Notices by Miguel Afonso Caetano (remixtures@tldr.nettime.org)

"In his essay “The West’s Last Chance” (January/February 2026), Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, correctly divines the future trajectory of world order. “The global South,” he writes, “will decide whether geopolitics in the next era leans toward cooperation, fragmentation, or domination.” He’s also right in asserting that “this is the last chance for Western countries to convince the rest of the world that they are capable of dialogue rather than monologue.” Yet to have a dialogue, one must listen. The sad truth is that the West does not seem willing to listen to the global South.

The countries of the global South do not all share the dominant Western perspectives about world order. Stubb emphasizes the challenges posed by China and Russia. But many of the 3.3 billion Asians who are not Chinese, along with many of the approximately 1.5 billion people who live in Africa and the over 660 million who live in Latin America, view China and Russia differently. Western policymakers rarely try to understand why. China and Russia may loom menacingly in Western imaginations, but people in the global South do not think of them in that way—nor should they be expected to. Indeed, the rest of the world has had as much, perhaps more, to fear from the West in recent history as it has from the West’s autocratic competitors. To his credit, Stubb urges the governments of Western countries to take the demands and interests of the global South seriously. But engaging with the global South is not just an exercise in listening. It also requires Western governments to reassess their own positions and approaches to a world they have long taken for granted."

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/dream-palace-west

#Geopolitics #Multilateralism #GlobalSourth #China #India #Imperialism

""The West insists that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked. Of course, Ukraine never attacked Russia, but the West’s policies toward Moscow since the collapse of the Soviet Union helped precipitate the crisis. Many leading Western thinkers, including the American diplomat George Kennan and the Australian intellectual Owen Harries, had warned decades ago that the eastward expansion of NATO would eventually provoke a Russian backlash. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva captured a more nuanced view on the war in Ukraine when he said, in May 2022, “Putin shouldn’t have invaded Ukraine. But it’s not just Putin who is guilty. The United States and the EU are also guilty. What was the reason for the Ukraine invasion? NATO? Then the United States and Europe should have said: ‘Ukraine won’t join NATO.’ That would have solved the problem.” A 2015 video in which the American political scientist John Mearsheimer explains how the West provoked Russian aggression, drawing from his 2014 essay in these pages, has been watched over 30 million times on YouTube—and widely shared in the global South.

Some Western leaders dismiss these views as amoral and as anathema to the principles that Western democracies seek to uphold in the world. Here, the simultaneous fighting in Ukraine and Gaza in 2024 and 2025 undermined Europe’s moral standing. Europeans have rightfully expressed horror over the killings of innocent civilians in Ukraine, but EU leaders remained mostly silent as Israel destroyed Gaza. Not only have many more civilians died in Gaza than in Ukraine, but Israeli military actions, according to estimates published in Foreign Affairs and elsewhere, may have led to the deaths of five to ten percent of Gaza’s prewar population—a staggering figure, exponentially higher than the toll of Russia’s war in Ukraine. No one respects an adulterous priest who preaches marital fidelity in church. But this is how European leaders are seen in the global South."

Sinceramente, por mais que tente, não consigo discutir sobre Política com alguém que não é da opinião que TODOS os seres humanos - independentemente da sua raça, origem étnica, religião, género, idade, nível de literacia, etc. - têm direito a usufruir de todo um conjunto de Direitos Básicos, Universais e Invioláveis, extensíveis ao conjunto da Humanidade.

Isso é o legado histórico dos últimos 300 a 200 anos. E alguém que não defende a universalidade dos Direitos Humanos é alguém que pertence verdadeiramente a um universo pré-Abolição da Escravatura, pré-Revolução Francesa e pré-Iluminismo...

"Two New York lawmakers on Friday announced that they are introducing a bill that would impose a three-year moratorium on data center development. The announcement makes New York at least the sixth state to introduce legislation putting a pause on data center development in the past few weeks—one of the latest signs of a growing and bipartisan backlash that is quickly finding traction in statehouses around the country.

