How Trump’s oily dreams may collapse in a Venezuelan dark pit

By Pepe Escobar 

So the Big Oil Picture in Venezuela is way more complex than the Trump 2.0 gang suspects.

Let’s start with neo-Caligula’s new edicts on the imperial satrapy he says he now owns; not exactly edicts but outright threats directed to interim President Delcy Rodriguez:

Crack down on “drug trafficking flows”. Well, this should actually be directed to Colombian and Mexican smugglers in cahoots with big American buyers.

Expel Iranian, Cuban, and other “operatives hostile to Washington” – before Caracas is allowed to increase oil production. Not happening.

Halt oil sales to “US adversaries”. Not happening.

Hence it becomes a near certainty that neo-Caligula may bomb Venezuela again.

Neo-Caligula, in a separate motormouth offensive, also clarified that he wants to somewhat overhaul the oil business in Venezuela via subsidies. It “could take less than 18 months”; then it morphed to “we can do it in less time than that, but it’ll be a lot of money”; and finally morphed to “a tremendous amount of money will have to be spent and the oil companies will spend it.”

No, they won’t, as several proverbial “industry insiders” have advanced. US energy majors balk at the sight of investing fortunes in a nation that may be engulfed by total chaos if neo-Caligula forces a traitorous government over 28 million people.

According to Rystad Energy Analysis, it would take no less than 16 years and at least $183 billion for Venezuela to produce a mere 3 million barrels of oil a day.

Neo-Caligula’s ultimate dream is to reduce global oil prices to a maximum $50 a barrel. For this purpose, the Trump 2.0 imperial gig will, in thesis, totally control PDVSA, including acquisition and sale of virtually all of its oil production.

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright, at a Goldman Sachs energy conference, let the oily cat out of the bag:

“We are going to market the crude coming out of Venezuela, first this backed up stored oil [up to 50 million barrels], and then infinitely, going forward, we will sell the production that comes out of Venezuela into the marketplace.”

So essentially the neo-Caligula gig will capture, actually steal the sale of crude from PDVSA, with the money theoretically deposited in US-controlled offshore accounts to “benefit the Venezuelan people”.

There’s no way Delcy Rodriguez’s interim government will accept what amounts to de facto theft. Even as Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller is bragging that the US is using “military threat” to maintain control of Venezuela. If you are really in control, you don’t need to issue threats.

So what about China?

China was importing roughly 746,000 barrels of oil a day from Venezuela. That’s not much. Beijing is already working on replacing it with imports from Iran. China essentially is not dependent on Venezuelan oil. Apart from Iran, it may also source from Russia and Saudi Arabia.

Beijing clearly sees that the imperial overdrive in the Western Hemisphere and in West Asia is not just about oil, but also to force China to buy energy with petrodollars. Nonsense: with Russia, the Persian Gulf and beyond, the name of the game is already petroyuan.

China is 80% energy independent. Venezuela de facto was accounting for a mere 2% of the 20% China imports – and this according to the US government’s own numbers.

China’s energy relationship with Venezuela goes way beyond cheap American formulas. Here is essentially outlined how “Chinese oil agreements with Venezuela are de facto binding financial contracts, with repayment mechanisms, collateral structures, penalty clauses, and derivative linkages embedded deep into global finance (…) They are connected – directly and indirectly – to Western financial institutions, commodity traders, insurers, and clearing systems, including entities tied to Wall Street. If these contracts are broken, the consequence is not China ‘taking a loss’. It is a cascade event: defaults triggering counterparty exposure, derivatives being repriced, legal disputes crossing jurisdictions, and confidence shock spreading outward. At a certain point, this ceases to be a Venezuelan problem and becomes a systemic global one.”

Moreover, “over the past twenty years, China has become the operational core of Venezuela’s oil industry. Not merely as a buyer, but as a builder. China provided refinery technology, heavy crude upgrading systems, infrastructure design, control software, spare parts logistics (…) Remove the Chinese engineers. Remove the technicians who understand the control logic. Remove the maintenance supply chains. Remove the software support. What remains is not a functioning oil industry waiting to be ‘liberated’, but an inert shell.”

