Terry Glavin: Trump reaps the spoils of a global dumpster fire

“To the victor belong the spoils,” U.S. President Donald Trump told the assembled diplomats and heads of state at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday. Meant as a realpolitik rationale for his expropriation of Venezuela’s oil wealth, the banality serves just as well to explain quite a lot about the stubborn reluctance of America’s traditional allies to throw themselves behind Trump’s calamitous misadventures in the Strait of Hormuz.

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After all, if the U.S. war on Iran is just another smash-and-grab operation that would leave the Khomeinist regime intact in the same way that the White House has colluded with the Bolivarian regime to dispossess the Venezuelan people of something like 65 million barrels of oil, what would be the point?

Columnist Jesse Kline keeps you up to date with what’s happening in Israel and the effects of antisemitism on life here in Canada. Friday mornings.

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During his visit to Ireland earlier this month, Trump reiterated the preference he’s more than once expressed for an Iranian endgame involving some kind of collaboration with a faction of the Khomeinist regime that would be allowed to stay in power. Trump said the U.S. would sooner or later end its military entanglement “unless ⁠we decide to stay and keep the oil like Venezuela.” In this way, he inadvertently answered the question he posed on his Truth Social platform on Sept. 1: “When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight?”

The Iranian people did rise up and fight, in their millions, roused in no small part by Trump’s pledge in January: “Iranian Patriots, keep protesting – take over your institutions!!! Help is on the way.” And they did keep protesting, and they died in their thousands, and help came in the form of a war that has engulfed the Middle East, sent shudders through the global economy, alienated the United States’ traditional allies in the region and strengthened America’s primary adversary: the People’s Republic of China.

As recently as June, a reasonably creditable poll showed that public opinion in Iran was divided, with 44 per cent of respondents expressing a positive attitude towards their erstwhile American saviour and 44 per cent expressing a negative view. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, the last person on Earth you’d call accommodating of the regime in Tehran, earned a 51 per cent favourable rating. One shudders to think what a similar poll would show now.

Back in January, after U.S. Special Forces swooped in and extricated Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from their palace in Caracas, Venezuelans were over the moon. A Meganálisis poll shows that 92.2 per cent of Venezuelans held Trump in high regard. Embattled Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado went so far as to present Trump with her own Nobel Peace Prize medal, a prize Trump said should have gone to him.

But it soon became evident that it was Trump’s intention to expropriate the spoils of the Venezuelan operation in collusion with Maduro’s vice-president, Delcy Rodriguez. The Bolivarian regime was left fully intact in an arrangement Trump described in his UN speech as “perhaps the biggest deal ever made.” The latest Meganálisis poll shows Trump’s favourability among Venezuelans has plummeted to 9.7 per cent.

Roughly 80 per cent of Venezuelans oppose the joint-venture oil deal, and U.S. Congressional investigators still can’t find where the first $13 billion in profits from Venezuelan oil sales has gone, exactly. Nearly $10 billion remains wholly unaccounted for.

Europe has declined to get behind U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s “Economic D-Day” plan to wholly isolate Iran from the global financial system — a plan that leaves Chinese banks undisturbed. China buys roughly 80 per cent of Iran’s oil exports. After all, the Trump administration has chafed against European sanctions targeting Russia and has more or less cut off Ukraine from all American military aid. The U.S. Congress recently passed a massive sanctions package targeting Moscow’s interests, but Trump hasn’t committed to putting the sanctions into effect.

These indecencies have not gone unnoticed in Canada, but Mark Carney’s Liberal government is similarly content to accommodate Beijing’s appetite for fossil fuels. China is the world’s largest oil importer, and by last month, China’s oil imports from Canada had risen by more than a third, year on year. Over the same period, China’s imports of Canadian LNG more than tripled.

After having lost his trade war with China last year, President Trump settled for a truce. U.S. negotiators are hoping to extend that arrangement to deal with competition in the Artificial Intelligence boom, in technologies and regulation. That will be at or near the top of the agenda in Trump’s summit with Xi Jinping this week. In advance, Beijing laid down its red lines. No talk about human rights. No talk about Taiwan.

Trump and Xi get along just fine, and as the rules-based order that sustained the world’s liberal democracies vanishes in the flames of a post-American bonfire, Xi has never been more confident of China’s place in the world. And the Trump family is doing just fine.

The president’s personal wealth has nearly tripled since January of last year to $6.3 billion, with holdings in foreign sovereign wealth funds, Wall Street trades and crypto currency.

After all, to the victor belong the spoils.

National Post

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