Why does the US need Venezuelan oil? Is it because of drugs? Or is it because it needs to be refilled with Venezuelan crude? In this episode of the podcast, Alex Blumberg looks at the answer to this question, and why the US needs Venezuelan oil.
00:04:41.400If America's going to have gasoline, it needs to feed those refineries with heavy oil.
00:04:46.720So if you look at the kind of imports coming into America in recent years, even though America is producing so much oil, more oil than it ever produced before, it still needs to suck in loads of oil from overseas.
00:04:59.660And the type of oil we're talking about, it used to be, it's mostly heavy crude, used to be only 12%.
00:05:05.920So only 12% of imports were heavy, gloopy crude.
00:05:55.340There's one other I'll come to in a second, which we'll come back to.
00:05:58.060But it's Canada and it's Venezuela, where you get most of this heavy crude oil.
00:06:02.140Which is why, about to think about where those refineries are, they're mostly set up.
00:06:05.940You've got some in the north there to get the heavy oil coming out of Canada, and you've got some around the kind of Louisiana and elsewhere and Texas to get that heavy oil that comes in from Venezuela.
00:06:17.120That was kind of the way they were set up.
00:06:19.100And it's really expensive to rebuild these things.
00:06:21.300You can't just chuck out a refinery very easily overnight.
00:06:23.320Some came from Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico as well, and that was pretty heavy too.
00:06:28.480And the upshot is, even though America is producing more and more oil, the imports, this is showing you imports of oil into America, are still really high.
00:06:36.400And if you break down those imports by the country that stuff is coming from, well, there's Venezuela.
00:06:42.080And it used to be a decent slug, actually more coming from Venezuela just about than from Canada just at the turn of the millennium.
00:06:48.160But now look at what's happened since.
00:06:49.540Right now, Canada has gone from 15% of all of the U.S. imports of oil to 61%.
00:06:58.600And Venezuela is basically next to nothing.
00:07:01.680But here's what's tantalising, and here's the reason I think that a lot of people are looking towards Venezuela and thinking, well, there's more to this than just drugs.
00:07:09.040Look at total oil reserves around the world.
00:07:12.620The higher these bars are, the more oil there is in the ground.
00:07:14.880So that hasn't yet been taken out of the ground.
00:07:16.560So there you've got Saudi, Iran, Iraq, all of the usual suspects.
00:07:20.980But the biggest of all, and this is according to various different sources, the biggest of all is Venezuela.
00:07:44.760All of which is to say, you know, it matters what kind of oil America needs.
00:07:51.100It's worth just delving into these kind of nuances, because that helps you understand a little bit more about the backstory of geopolitics.
00:10:44.980Eric, you have been on this show now, I think, for years, I might say, saying the way to bring this to a head is to go in and extract Maduro.
00:10:55.480Talk to me about your thoughts of what happened in the last couple of hours.
00:11:01.300The phrase the President was looking for was speed, surprise, and violence of action.
00:11:12.900It's truly the most refined, decisive kinetic action operation organization I think the world has ever seen.
00:11:22.580You know, back after the debacle of Desert One and the Iran hostage attempt, a rescue attempt in 79,
00:11:31.060when Congress created SOCOM, it was done to create the money and the focus to have this kind of capability,
00:11:38.480absolutely apex predator, go anywhere in the face of whatever, surface-to-air missile, air defense networks, whatever.
00:11:48.260And remember, Caracas is at about 3,500 feet.
00:11:50.920So you've got to go from sea level up a mountain plateau into this bowl and hit a lot of targets simultaneously, and they did.
00:12:00.080The targeting and the intelligence to do this was spectacular.
00:12:04.340I also must add I'm extremely glad to see that they bombed Chavez's grave as an extra FU to the cancer of socialism that has infected Venezuela.
00:12:14.660As I said on your show a few weeks ago, you can vote in socialism.
00:12:35.460There's some other bad people that they have to take out.