Data center moratoriums are “being tested as a model throughout states in this country,” said state senator Liz Krueger, a Democrat, who presented the bill at a press conference Friday with its cosponsor, assemblymember Anna Kelles, also a Democrat. “Democrats and Republicans are moving forward with exactly these kinds of moratoriums. New York should be in the front of the line to get this done.”

The new bill comes as a wave of bipartisan anti-data center sentiment that has swept across the country in recent months. In December, Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, became the first national politician to call for a blanket moratorium on data center permitting, saying that a moratorium would “ensure that the benefits of technology work for all of us, not just the 1 percent.”"

https://www.wired.com/story/new-york-is-the-latest-state-to-consider-a-data-center-pause/

#AI #DataCenters #Energy #NewYork #USA

Democracy? What Democracy? It's all about the old mighty cold dollar... ->

"When the World Wide Web went live in the early 1990s, its founders hoped it would be a space for anyone to share information and collaborate. But today, the free and open web is shrinking.

The Internet Archive has been recording the history of the internet and making it available to the public through its Wayback Machine since 1996. Now, some of the world’s biggest news outlets are blocking the archive’s access to their pages.

Major publishers – including The Guardian, The New York Times, the Financial Times, and USA Today – have confirmed they’re ending the Internet Archive’s access to their content.

While publishers say they support the archive’s preservation mission, they argue unrestricted access creates unintended consequences, exposing journalism to AI crawlers and members of the public trying to skirt their paywalls.

Yet, publishers don’t simply want to lock out AI crawlers. Rather, they want to sell their content to data-hungry tech companies. Their back catalogues of news, books and other media have become a hot commodity as data to train AI systems.

https://theconversation.com/news-sites-are-locking-out-the-internet-archive-to-stop-ai-crawling-is-the-open-web-closing-274968

#OpenWeb #Media #InternetArchive #News #Newspapers #Journalism

"What we are witnessing in America is technofascism. This is fascism partnered with advanced surveillance technologies. And this is what we see playing out in Minneapolis in real time, and with one company playing a pre-eminent role: Palantir.

It’s not just Palantir. We’ve seen other data-harvesting monopolies and Silicon Valley companies paying homage to Trump: Meta and Google and OpenAI and Oracle and Amazon and Nvidia, many of which have financial and other links to Thiel. Palantir is the very tip of this extremely poisonous spear.

What is happening in Minneapolis is a trial balloon. It’s where Trump is testing the limits of his power. That includes his ability to suppress dissent, to create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation, to break people’s will. And surveillance is at the heart of this.

It’s no coincidence that ICE officers wear masks. For them, privacy is impunity. That’s what the killing of Alex Pretti showed last week: that no one would be held to account. But for everyone else, there was another lesson: that there is nowhere to hide.

Personal data is the key to Trump’s political project. It’s an essential part of ICE’s work, the foundation for what is now under construction, and Minneapolis is where you can see it being built: an authoritarian surveillance state."

https://www.thenerve.news/p/technofascism-us-america-fascism-trump-palantir-peter-thiel-uk-nigel-farage-reform

#USA #Trump #Palantir #TechnoFascism #Fascism #UK #Reform #ICE #Surveillance #PoliceState

"AI is expected to reshape society and labor markets, yet experts remain divided on whether AI will primarily displace human labor or generate new employment opportunities. Despite the importance of this debate, little is known about how the public perceives AI’s labor market impact—and how these perceptions affect democratic attitudes and behaviors. Large-scale survey data (N = 37,079; 38 European countries) indicate that the public tends to view AI as labor-replacing rather than labor-creating. Controlling for technology-related, political, and sociodemographic factors, these data further show that perceiving AI as labor-replacing (vs. labor-creating) is associated with lower satisfaction with democracy and political engagement with technology. Two preregistered, nationally representative experiments (N = 1,202, United Kingdom; replication study N = 1,200, United States) provide causal evidence for this relationship. Participants exposed to a labor-replacing (vs. labor-creating) AI frame report greater erosion of trust in democracy and lower willingness to politically engage with future AI developments. Together, our findings suggest that perceptions about AI’s labor market consequences—regardless of actual outcomes—may decrease democratic legitimacy and public engagement in shaping the future of AI."

