Oil.
For the past century, oil has shaped the rise and fall of nations, from the trenches of Mesopotamia in the Great War to the deserts of the Persian Gulf. It is a dark current beneath what we call “foreign policy.”
SPONSORED
Every day, data brokers are trying to sell your personal info. And who’s buying it? Best case: companies target you with ads. Worst case: scammers and identity thieves.
Keep your info off the Dark Web with Incogni. It scrubs your personal data from the web better than any other service, confronting the world’s data brokers on your behalf.
If they can’t find you, they can’t scam you. Use code ALLSIDES for 55% off annual Incogni plans.
The conflict between the US and Venezuela is no exception. Oil has always been the foundation of the pipelines, the refineries, the dollars that once flowed freely between Houston and Caracas. Today that relationship is at its lowest point in decades. Washington does not recognize Nicolás Maduro’s re-election, sanctions have choked off billions in oil revenue, and the Venezuelan economy has collapsed under the weight of it all.
The human cost is impossible to ignore. More than 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled their country; over 600,000 now live in the US. Even up here in northern Utah, we’ve welcomed new neighbors from Caracas and Maracaibo – families who never imagined they would end up in the Rocky Mountains.
And now the tension has moved from sanctions to warships.
This autumn, the US sent eleven more ships, fifteen thousand troops, and a nuclear-powered submarine into the Caribbean. American missiles have struck boats accused of running drugs for the cartels and gangs that have filled the vacuum in Venezuela. Caracas calls it “imperialist aggression” aimed at seizing the world’s largest oil reserves. Washington says it is simply fighting narco-trafficking networks that have spread from Venezuela across the hemisphere. Both sides have their talking points; the truth, as usual, is messier.
The latest step was President Trump closing most Venezuelan airspace, a move that feels like the calm before the storm.
Headlines across the political spectrum echo the very thing Trump has long said he opposes: war. Fox News (Right bias) fears a showdown, and Al Jazeera (Lean Left) speaks of war.
For years America’s oil-driven wars and interventions felt far away, someone else’s problem on the evening news. This one is different. Venezuela is in our own backyard. Its refugees are in our cities, its gangs are in our headlines, its instability lands on our doorstep.
Immigration, the issue that dominated this past election, is now tangled up with the oldest motive of all: control of energy. As ICE carries out raids in American neighborhoods and the administration promises the largest deportation operation in history, we are forced to admit a hard fact: what happens in Venezuela does not stay in Venezuela.
Do we keep treating the symptoms – more sanctions, more ships, more deportations – or can we finally deal with the cause? Before us, we have a failed state sitting on an ocean of oil, bleeding people and crime into the rest of the hemisphere, and black stuff still runs the game.
Chris Mangum is a soldier in the U.S. Army National Guard. He has a Center bias. Reviewed by Product Manager Evan Wagner (Lean Left) and News Analyst and Social Media Editor Malayna Bizer (Right).