00:12:37.640Diastaro Cabello, Padrino, the minister of defense, Jorge and Delce Rodriguez, Diastaro Cabello, they all have to go.
00:12:50.280And then Venezuela has a chance at breathing free.
00:12:54.560This is not going to require U.S. occupation or anything else,
00:12:59.060but it took away the inevitability of the regime and to see people breaking out and protesting in celebration all across Venezuela is a very, very great sign.
00:13:39.900You combine the end of the 12-day war with that strike, including from the Navy submarines, you add this.
00:13:47.040The American people have to understand now, the geopolitics of it, strategically, what's going to happen, what's going to happen in Venezuela, we're going to get to all that.
00:13:53.940Mike Davis is going to join us about the legality.
00:13:55.960There already are on Trump about that.
00:13:57.280We're going to cover it all, but just the mechanics of the capability of can you do it.
00:16:59.100Sign up for free and be part of the movement.
00:17:03.880Okay, I want to make sure whether you're interventionist, non-interventionist, you think this is part of the MAGA strategy, not part of the MAGA strategy, whether Madura should go, all the geopolitical aspects of this, the geoeconomic aspects of this.
00:17:54.300We've had, I don't know, 12,000, 14,000 fleet Marines, sailors, special operators, special forces.
00:18:00.620And we've been pouring – Hegseth, Pete's been pouring people through, I think, the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico, I think.
00:18:07.260Just walk through to the knowledge, to what you know, because you've been advocating something along these lines of a quick strike that can take care of at least the problem with the Maduro.
00:18:19.220Maybe not with his bad hombres that are around him.
00:18:22.260But just walk me through what you know about this strike and how complicated it was to pull off and how proud we should be of our forces.
00:18:30.720The Maduro regime has spent a lot of money on building out – they spent a lot of money on defense.
00:18:38.960And the Russian air defense systems, the Pantsir, anti-aircraft cannons, the S-300s, all of that stuff would have been on high alert because of the presence of all those ships offshore.
00:18:51.280And the fact is the U.S. could come in, turn the lights off – I'm sure they'd turn the power off, turn the phones off, turn the ability of those surface-to-air missile systems to even function, destroyed them, and to fly helicopters right into an urban area like that and to get everybody out clean is truly spectacular.
00:19:12.400It is an enormous amount of coordination. Congrats to Pete Hegseth and General Kane and the entire Department of War.
00:19:21.960It's amazing what you get when you focus on merit and lethality instead of politics and social engineering, and it works.
00:19:29.820This is exactly what we want our military to be, a snarling attack dog waiting to be let off leash.
00:19:35.960And they did it last night, and they did it really well.
00:19:37.980Now, when you take that magnificent capability, and if you're going to park it in Venezuela for the next 20 years, right now you have a – like a diamond-bladed, four-foot-long chainsaw with a big motor, okay?
00:19:54.500But if you park it there for 20 years and do nation building, it's like cutting a tree with a railroad spike in it.
00:20:00.100It destroys the blade, and that's what the endless war is, the nonsense of Iraq and Afghanistan did when you allowed lawyers to be making decisions instead of warriors.
00:20:10.740Warriors made the decisions last night, and that's what works.
00:20:16.020Just to – I want the audience to understand.
00:20:18.180They went in and extracted the dictator.
00:20:23.540This is not like some democratically elected guy that's like some liberal or whatever.
00:20:34.260They knew he – this is the type of guy, like Saddam Hussein, that's changing residences every night.
00:20:39.880To actually go in, know exactly where he is, extract him and the wife, right?
00:20:44.600And we know there may be a few casualties on the Venezuelan side, but it doesn't sound like it was a massive shootout.
00:20:49.800To go in and know exactly where he is, given the fact that they – he's hunkered down.
00:20:55.400You know they got tremendous defense capability.
00:20:59.160To extract it and come out – essentially, it looks like bloodless is breathtaking, is it not?
00:21:05.780And sends a signal to every bad guy in the world that you're not beyond the reach of the United States military, sir.
