerns about the rule of law or what’s right for the Venezuelan people. Rodríguez’s government is viewed by many Venezuelans as illegitimate, and the deal with Trump, which auctions off a major chunk of the nation’s resources, appears to some experts to have been settled outside of the country’s constitutional constraints . “You opted to push an asset grab, an unconstitutional deal with an illegitimate oppressive government, instead of using US leadership to re-establish constitutional rule and democracy first, and then deal with a legitimate government that could have made credible long-term commitments, in due course,” Ricardo Hausmann, a Venezuelan economist at Harvard University, lamented in a social-media post addressed to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Critics of the deal exist among both the Chavista old guard and the pro-democracy opposition. Rafael Ramírez, a former energy minister and the head of Venezuela’s state-run oil company under Chávez, called the agreement a “sellout” that opened “the doors to the new colonialism of the United States.” José Amalio Graterol, a member of the political party of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and opposition leader María Corina Machado, who has been sidelined by Trump, denounced the agreement as one signed by “those who usurp power,” and warned that it could be “null and void” in the future under a different political dispensation. “Trump’s agenda in Venezuela is fundamentally extractivist,” Tony Frangie Mawad, a Venezuelan journalist and political analyst, told me. “But the only way this can genuinely benefit Venezuelans and contribute to a sustained national recovery is if the agreements are transparent, designed under legitimate and inclusive institutions,” and take place amid a broader political opening.
Such a transition seems to be nowhere in sight, thanks to Trump’s investment in Rodríguez, who in a matter of months has turned a country that was the U.S.’s hemispheric foe into a place that Trump quipped could be the “fifty-first state.” White House officials argue that their more muscular approach to the Americas, sometimes called the “Donroe Doctrine,” has undermined Russian and Chinese interests in the region. But they also appear to be following suit: Imdat Oner, a Turkish former diplomat, once stationed in Caracas, who is now a scholar at Florida International University, likened the new deal to vague, “non-transparent” arrangements regarding Venezuela’s oil which were made in the recent past with both Beijing and Moscow. He told me, though, that the deal may guarantee Rodríguez’s political survival: Trump is “happy with this current situation, with the current actors and current institutional setup.” (On Wednesday, when asked about future elections in Venezuela, Trump told reporters that the country is “not ready yet” and said that he is “getting along great” with the current regime.) Mariano de Alba, a Venezuelan lawyer and an associate fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, told me that the opacity surrounding the deal could mean that Venezuela is “walking toward more corruption, with a lot more money on top of everything that has been already robbed that’s going to disappear in the hands of the very few to the detriment of very many.” Eight months after Trump’s removal of Maduro, he added, economic conditions within Venezuela have only continued to worsen.
Trump’s power play also harks back to a tradition of Yankee imperialism. House Democrats have accused the President of engaging in the “pillaging” of Venezuela, a critique of U.S. hemispheric policy long heard from the Latin American left. Trumpist interference is a major theme in next month’s election in Brazil, where the incumbent President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is hoping to channel popular disquiet over coercive U.S. trade policies, and other measures that Trump has pursued to punish his government; Lula’s right-wing rivals have a conspicuously close connection to the White House.
Trump officials often tout their belief in a politics where might makes right, in a world “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” as the White House adviser Stephen Miller infamously told CNN. The Administration stated in its National Security Strategy, released last November, that the “outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations.” Yet, on so many fronts, Trump’s assertion of that power appears to be backfiring. He can’t tame the Iranian regime, despite nearly half a year of military and economic pressure. He is in the midst of a spiralling trade war with Canada, whose center-left government is winning support with its defiance; on Monday, the ruling Liberals swept three by-elections, a wave that analysts ascribe to renewed Canadian nationalism and antipathy to Trump. In a recent column in the Daily Telegraph, Daniel Hannan, a former Conservative Party official and a prominent right-wing commentator, attacked Trump for “single-handedly destroying global conservatism” with his disruptive politics. “He has created a sense that it is better to be America’s enemy than its friend, for it buys its enemies and sells its friends,” Hannan wrote. “Never once has he spoken about Vladimir Putin in the way he talks of Canadians, Norwegians, South Koreans and other old partners.” Polling in foreign countries shows a dramatic shift in attitudes toward the United States. “Much of the world is losing faith in the United States’ ability to serve as the leader of a liberal international order. And these new reservations, deeper than those of the past, may prove hard to reverse,” Richard Wike, a director at the Pew Research Center, wrote.
Trump and his allies, of course, have no interest in the “liberal international order,” or in espousing any sort of internationalism. During a speech in Saudi Arabia, in May of last year, Trump tried to set himself apart from earlier traditions of U.S. foreign policy, scoffing at his predecessors’ track record in the Middle East and a generation of “so-called nation-builders ” and “interventionists” who “wrecked far more nations than they built.” But, in the past year, Trump has left a trail of his own wreckage, whether through strikes in Iran or a transatlantic relationship battered by his constant attacks on the European Union and his imperialist designs on Greenland. Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of the forthcoming book “Bringing Order to Anarchy: Governing the World to Come,” said that Trump’s “core instincts” of securing American primacy and control are “intuitive and sensible” to the average voter. But “when he turns the instincts into actual policies, the results are disastrous,” Kupchan told me. “Instead of building a kind of benign sphere of influence that countries in North, Central, and South America feel attracted to, he’s created a malign sphere of coercion in which most countries are running for cover.” ♦