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2523508123?utm_source=TOC&utm_medium=ealert&TOC_v123_i4=&ref=d12164

#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #MassUnemployment #Democracy #PoliticalParticipation

"After proudly renaming the Pentagon from the Department of Defense to the Department of War, Trump now plans to raise the US military budget from $1 trillion to a staggering $1.5 trillion.

This means that, if Trump succeeds, the United States will soon spend more on its military than all of the other countries in the world combined, excluding China.

This is deeply hypocritical, because in his January 2025 inauguration speech, as he started his second term as US president, Trump declared that he would be a “peacemaker”.

Similarly, in the victory speech that Trump gave after he won the November 2024 presidential election, he claimed, falsely, that during his first term, “we had no wars”.

“I’m not going to start a war; I’m going to stop wars”, Trump promised.

He lied. In the first year of his second term, the Trump administration bombed seven countries: Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.

When his first and second terms are combined, Trump has bombed 10 nations (the aforementioned seven, plus Afghanistan, Libya, and Pakistan).

This means Trump has bombed more countries than all other presidents in US history.

Moreover, Trump is threatening to attack at least four more nations: Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Greenland. He has vowed to colonize Greenland and forcibly turn it into US territory."

https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2026/01/25/trump-bombed-10-countries-trillion-military-budget/

#USA #Trump #Militarism #Warmonger #Imperialism

"Britain’s reliance on Palantir, the controversial US data surveillance firm, is a “gaping national security vulnerability”, MPs and tech experts have said, as a Nerve investigation reveals how deeply embedded the company is in the UK’s critical national infrastructure.

The Nerve’s investigation shows the company, co-founded by one of President Trump’s most loyal allies, Peter Thiel, is enmeshed in Britain’s civil and defence structures to a far greater degree than previously realised. The Nerve has found at least 34 current and past state contracts across at least 10 government departments, local councils and police authorities.

The investigation also reveals previously undisclosed contracts between Palantir and AWE Nuclear Security Technologies, the agency that underpins Britain’s nuclear deterrence programme.

The agency, formerly known as the Atomic Weapons Establishment, designs and manufactures the nuclear warheads carried by UK submarines. The Nerve has found £15m worth of contracts for “cloud support” on the Crown Commercial Service dashboard, an agency that works with the Cabinet Office and external suppliers.

These contracts are not on the government’s official contract finder website and the Ministry of Defence refused to either confirm or deny their existence. Palantir did not acknowledge or respond to the Nerve’s inquiries.

The Nerve’s research – shown in two infographics here – shows that Palantir has current and historic deals worth £388m with the MOD across at least a dozen contracts and extensions to contracts, and more than £244m with the NHS (12 contracts/extensions). Government agencies and authorities with smaller contracts include Coventry city council, Leicestershire police, DEFRA and the Homes for Ukraine scheme."

https://www.thenerve.news/p/palantir-technologies-uk-government-contracts-size-nuclear-deterrent-atomic-peter-thiel-louis-mosley

#UK #Palantir #Surveillance #Thiel #NuclearWeapons

"Meta has started blocking its users from sharing links to ICE List, a website that has compiled the names of what it claims are Department of Homeland Security employees, a project the creators say is designed to hold those employees accountable.
Dominick Skinner, the creator of ICE List, tells WIRED that links to the website have been shared without issue on Meta’s platforms for more than six months.

“I think it's no surprise that a company run by a man who sat behind Trump at his inauguration, and donated to the destruction of the White House, has taken a stance that helps ICE agents retain anonymity,” says Skinner.

As agents from Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which are under DHS, have continued to terrorize immigrant communities and kill US citizens, activists have sought to track and record their activity online in a bid to hold them accountable. But as well as threatening to prosecute those they claim are “doxing” ICE agents, the Trump administration has pressured tech companies to block any efforts at crowdsourcing the location and activities of those agents.

ICE List has been operating since last June. Skinner says it is run by a core team of five people, including him, as well as hundreds of anonymous volunteers who share information about ICE agents operating in cities across the US."