00:21:13.140And to put an icing on the cake, Steve, there was a high-level Chinese delegation, military delegation, in Caracas, trying to sell them more Chinese weaponry.
00:21:24.000And so those dudes, I'm sure, were hunkered down in their hotel hearing, I guess in the words of Mondami, what rugged individualism looks like and feels like instead of that warm embrace of collectivism.
00:21:37.160While I've got you, I know you've got to bounce.
00:21:38.880While I've got you, just let's talk about the geostrategically for a moment.
00:21:42.380But this is – I wanted to start about this analysis they had on the oil.
00:21:45.860Of course, he was extradited and I think already indicted in the southern district.
00:22:28.220It was actually incentive for the Russians to let Venezuela be as screwed up as it was for as long as it was because it took probably two and a half million barrels a day of production offline.
00:22:38.260There is an enormous, as your prelim said, enormous amount of crude in the ground in Venezuela.
00:22:44.040Venezuela, but it takes a lot of special processing equipment, and a lot of that stuff has been largely rotting and unmaintained for years and years and years.
00:22:54.720There's a reason Venezuela was called El Dorado.
00:22:57.060There is unbelievable natural resources in the country.
00:23:00.060Venezuela hit its peak in like the early 70s, 80s, because there was a lot of Italians and Germans that went there as part of the oil business and built it out.
00:23:09.020It was an extremely successful, growing economy, and they voted in socialism, and this is what they have now.
00:23:16.280Look, the intervention in 89 to take out Noriega from Panama was necessary.
00:23:24.600And sitting aside a super strategic waterway like the Panama Canal, I would put Venezuela in the same boat because of the money they can generate that they used to spread narco nonsense.
00:23:36.620And leftist, leftist rot across all of Latin America and the Caribbean.
00:23:43.280It's good, and the fact is they've had an election a year and a half ago, and now an actual representative government can take power.
00:23:52.620Yes, there's going to be problems in Venezuela.
00:23:54.600It's not going to be perfect, but it is, the pendulum is starting to swing in the right direction, and kudos to the U.S. military for doing a spectacular job in removing that guy from power.
00:24:06.620But you've been on here now for over a year talking about it, maybe two years, talking about this.
00:24:13.260When you discussed it, you actually talk about there's another ring around him, his inner circle, and you've mentioned those guys at the beginning.
00:24:20.900In fact, I think they've picked a successor.
00:24:22.400So if his bad hombres are not leaving, how comfortable you are that the second and third order events that are going to happen, are you comfortable that this has been thought through and this thing's not going to devolve into a civil war?
00:24:39.400I think there's a different negotiating position now if the Trump administration people can say, we highly encourage you to step down or take the money and leave, because look what happened to number one.
00:24:52.160And the Venezuelan military folded like a napkin in that kind of press.
00:24:59.300So, look, this is especially near and dear.
00:25:02.780We planned an operation like this from the private sector if the Venezuelan, free of Venezuelan government, was able to fund it to do something like it at this scale.
00:25:12.820Obviously, not to the spectacular level of performance that JSOC just did it, and good on them, and congratulations.
00:25:19.780So, yes, the terrain, the difficulty, there are some bad people there that need to go, but they should be in a very different frame of mind right now, seeing that their leader is in bracelets in a Gulfstream aircraft headed for prison in New York.
00:25:37.680You can't think, you know, what's happening in the streets of Tehran, right, with this kind of uprising, as we've talked about, the sanctions are killing these guys.
00:25:47.880We've argued you've got to shut the oil down, but the Persian real is crashing.
00:25:55.120The economy is so bad, I think they've shot and killed now five to seven protesters.
00:26:01.140Venezuela was actually one of the Mullah's best strategic partners.
00:26:05.580Do you think this is linked, the timing of this is linked to what's happening in Iran?
00:26:13.340Look, this timing is based on what needed to happen in Venezuela.