Conclusion: “Converting Venezuela’s Chinese-built oil sector into an American one would take three to five years, minimum.”

Financial analyst Lucas Ekwame hits the major points. Venezuela produces superheavy oil as thick as tar. It doesn’t just flow; it needs to be melted to reach the surface, and after extraction, it hardens again, requiring diluent: no less than 0.3 barrels of diluent need to be imported for each exported barrel.

Compound it with Venezuela’s energy infrastructure shaped by China and at the same time suffering years of American sanctions, even worse than over Iraq in the early 2000s, and neo-Caligula’s faulty oil “strategy” becomes obvious.

That of course does not alter the short-term feast of imperial hedge fund vultures over Venezuela’s carcass, starting with ghastly Paul Singer, the billionaire Zionist hedge fund manager and MAGA super PAC donor ($42 million in 2024) whose Elliott Management acquired the Houston-based subsidiary of CITGO for $5.9 billion in November, less than a third of its $18 billion market value, thanks to the embargo on Venezuelan oil imports.

The speculative money crowd is bound to cash in on up to $170 billion in the debt market; defaulted PDVSA bonds alone are worth over $60 billion.

So the Big Oil Picture in Venezuela is way more complex than the Trump 2.0 gang suspects. Of course on the road ahead we may come to a situation where the Viceroy of Venezuela, the gusano Marco Rubio, cuts off the oil flow from Caracas to Shanghai. Well, considering Rubio’s strategic “expertise”, better start regimenting battalions of lawyers right away.

~ Pepe Escobar is a Brazilian journalist. He writes a column – The Roving Eye – for Asia Times Online, and works as an analyst for RT, Sputnik News, and Press TV as well as formerly for Al Jazeera. Escobar has focused on Central Asia and the Middle East, and has covered Iran on a continuous basis since the late 1990s. Escobar has reported extensively from Afghanistan. 

Palantir was hacked & exposed

Palantir's Peter Thiel (L) and Alex Karp (R) meets Israeli President Isaac Herzog (C) in Israel

 Kim Dotcom
@KimDotcom

Breaking

Palantir was allegedly hacked. An AI agent was used to gain super-user access and here”s what the hackers allegedly found:

Peter Thiel and Alex Karp commit mass surveillance of world leaders and titans of industry on a massive scale.

They have thousands of hours of transcribed and searchable conversations of Donald Trump, JD Vance and Elon Musk.

They have back-doored the devices, cars and jets of world leaders and accumulated the biggest archive of blackmail material.

Palantir is creating nuclear and bio weapon capabilities for Ukraine and is working closely with the CIA to defeat Russia. They believe they are one year away. They plan to achieve this by keeping Russia busy with meaningless peace negotiations.

Palantir is responsible of the majority of Palestinian deaths in Gaza. They have developed the AI targeting for Israel.

Palantir is an arm of the CIA and all data from international clients is copied into a CIA spy cloud.

Palantir has become the most dangerous company in the world. If you work there you have the right to know that this is what Palantir AI is used for, without your knowledge.

The Palantir data the hackers allegedly gathered will be given to Russia and/or China. I was chosen as a trusted partner for this publication. I’m not involved in the Palantir hack and I don’t know the hackers. But I do know that the hack happened.

https://x.com/kimdotcom/status/2023165849721536672

Arsenal of Hypocrisy

 

Long ago

I used a bank

in Orlando, Florida

that changed 

its name to

'Freedom Bank'.

 

I asked myself

'whose freedom,

what kind of freedom

are they talking about'?

 

I closed my account

and moved to another bank.

 

This freedom they talk about

is easy to understand.

 

It is the freedom

to smash and grab.

To steal like pirates. 

To lie and distort.

To attempt to control

everything

and everyone.

The freedom to create

mind numbing intimidation 

and paralyzing fear. 

 

The freedom to protect

big oil, big pharma,

Wall Street banksters,

their pedophile partners,

their sleazy media outlets

that report the CIA scripts

that are handed daily

to well paid editors.

