Throughout his time in public life, Donald Trump has flip-flopped on just about every conceivable issue. He was pro-choice, and then he overturned Roe v. Wade. He was a lifelong Democrat, then became a Republican. He was for invading Iraq, then against it. He wanted to ban TikTok, and now he loves it. He was for gun control, now he’s against it. And on and on.
But for decades now, he’s been pretty consistent on one thing: Enthusiasm for invading other countries in order to steal their resources, especially oil.
Trump has repeatedly returned to this theme over the years. His mantra is, “We take the oil.” He advocated stealing Iraq’s oil reserves during the US occupation, saying, “We should have kept the oil.” He’s floated stealing oil from Libya and Syria. For the social media-inclined, here some unhinged tweets demonstrating the president’s preoccupation with seizing foreign oil reserves:
Trump has made no secret about the fact that he sees taking Venezuela’s oil as a key upside to the recent military operation against that country. He promised windfall profits to American oil firms, and baselessly alleged that Venezuela stole America’s oil. (For their part, oil executives have called the country “uninvestable.”)
Trump has scoffed at the concept of the countries in his crosshairs being “sovereign nations.” The clear implication is: Might makes right, and smaller sovereign nations are subject to the full power of the United States once he sets his sight on their oil reserves. That’s the law of the jungle, and it’s the new order that Trump is bringing to the international stage.
Americans have a lot on their minds right now: inflation, the broken health care system, the housing and higher ed affordability crises, and the job market. Few of them sit around thinking, “I’m sure glad we’re launching foreign wars to steal other countries’ oil right now.” Polls show that today, most Americans want Venezuela to run its own affairs, not America.
Trump has re-made the Republican Party in his “America First,” image. Now it’s clear what that means: America unchained, free to invade and pillage and steal, and do so in broad daylight, without even the pretense of doing so for a higher or more noble purpose. We’ve gone from high-minded concepts of nation-building and democracy-promotion, to our new normal of plunder as policy.
How exactly this benefits your average American citizen is unclear. Experts warn that there is likely to be no appreciable drop in gas prices thanks to the military action, and they might even tick higher due to all the chaos and instability. Meanwhile, prices continue to shoot upward for other household goods, a problem Trump seems to have decided to ignore for the time being.
Trump—who received no fewer than five draft deferments—has called himself an “old-fashioned warrior” for his willingness to unapologetically go to war for oil. He’s not a warrior, but he is old-fashioned. His foreign policy ideas are a throwback to the turn of the 20th Century, the last time we had a president who so brazenly advocated a policy of outright theft of other countries’ resources.
Trump doesn’t know any of that because he doesn’t know anything about history, and it’s the rest of us who get to suffer the consequences of his “we take the oil” jingoism.
Home of the Brave is an initiative dedicated to exposing this administration’s corruption, cruelty, and lawlessness.