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-is-blocking-links-to-ice-list-on-facebook-instagram-and-threads/

#SocialMedia #USA #PoliceState #Trump #ICE #Facebook #Meta #Instagram #Censorship

"What sparked Carney’s intervention was not Sudan, Venezuela or Gaza. It was the US threat to Canada and Greenland.

A western prime minister took umbrage only when the US, under President Donald Trump, threatened to treat the prosperous West in the same way it has long treated the Global South.

Let’s return now to Israel’s recent invasion of Unrwa’s headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem: a gross breach of international law and a direct attack on the United Nations.

Article 6 of the UN charter establishes that any state that persistently violates its principles can be expelled from the UN. The attack on Unrwa is part of a pattern of Israel’s criminal hostility towards the UN, including its refusal to respect orders from the International Court of Justice on Gaza, its slaughter of UN aid workers and its regular attacks on UN positions in southern Lebanon.

The case for expelling - or at the very least suspending - Israel from the UN is overwhelming. Yet neither Carney’s Canada nor Starmer’s Britain, nor any other western power, has so much as suggested the idea.

In his Davos speech, Carney set out Canada’s approach as follows: “We aim to be principled and pragmatic. Principled in our commitment to fundamental values: sovereignty and territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force except when consistent with the UN Charter, respect for human rights. Pragmatic in recognising that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner shares our values.”

This is all well and good. But on the evidence so far, Carney is prepared to be principled when it comes to western countries like Canada and Denmark, and pragmatic when it comes to Palestine and Venezuela.

This is a fundamentally racist equation."

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/carney-wants-new-world-order-only-west

#Canada #Carney #Imperialism #USA #Trump #InternationalLaw #Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Genocide

"Critics see these disruptions as exacerbated by the deep cuts to federal funding, which total tens of billions of dollars, that underwrites academic research and researcher training. “The beauty of academic research is that people could stick with hard problems for a long time to make progress,” says Goldman. “We can’t create experts overnight.” At the same time, many foreign scientists face an uphill battle in securing visas to study or work in the United States.

Some scientists have spoken out, filed lawsuits and pushed back against what many say is a dismantling of what has long been the world’s leading science power. In May 2025, the Center for Open Science criticized the administration’s Restoring Gold Standard Science executive order for “positioning policymaking to ignore scientific evidence by holding it to unachievable standards”.

Nosek says his organization has a duty to push back against any administration attempts to “sow distrust and undermine the whole process” of science-research reform.

The US Congress has the power to determine which agencies are funded to what extent, and earlier this month, both houses of Congress voted to mostly reject the Trump administration’s proposed deep budget cuts for 2026 for a subset of science agencies including NASA, USGS, EPA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The future remains far from certain — especially as China makes steady gains in global scientific leadership.

Nature’s careers team interviewed researchers to find out what a year of Trump administration policies has meant for their research and careers, and looked back at how Trump’s first year was covered by Nature."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00091-0

#USA #Trump #Science #DOGE #Austerity

RT @yarotrof
Trump’s “Board of Peace” looks very much like a plan to replace the UN Security Council with an imperial court of vassals in which he is chairman for life, even after leaving the White House, with veto over every decision and the sole right to designate a successor. And a $1 billion fee for aspiring permanent members.

https://www.ft.com/content/0ee79faa-86d3-4c01-a180-add6e164ac28?accessToken=zwAGSKwUmEg4kc8O55-qhtNMAdOhgK3W4WSsKA.MEUCIG90yhnpd6836G-pd4NwwXgCPPreNo-iI_ERePXH7fj_AiEAmYxxRC9xbqDYh43WecrbO_pFzaZu_3avjEKtNm0zUFw&sharetype=gift&token=b6692b27-71c2-4c84-90c8-4692ba31917b

RT @jasonhickel
It's not hypocrisy, it's capitalism.

The bizarre behaviour of Western states and leaders often seems to betray a moral double standard. But in fact it is all perfectly consistent with a single standard, namely, the objective of maintaining the conditions for capital accumulation in the core.

On Iran, they tell us they "support the protestors". But of course they violently brutalize protestors at home, and never support protests against the governments of their often brutal client states.