00:26:17.520The fact is the Iranians had a significant presence in Venezuela, including a drone factory making a lot of the same long-range drones that were used to attack U.S. ships in the Gulf of Aden, off of Yemen,
00:26:30.320and to attack Israel and other U.S. targets throughout the Middle East.
00:26:35.580The other thing to be watching for is the Chinese are planning some big quarantine exercise where they surround Taiwan with all their ships.
00:26:47.680And if they actually try to close it off, the question is, will the Navy guarantee freedom of navigation in the South China Sea and around Taiwan?
00:26:57.760Will they have to do convoys to escort merchant ships to breach that Chinese PLA Navy quarantine?
00:27:04.540That's the next flashpoint you should be watching for.
00:27:06.780Last thing, you think Hezbollah, there's all this talk, they've had Hezbollah training camps, the Venezuelan, Maduro is very close to them.
00:27:15.540Do you think that could be a problem here in the United States?
00:27:17.900There's been thousands and thousands of Iranians that have flown to Venezuela and be rebadged as Venezuelans.
00:27:33.580The biggest issue will be kneecapping the cartels because the narco business, Venezuela is really not a production point, but it is a transshipment and processing point for all the drugs coming out of Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, etc.
00:28:09.480I know you've got to bounce, but I want to send it right to the site for the phones.
00:28:13.640Stick with us for a couple more minutes.
00:28:15.340It's Captain Fennell, El Todd Woods, Mike Davis, Jack Posobiec leading up to the press conference at Mar-a-Lago with the Commander-in-Chief.
00:30:03.560They need to remove a great book called The Dictator's Handbook on How Do You Do Regime Change Against Dictatorial Regimes.
00:30:09.800This is – the next two weeks will be critical, and to get adult leadership in there and actual security capability to kneecap the cartels.
00:30:22.740Hopefully, there are some patriots amongst the Venezuelan generals that will rise and protect a free Venezuelan now.
00:30:41.720Jack, you're a naval intelligence officer.
00:30:44.160Intelligence here, at least on the strike, had to be pretty damn good, right?
00:30:47.980They knew exactly where he was, exactly how to get him, and extracting, sir.
00:30:54.840Steve, as of 0400 Eastern Standard Time, every single world leader who is an adversary of the United States
00:31:05.080was suddenly woken up by the head of their security detail saying, sir, you might want to put on the television because this just showed them that no matter where you are,
00:31:16.840no matter how secure you are, no matter how secure you think you are, no matter how safe you think your defense is, your security is, the United States of America and the United States military has the capability to reach out in the middle of the night and get you, your family and everyone around you with the flick of – with the snap of President Trump's fingers.
00:31:38.840And when President Trump says go, that is exactly what the United States military does.
00:31:43.240And, Steve, I know you and I were talking about this, the 15,000 U.S. Navy sailors that were parked there off the coast of Venezuela throughout New Year's, throughout Christmas, saying it looks like there's an operation imminent.
00:31:55.720A lot of people talked about this, and now we see that this is the culmination of those operations, and we know that a variety of operations were given to President Trump, and this is the one that he ultimately went with.
00:32:08.400One of the things that I'm looking at right now – obviously, you mentioned earlier, of course, what will be the status of those massive oil reserves in Venezuela, those untapped oil reserves, some of the largest – the largest in the hemisphere between them and Canada.
00:32:21.540And then, of course, what comes of the regime? Are we seeing full-on regime change, or are we simply seeing a removal of Maduro?
00:32:31.000Of course, all of this is going to be playing out in the coming days, weeks, and months.
00:32:35.060Yeah. For our troops, for our special operators, Navy, fleet, Marines, just a magnificent day.
00:32:43.400But you talk about hemispheric defense, and you talk about what's happening in Iran, and between America First, interventionists.
00:32:51.320I mean, put it in perspective right now as MAGA wakes up to this and sees a magnificent military operation.
00:32:56.960And, folks, I'm going to tell you, if you look at the two expeditionary operations we've had for mid-July with the ending of the 12-day war so dramatically,
00:33:05.720and then the dramatic extraction of Maduro and his wife, and now they're sitting on the Iwo Jima right now,
00:33:13.580probably in the captain's cabin, pretty extraordinary.
