alt Hacker News> Venezuela can have a real election now
Assuming the US wants and will allow that. Which isn’t at all clear, given the desire to get a hold of Venezuelan oil.
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Yes. I am generally dumbfolded on how many of these comments trying to explain the situation completely ignore oil, when it is the main drive for US going to war in the last 50 years. This _is_ an oil motivated attack no doubt
it would 100% be somebody who is aligned with far-right Trumpian values. so basically a fascist kleptocrat a la Bolsonaro, Putin, Orban, et al.
The US has no use for Venezuelan oil. The US is sitting on a vast reserve of relatively good quality oil and is pumping as much as the global markets can handle. Venezuela is sitting on massive reserves of low quality, difficult to process oil.
The US goal is deprive China of access to Venezuelan oil. China is ~80% of all Venezuelan oil exports (legal or illegal). Venezuela represents a very large potential supply of oil for China, for the next 30-50 years (a time after which oil probably won't matter very much to China).
Note that the US also did not take Iraq's oil. China & India mostly have got that output. The US spent trillions of dollars, used its super power military to fully invade and occupy Iraq, and then did not take its oil. Read that again if anybody still feels brainwashed from the false campaign that endlessly proclaimed the US invasion of Iraq was to Steal The Oil.
Iraq was about the great power conflict with Russia across the Middle East (see: Syria, Libya, etc).
Venezuela is about the great power conflict with China and controlling what the US considers its backyard.
> ... we're making that decision now. We can't take a chance on letting somebody else run it, just take over where he left off. So we're making that decision
they have already signaled that this is not what will be allowed to happen