“We don’t need Venezuela’s oil. We have plenty of oil in the United States,” the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, told an NBC interviewer the day after US troops snatched Nicolas Maduro from Caracas last month.
“What we’re not going to allow is for the oil industry in Venezuela to be controlled by adversaries of the United States,” Rubio added, going on to name the US’s list of usual suspects: China, Russia, Iran. “They’re not even in this continent; this is the Western Hemisphere. This is where we live.”
While it is indeed unlikely that Donald Trump’s invasion of Venezuela was intended solely to open up access to the country’s deep oil reserves for American companies, the oil factor speaks to broader forces that are also at play. Specifically, experts openDemocracy spoke with pointed to oil’s role in weakening the US dollar’s position as the financial instrument of choice on the international stage, which is in turn reducing the US’s global economic dominance.