00:33:19.800But what about the bigger picture here?
00:33:21.260Particularly, you know, Eric Prince had been on here.
00:33:23.480You had been on here for over a year talking about this.
00:35:50.240However, it seems that Trump – and if you go back to the strategy document, go back to the strategy document that was put out.
00:35:57.020They talked about hemispheric defense, remember, the Monroe Doctrine with the Trump corollary, the Monroe Doctrine with the Trump corollary that we will clean up the mess.
00:36:06.480This is what President Trump is executing on.
00:36:10.480And so the question that I have looking forward when we're talking about these narco-terrorist syndicates is are they going to hit the Mexican drug cartels next?
00:36:18.200Are they going to take out capture-kill operations for every single one?
00:36:21.480Go Pablo Escobar on these guys, all right?
00:36:24.640And by the way, you know, I know officially we say that the United States was not involved in that decapitation operation,
00:36:30.160but let's just say behind the scenes people talk, all right?
00:36:33.100People talk about who actually took the shot on Pablo Escobar, all I'm saying right there.
00:36:37.840So we need to do that to every single one of these cartels and to the people like the president of Colombia and the friend Scheinbaum down there in Mexico
00:36:46.280who do play all this happy talk saying that they're partners of the United States when in reality we know that they are working hand-in-hand with the cartels,
00:36:54.360looking the other way while the Condels conduct the operations.
00:36:57.140The question is no longer up for debate.
00:37:00.100You will work with the United States or you will get Maduro'd.
00:37:06.100Is the timing of this tied to this uprising you see on the streets of Iran, sir?
00:37:14.440I mean, it's hard to say that, you know, events in South America could be tied to something that's a world away in the center of the world island over there,
00:37:23.840the capital of Persia, the ancient empire.
00:37:26.560But certainly there's no question that there are no conspiracies, but there are no coincidences.
00:37:32.900And so when we look at this, we do have to wonder whether or not there are elements that are looking to potentially maximize on these uprisings that are going on in Iran right now.
00:39:48.020But this is also the reason that you want to understand gold as a hedge right now.
00:39:52.740I think markets on Monday may be on fire, right?
00:39:57.200Of course, this is another shift in geopolitics.
00:39:59.420This may be a massive shift because the oil shift, the oil.
00:40:02.340So assets here are breathtaking when you talk about Venezuela and Guyana and about America's need for overseas hemispheric defense and maybe get off the Eurasian landmass.
00:40:15.240El Todd Woods, you came out of the Air Force Academy.
00:40:38.120Our customers were Delta Force and ST-6 or SEAL Team 6.
00:40:41.420We had to get them anywhere, as you mentioned.
00:40:44.360No matter the threat, no matter the timing, no matter the weather, that was our job.
00:40:47.800And I want people to understand that this is a much bigger operation than what you see on the news.
00:40:54.120There were literally hundreds of aircraft involved.
00:40:56.860You've got aircraft coming in to bring in, you know, typically how this goes down is the Rangers will temporarily take an airfield and block off any traffic in and out of there and allow U.S. aircraft to get in there.
00:41:10.420And then you have the special operators coming in and rotary wing aircraft to the target, extract the precious cargo, and either take them to the airfield or take them to a ship here.
00:41:18.880I'm not sure what happened, but this is a big dance.
00:41:22.520And literally, you will have helicopters coming into a target with fire coming on the target, and then the fire will let up like five to ten seconds before they arrive.
00:42:55.240President Trump gave him 50 seconds and actually teed up this 11 o'clock press briefing.
00:43:00.920The second question this guy asked him is, well, do you really have the legal authority to do this?
00:43:05.200I mean, already they were on President Trump.
00:43:07.640So you've been the biggest advocate of, in Project 2025, in the years in the wilderness, the inherent, going back to President Lincoln, the inherent powers in Article 2 of the President of the United States as commander-in-chief to repel an invasion and actually to, you know, get into a, you know, get, basically try to put down a conflict between some bad guys that are trying to destroy the United States.