 

The freedom to make

the war mongers 

pockets bulge with

greasy blood money. 

 

The freedom to genocide Palestine,

Sudan, Congo, Cuba, 

and the unwanted poor

all around the globe.

 

Freedom to make war

anytime and any place

that Mr. Big desires.

The freedom to kill

indiscriminately.

 

The freedom

to control

and dominate space. 

 

The freedom to destroy

our own nation

by imperiling 

public trust

and hope for

a democratic order.

 

The freedom to ignite

hate and violence

amongst our own people,

to destroy and bury

national unity

and a sense of

common purpose.

 

This is fascism,

plain and simple.

We know the story,

we've seen it before.

 

Our task

is to let the air

out of this

so-called 

'freedom balloon'.

 

Reveal the hollow

'freedom' word 

for what it

truly is.

A manipulative lie.

 

The public is ready

to hear this truth.

 

Will they dare

to share it,

to speak it?

 

Will they struggle

to save our true freedoms

to speak, assemble,

have free media,

and the right to vote

in fair and honest 

elections? 

 

No matter which

political party

is in power? 

 

Will they fight

for a socialist economy,

good jobs and education,

health care, a clean environment,

social security, 

rather than

allow the 1%

to bleed us

to death? 

 

Bruce 

Pepe Escobar on western imperial collapse

From 9/11 to the Gaza genocide and the exposure of elite impunity, Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar describes a system entering its slow yet visible decline.  

Sunday song

The liberal order’s last stand at 'Munich Security Confab'

Vladimir Putin speaking at 2007 Munich Security Conference

Munich, 2007: The Day the West Was Told No

The Islander 
 
They like to pretend it came out of nowhere.
They like the bedtime story: Europe was peacefully humming along in its post-history spa — open borders, cheap energy, NATO as a charity, Russia as a gas station with a flag… and then, one day, the barbarian kicked the door in for no reason at all.

That story is not just dishonest. It’s operational. It’s the propaganda you tell yourself so you can keep the addiction going without ever admitting how self-destructive it is.

Because the truth is uglier and far more incriminating:

In Munich, on February 10, 2007, Vladimir Putin stood on the most flattering stage the Atlantic system owns — the Security Conference where Western officials applaud themselves for maintaining “order” and he laid out, to their faces, the skeleton of the coming disaster. He didn’t whisper it in a back channel. He used the microphone to deliver some much needed medicine, however hard it would be for the Empire to swallow.

He even signaled he wasn’t going to play the usual polite theatre — the kind where everyone agrees in public and stabs each other in classified annexes. He said the format allowed him to avoid “pleasant, yet empty diplomatic platitudes.”

And then he did the unforgivable thing, (gasp!) he described the empire as an empire.

He named the unipolar intoxication — that post–Cold War hallucination that history had ended, that power had found its final owner, that NATO could expand forever without consequences, that international law was optional for the enforcer class and compulsory for everyone else.

Putin’s core argument was brutally simple: a unipolar model is not only unacceptable, it’s impossible.

Not unfair. Not rude. Impossible.

(Because in a world with) “one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making” is a world where security becomes privatized — where the strong reserve the right to interpret rules (with exemptions for themselves), and the weak are told to accept it as morality. (And yes, he put it in exactly those terms — one center, one force, one decision — the architecture of domination.)

And when you build that kind of world, everyone else does the only rational thing left: they stop trusting the wall of law to protect them, and they start arming for survival.

Putin said it outright: when force becomes the default language, it “stimulates an arms race.”

This is where the Western client media — professionally disingenuous as ever, clipped one or two spicy lines and missed the larger point: Munich 2007 wasn’t “Putin raging.” It was Russia publishing its red-lines in front of the class.

And then came the part that should have frozen the room. Putin named it - NATO expansion.

Putin didn’t argue it as nostalgia. He argued it as provocation — a deliberate reduction of trust. He asked the question no Western leader ever answers honestly:

“Against whom is this expansion intended?”

And then he drove the blade in: what happened to the assurances made after the Warsaw Pact dissolved? “No one even remembers them.”

