Begging Venezuela’s Maduro for oil is weak. Ramp up US production to undercut Russia | Opinion
“If I had your hair, I’d be president of the United States,” then-Vice President Joe Biden joked with Nicolás Maduro in 2015. Seven years later, now-President Biden is begging Maduro for Venezuela’s oil.
Maduro is the leader of a ruthless regime that trades in drugs, arms and human beings. Under his illegitimate mandate, the people of Venezuela have been subject to state-sanctioned murders, unlawful detentions and torture. His regime’s incompetence and corruption drove the economy into the ground and forced an exodus of millions of Venezuelans to neighboring countries. In 2017 alone, the average Venezuelan lost over 20 pounds because of state-caused food shortages.
It was just a few short years ago that the world recognized the horrors of Maduro’s Venezuela. And thanks to the leadership of then-President Donald Trump, nearly 60 nations recognized Juan Guaidó as the country’s rightful interim president.
But now, with soaring global oil prices, President Biden is turning his back on Venezuela’s interim government, those who died fighting for freedom and democracy in Venezuela, and all of those who still suffer under Maduro’s rule.
This past weekend, a U.S. delegation snuck down to Caracas to negotiate lifting sanctions on Venezuelan oil in exchange for Maduro’s promise to cut ties with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. It’s a gross display of incompetence and negligence from the Biden administration. Maduro owes his very existence to the support from the regimes in Russia, China and Cuba. Only President Biden is naive enough to believe Maduro would turn his back on Putin the way he has betrayed Guaidó.
Even if Maduro were willing to sever ties with Putin, Venezuela is not a solution to record oil prices. Venezuela may have the world’s largest oil reserves, but because of Maduro’s ineptitude and corruption, it produces little more than 5% of the amount Russia does in a given day.
Stop Venezuela oil imports
Allowing Venezuela’s narco-dictator to reenter the global oil market will not reduce prices here at home — it would only finance Maduro’s illegitimate grip on power and perpetuate his horrific crimes against the Venezuelan people. To prevent this terrible deal from going through, I will introduce legislation this week that would prohibit the importation of energy resources from Venezuela.
Instead of swapping out the oil of one dictator for that of another, the easiest and most obvious way to undercut Russia’s campaign of human slaughter would be to increase oil and natural gas production in the United States. God blessed our country with tremendous natural resources, including more than 200 billion barrels of oil and hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas.
Under the Trump administration, the U.S. became a net exporter of energy. If we returned to that — and there is nothing stopping us from doing so — it would be a powerful blow against not just Russia, but all energy-rich dictatorships that use their wealth against America.
But President Biden will not do that, because he prioritizes the Democratic Party’s far-left agenda over the needs of the American people.
He is too afraid of Green New Deal fanatics to revitalize domestic oil and natural gas production here in America — never mind that it makes no difference to the climate whether the fossil fuels we burn originated within the U.S. or abroad.
There’s also no doubt this deal with narco-terrorist tyranny is being pushed by Obama-era regime apologists, Marxist sympathizers who are obsessed with cozying up to Maduro and his thugs, as well as their counterparts in Cuba and Nicaragua.
Joe Biden’s task as president is simple: defend and advance our national interests. But instead of doing that, he is capitulating to narrow partisan pressure and propping up dictatorships around the world. It is a fundamentally flawed approach, one that I hope Congress will address by passing my bill.
In 2020, I said on Twitter that the men and women staffing this administration went to all the right schools, have all the right credentials, go to all the right conferences and will all be “polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline.” If the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the nefarious response to the historic protests in Cuba and the resurrection of the failed Iran nuclear deal didn’t prove me right, what the U.S. is doing in Caracas does so in spades.
Marco Rubio is Florida’s senior senator in the U.S. Senate.