They say they support "women's rights". But of course they actively support a genocidal regime that has massacred tens of thousands of women, live-streamed to our screens.

They say they want to see "freedom" and "democracy". But of course they prop up several repressive dictatorships in the Middle East.

They say they value international law. But they violate it regularly, in spectacular fashion, as easily as they breathe.

They say they want to see "liberation". But their explicit objective is to impose a puppet monarchy with zero real sovereignty, permanently subordinated to the US and Israel.

Why? Because they want to maintain the conditions for capital accumulation in the core.

This requires a massive flow of cheap labour and resources from the periphery. To keep it going, they do everything possible to crush any state or movement that seeks real sovereignty, because sovereign development in the South means that the South produces and consumes more for itself, so their resources and labour are less cheaply available for accumulation in the core.

This is why they are going after Iran. It's the same reason they are going after Venezuela and Cuba... it's the same reason they fantasize at going to war with China... it's the same reason they invaded Libya and Iraq... it's the same reason they assassinated Lumumba and Sankara. It's the same reason they prop up Saudi Arabia and the UAE...

https://x.com/jasonhickel/status/2011801479384825972

"Nordic governments are rejecting U.S. President Donald Trump’s assertions that Russian and Chinese vessels are operating near Greenland, warning that the claims are not supported by intelligence and are fueling destabilizing rhetoric, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

Two senior Nordic diplomats with access to NATO intelligence briefings told the FT there is no evidence of Russian or Chinese ships or submarines operating around Greenland in recent years, directly contradicting Trump’s justification for U.S. control of the Arctic territory.

“I have seen the intelligence. There are no ships, no submarines,” one diplomat told the paper.

Trump has claimed that Greenland is “covered with Russian and Chinese ships” and argued that the U.S. must take control of the island for national security reasons — rhetoric that has intensified in recent weeks."

https://www.politico.eu/article/nordic-officials-reportedly-dismiss-trump-greenland-claims-nato-defense/

#USA #Trump #Imperialism #Greenland #Denmark #Disinformation #Propaganda

"[i]n the chaotic aftermath of the shooting, one thing became immediately clear: The Trump administration was lying about what happened.

Shortly after news began circulating about the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement on X that “rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and the White House adviser Stephen Miller also described the incident as “domestic terrorism,” while President Donald Trump posted on his social network that Good “ran over the ICE Officer.”

Videos of the incident, taken by bystanders, show almost every element of McLaughlin’s statement to be false. There were no riots at the scene, and no rioters. The vehicle appears to be driving away from the armed federal agents, not toward them, and no one was run over. And there is no evidence that terrorism of any kind was involved.
(...)
The blatant lies about Minneapolis serve several purposes. They perpetuate the false narrative that federal agents are in constant peril and therefore justified in using lethal force at the slightest hint of danger. They assure federal agents that they can harm or even kill American citizens with impunity, and warn those who might be moved to protest Trump’s immigration policies of the same thing. Perhaps most grim, they communicate to the public that if you happen to be killed by a federal agent, your government will bear false witness to the world that you were a terrorist."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/ice-defense-minnesota-killing/685549/?gift=SCYx-5scVta3-cr_IlgTyb8Q5BokqAExuClP-mrxf8s

#USA #Trump #Fascism #ICE #PoliceState #Militarism #Militias

"Two decades ago, Richard N. Haass, a senior foreign-policy official in the George W. Bush administration, confessed that he would go to his grave not knowing why the United States had invaded Iraq. “A decision was not made,” Haass told me. “A decision happened, and you can’t say when or how.” I thought of this astonishing remark after Saturday’s military action in Caracas. President Donald Trump and his advisers have thrown out numerous justifications for seizing the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife and bringing them to New York for trial. None of them makes sense.

Maduro ruled Venezuela viciously and illegitimately, but Trump has no qualms about doing business with the vicious and illegitimate—he prefers them to democratically elected leaders. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told skeptics in Congress that the operation wasn’t an act of war at all, but a simple arrest based on Maduro’s indictment for drug trafficking. Then why, at the end of last year, did Trump pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the ex-president of Honduras who had been convicted of the same crime by an American court and sentenced to 45 years in prison?