That line matters because it goes well beyond grievance — it’s a window into how Russia saw the post–Cold War settlement: not as a partnership, but as a rolling deception. Expand NATO, move offensive infrastructure, then call it “defensive.” Build bases, run exercises, integrate weapons systems, and insist the other side is paranoid for noticing.

Putin’s formulation was clean: NATO expansion “represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.”

Now pause and look at the psychology of the West in that room. They didn’t hear a warning. They heard audacity. They didn’t hear “security dilemma.” They heard “how dare you speak like an equal.”

That’s the cultural glitch at the heart of the Atlantic project: it believes its own core lie and cannot process sovereignty in others without treating it as aggression.

So Munich 2007 became, in Western memory, not the moment Russia told the truth — but the moment Russia “showed its hand.” The implication: Russia’s “hand” was evil, and therefore any response to it was justified. Which is exactly how you sleepwalk into catastrophe.

The real prophecy: not mysticism — mechanics

What was prophetic about Putin’s speech isn’t that he had a crystal ball.

It’s that he understood the West’s incentive structure:

• A security system that expands by definition (NATO) needs threats by definition.

• A unipolar ideology needs disobedience to punish, otherwise the myth collapses.

• A rules-based order that breaks its own rules must constantly produce narrative cover.

• An economic model that offshore-outs its industry and imports “cheap stability” must secure energy routes, supply chains, and obedience — by finance, by sanctions, by force.

Putin was saying: you can’t build a global security architecture on humiliation and expect it to be stable. Russia had lived through the wreckage of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq and that this playbook would be used again and again, with Georgia, with Syria, Libya, Iran and Russia itself if Putin did nothing. 

He was also saying and this is where the Russophobic mass hysteria accelerates — that Russia would not accept a subordinate role in its own neighborhood, on its own borders, under a wannabe hegemon’s military umbrella.

This is where the Western catechism kicks in: “neighborhood” is called “sphere of influence” when Russia says it, and “security guarantees” when Washington says it. And so the hysteria machine warmed up.

You saw it in the immediate reception: Western elites, including Merkel and McCain treating the speech as an insult rather than a negotiation offer. You saw it in the years that followed — the steady normalization of the idea that Russia’s security concerns were illegitimate, and therefore could be ignored with moralistic lectures, free of consequences.

Ignore, expand, accuse, repeat.

That loop is your road to 2022 and to today, in Munich 2026. Groundhog day without learning the vital lessons to end the loop of utter madness. 

Munich, Feb 13 (2026): Merz admits the order is dead — and calls it “uncertainty”

Fast forward. Same city. Same conference. Same Western liturgy, just with more panic in the eyes and the nucleus of a terrifying realization.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz using his best performative courage, murmured that the world order we relied on is no longer there. Framing the post–Cold War “rules-based order” as effectively crumbled and almost begging for a reset in transatlantic relations.

He goes further: he talks up a stronger European defence posture, and pointed to discussions with France about a European nuclear deterrent concept, a “European nuclear shield.”

And then comes the line that should be carved into the marble of the Munich conference hall as Exhibit A: Merz argues that in this era, even the United States “will not be powerful enough to go alone.”

Read that again.

The BlackRock chancellor on NATO’s spiritual home turf is effectively saying: the empire is overstretched, the illusion of old certainties are gone, and Europe will be left hung out to dry. Talk about strategic vertigo!

And it is exactly what Putin was talking about in 2007: when one axis tries to act as the planet’s owner, the cost accumulates — wars, blow-back, arms races, fractured trust, until the system starts to wobble under its own contradictions.

Merz also reportedly begged the U.S. and Europe to “repair and revive” transatlantic trust. Repair trust with what currency?

Because trust isn’t repaired by speeches. Trust is repaired by reversing the toxic and suicidal behaviors that destroyed it.

And those behaviors were precisely what Putin named in 2007: 

• expanding military blocs toward another power’s borders,

• treating international law as a menu,

• using economic coercion as a weapon,

• and then pretending the consequences are “unprovoked.”