00:43:36.460And in this case, maybe just enforcing a, what, a warrant from a, from a, from a, from a federal court.
00:43:45.660What, what powers did the president use today, sir?
00:43:48.820Well, there's a, an indictment out of the Southern District of New York, a four, a four counts indictment that Attorney General Pam Bondi just released.
00:43:59.020It's a four count indictment for narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices against the United States.
00:44:14.660And so there was this indictment that was unsealed.
00:44:17.040There was an arrest warrant, and the president executed this arrest warrant, went and got the Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife, and he brought them back to, he's bringing them back to court in New York City.
00:44:34.500They're going to stay in a Brooklyn jail.
00:44:37.240The president absolutely has that constitutional and statutory power to do that.
00:44:43.060Separate from that, remember what Maduro did.
00:44:46.140Maduro unleashed trendy Aragua terrorists on the United States who kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered Americans, including Lake and Riley.
00:44:57.220We, we have people, we have hundreds of thousands of Americans who have died from fentanyl poisoning because of Maduro and his wife.
00:45:07.600And so the president absolutely has the Article II and statutory power to do what he did.
00:45:17.020And I would say to the Democrat politicians who are crying about this today, President Trump made it much easier for these Democrat politicians to go have margaritas with Maduro in this Brooklyn jail.
00:45:31.780They don't have to travel down to Venezuela.
00:45:33.960They don't have to travel down to Caracas to do it now.
00:45:37.600Yeah, and they don't have to go to, what, El Salvador to have, to have Mai Tais with them.
00:45:44.520So you're saying here that the indictment, this was, he was actually using his power as the chief magistrate and chief law enforcement officer since there was an indictment from the attorney general in a federal court, the Southern District of Manhattan, to allow the military to go execute on that indictment and to bring him in as a criminal?
00:46:03.840Yeah, yeah, Southern District of New York in Manhattan.
00:46:06.700And there was a separate indictment in 2020 also.
00:46:10.020So there are two different indictments.
00:46:17.420Maduro and his wife are going to spend the rest of their lives in federal prison in the United States.
00:46:25.020And so, you know, this is, President Trump is following the rules.
00:46:31.320His attorney general is following the rules.
00:46:33.840I want to say congratulations to President Trump and his team, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of War Pete Hexf, the Attorney General Pam Bondi.
00:46:43.500They did a lawless job of executing this arrest warrant and bringing these alleged criminals to justice.
00:46:54.960Mike, do you think the reason, now you had the Article II powers as commander in chief, and we've had this with Trendy Aragora and what he's trying to do to the United States and obviously killing people with the drugs that are coming up here, which is also part of the indictment.
00:47:05.620And it's one of the things that just does jump out here, because we've been talking about this now from when President Trump got back, but Eric Prince had been talking about this even in the first term.
00:47:17.160They did not round up the rest of the bad hombres, right?
00:47:20.080And he's got some very bad hombres that are his inner circle.
00:47:23.840Do you think that's because they very narrow casted this around this indictment and let's go extract this guy and getting back on federal charges and then we can negotiate with these other guys?
00:47:34.840I mean, I'm sure these other guys are co-conspirators, are part of it.
00:47:38.520Why would they not go in and get those on enforcing this indictment?
00:47:43.940I think President Trump was correct to focus on getting these two big fish and getting them out of Venezuela, getting them into U.S. custody.
00:47:54.200I'm not saying where Maduro's security forces put up much of a fight.
00:48:32.240And if she's the next leader of Venezuela, that's going to be a very good thing for the United States of America.
00:48:38.720We're going to have a key ally in Venezuela.
00:48:40.620Well, remember Venezuela was once a very wealthy, successful country before Chavez and Maduro destroyed this country with their left-wing Marxist socialism.
00:48:55.740And I think that a leader like Machado can restore Venezuela and make Venezuela great again.