If narco-terrorism is a threat to U.S. security, Venezuela is a relatively small player in the global narcotics trade; the chief drug it exports, cocaine, is not a mass killer of Americans like fentanyl is, and the probable destination of the alleged drug boats that U.S. forces have been bombing off the Venezuelan coast was Europe."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/venezuela-iraq-hypocrisy/685547/

#USA #Trump #Imperialism #Iraq #Venezuela #Oil #FossilFuels

"On Wednesday afternoon, ICE agents carrying out an operation in south Minneapolis were briefly obstructed by a car blocking traffic. ICE agents approached the female driver, 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, yelling, “Get out of the fucking car,” and one of them attempted to open the driver’s-side door. After the driver backed up to turn around and move, another agent drew his gun and unloaded three shots into the car. The car barreled into a light pole about 100 feet down the road, and the driver was quickly pronounced dead.

This is confirmed by eyewitness accounts and videos from multiple angles. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), while confirming the broad details, claims that the ICE agent acted in self-defense to avoid being run over by the vehicle.

These are the kinds of disputes that the courts are equipped to handle. Because if an agent shot directly into a car and killed the driver without some credible fear of personal harm, it would be called murder. And federal agents can indeed be prosecuted for murder.

States can prosecute anyone for violations of state law, regardless of their rank or authority. Murder is a felony in the state of Minnesota, as it is in every other state. Within the last several years, we saw Minnesota successfully prosecute a murder, committed by a law enforcement officer, that was documented on tape and broadcast to the world."

https://prospect.org/2026/01/07/ice-agents-can-be-charged-with-murder/

#USA #Trump #Minnesota #Minneapolis #ICE #Immigration #PoliceState #Militias #Militarism

"President Donald Trump’s Cabinet officials are scheduling their first formal calls with oil company CEOs to press them to revive Venezuela’s flagging oil production, four people familiar with the conversations told POLITICO.

Calls that Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum are planning with chief executives represent some of the first official outreach that the administration has made to the U.S. companies after months of informal discussions with people in the sector, these people said — days after President Donald Trump told reporters that “our very large United States oil companies” will “spend billions of dollars” in Venezuela.

However, the companies’ executives remain wary of entering a socialist-ruled country that was plunged into political upheaval after U.S. forces took strongman Nicolás Maduro into custody over the weekend, following decades of neglect in its nationalized oil fields, according to market analysts and industry officials.

Industry officials are also discussing what types of incentives would be needed to get them to return to the country, according to two industry officials familiar with the plans who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media. Those could include having the U.S. government signing contracts guaranteeing payment and security or forming public-private joint ventures.

Even if they don’t yet have fully formed ideas for what would get them to invest in Venezuela, Trump’s insistence is difficult to ignore, said one former administration agency head who was granted anonymity to discuss the evolving matters."

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/05/trump-venezuela-oil-fields-00710893

#USA #Trump #Venezuela #Oil #BigOil #FossilFuels

"The United States’ oil industry appears wary of President Donald Trump’s repeated pledges that companies are going to spend billions of dollars upgrading decrepit Venezuelan oil infrastructure following the capture of Nicolás Maduro.

The companies themselves have stayed largely silent since Saturday, when Trump promised that the American oil industry would “go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”

None has provided on-the-record statements about their plans beyond Chevron, which said it was focused on protecting its assets in the country. And the American Petroleum Institute, the leading industry association for American oil and gas companies, has not met with the Trump administration about this issue.

Rather, oil analysts have made clear that American and multinational oil giants don’t have an economic incentive to pony up investments in Venezuela, despite it being home to the largest oil reserves in the world.

Unless the Trump administration can address the serious safety issues, fear of regime instability, and longstanding legal concerns, the president’s pledge to “take the oil” remains a giant question mark.

“I really don’t know, who are the players that win from this?” said Ed Hirs, an energy markets analyst and professor at the University of Houston. “It’s not obvious, that’s for sure.”"

https://www.notus.org/energy/trump-pledge-us-oil-investment-venezuela-industry-silent