8 hours ago, BruceVC said:

It will greatly benefit the people of Venezuela to have functional oil  infrastructure

And you are sure of this ?

At current production rates the stated royalties would be pretty decent (30bn raw value, 8bn royalty pa). At projected production rates though, and in what should be a surprise to absolutely no one, awful; even if you take into account most of Venezuela's oil being rubbish and hard to extract. Plus you'd expect there to be a lot of, hmm, 'catches' in the royalty payments like having to buy helicopters specifically off US companies for 500mn a piece. 16 of them, and you have no royalties left. One might think that is cynical, but given the people involved thinking otherwise is far more likely to be hopelessly naive.

Such is the life of a colonial adjunct and enslaved state. Will be interesting to see if the 'deal'* and occupation outlast Trump or not.

*I'd make a Star Wars reference about praying deals aren't altered further since Delcy Rodriguez has a passing resemblance to Lando Calrissian, but I'd feel a bit mean comparing Darth Vader to Donald Trump.

2 hours ago, Zoraptor said:

At current production rates the stated royalties would be pretty decent (30bn raw value, 8bn royalty pa). At projected production rates though, and in what should be a surprise to absolutely no one, awful; even if you take into account most of Venezuela's oil being rubbish and hard to extract. Plus you'd expect there to be a lot of, hmm, 'catches' in the royalty payments like having to buy helicopters specifically off US companies for 500mn a piece. 16 of them, and you have no royalties left. One might think that is cynical, but given the people involved thinking otherwise is far more likely to be hopelessly naive.

Such is the life of a colonial adjunct and enslaved state. Will be interesting to see if the 'deal'* and occupation outlast Trump or not.

*I'd make a Star Wars reference about praying deals aren't altered further since Delcy Rodriguez has a passing resemblance to Lando Calrissian, but I'd feel a bit mean comparing Darth Vader to Donald Trump.

My thought on hearing that is it essentially commits the US to future military actions over protecting their oil supply. Some Venezuelans are none to happy about this relationship, and we've linked ourselves to the current corrupt government. It wouldn't surprise me to see a future US President drop the deal.

Dunno about that. Any successor can just blame Trump for any problems. Some sort of 'committed to our commitments, even if we disagree we must honour them to maintain the integrity of other agreements' sort of spiel.

These things tend to have a great deal of inertia. Would a future President be willing to pay out all the investors? Or would they try and force Venezuela to do so? What happens if Venezuela repudiates the deal (and it can hardly be claimed it hasn't been signed under duress)? Ironically, the only recent President who ignored that sort of inertia is Trump himself, who'd have no problem leaving precipitately if it were Obama or Biden's pet project.

In a similar vein, even if Obama Somehow Returned to the White House it seems unlikely he would be able to change the Iranian situation. Because much as the Iranians might trust ('trust') him personally compared to Trump there's no trust for the US as a whole. You can't unpop a balloon.

(The agreement will commit Venezuela to protecting US interests, so the expectation would be minimal US boots on the ground and, they would hope, minimal bad publicity in the form of US troops shooting civilians/ people disgruntled about their natural resources being 'stolen. That would be done by the fine upstanding chaps in the Venezuelan police/ army. Yes, the same army and police who a few months ago were villains suppressing freedom etc. There is also, per above, the appeal of obligating Venezuela to buy overpriced and irrelevant military gear to do the protecting. All of those factors will make it far from a foregone conclusion that even a new D President would change tack significantly, as opposed to trying to dress up the neocolonialism a bit better)