Europe is now gasping at the invoice for that policy set: industrial stress, energy insecurity, strategic dependency, and a political class that can’t admit how it got here without indicting itself.

So instead of confession, you get moral performance. Instead of strategy, you get hysteria and cartoon slogans.

Instead of peace architecture, you get escalation management — the art of walking toward the cliff while calling it deterrence.

Merz’s remarks underscore that Europe is being forced to contemplate a harsher security environment and greater responsibility, all of its own suicidal making — but it still frames the Russia question in the familiar moralizing register.

Which is the whole tragedy: they can feel the tectonic plates shifting beneath them, yet they keep reciting the same old prayers that summoned the earthquake.

Why we’re here: the Western addiction to expansion — and the manufactured Russophobia that lubricated it

Russophobia is more than just bloodthirsty prejudice. It’s the (failed) policy tool of choice of the last few empires against Russia.

It’s what you pump into the Mockingbird media bloodstream to make escalation feel like virtue and compromise feel like treason.

You don’t have to love everything Russia does to see the mechanism: a permanent narrative of Russian menace makes every NATO move sound defensive, every EU economic self-harm sound righteous, and every diplomatic off-ramp sound like appeasement.

It creates a psychological environment where: 

• NATO expansion becomes “freedom,” 

• coups become “democratic awakenings,” 

• sanctions become “values,” 

• censorship becomes “information integrity,” 

• and war becomes “support.” 

And once you install that operating system, you can torch your own industry and still call it moral leadership.

That’s the dark comedy of Europe since 2014 — accelerating post 2022: self-sanctioning, deindustrializing pressure, energy price shocks, and strategic submission to Washington’s delusion of carving up Russia, sold as “defending democracy.”

Meanwhile, Moscow reads the West’s behavior the same way it read it in 2007: as a hostile architecture closing in, dressed up as virtue.

Putin’s Munich speech — again, not mysticism — warned that when the strong monopolize decision-making and normalize force, the world becomes less safe, not more.

So what did the West do?

It made the “rules-based order” a brand — while breaking rules (international law) whenever convenient. Exceptionalism at almost biblical levels, God’s chosen people. 

It expanded NATO while insisting the expansion was harmless.

It treated Russian objections as evidence of Russian guilt — which is circular logic worthy of an inquisitor.

And it nurtured a media culture that could not imagine Russia as a rational actor responding to a pattern of ugly regime change behavior — only as a cartoon villain driven by pathology. Not analysis but theological warfare.

The punchline Munich won’t say out loud

Here’s the line Munich still cannot speak, even in 2026, even with Merz admitting the old order is gone:

The West didn’t misread Putin’s warning. It rejected it because accepting it would have meant limiting itself.

Munich 2007 was a chance — maybe the last clean one — to build a European security architecture that wasn’t just NATO with better PR. A chance to treat Russia as a Great Power with legitimate interests, not a defeated adversary to be regime changed and broken apart.

And now, in Munich 2026, they stand amid the wreckage and call it “uncertainty,” as if the storm blew in from nowhere. The BlackRock Chancellor calls for resets, for revived trust, for Europe to become stronger, for new deterrence ideas.

But the reset Munich needs is the one it refuses: 

• reset the premise that NATO will remain a viable alliance beyond the war in Ukraine, 

• reset the premise that Russia must absorb strategic humiliation and accept the inverse, the reality as it is - where it’s in fact Western Europe that is wearing the humiliation. 

• reset the premise that international law is a tool of the powerful, 

• reset the premise that Europe’s role is to be the forward operating base and European sovereignty sacrificed to buy the Empire time. 

Until that happens, Munich will keep happening — every year, more anxious, more militarized, more rhetorical, more detached from the material reality its own disastrous policies created.

And Putin’s “prophecy” will keep looking prophetic — not because he conjured the future, but because he correctly described the machine. 

Ramadan in Gaza

As a third Ramadan approaches, Gaza prepares for the holy month under the weight of the ongoing Israeli genocide. 

More than one million displaced Palestinians are living among rubble and in tents, while over 71,000 have been killed, thousands remain missing, and many families are unable to identify their loved ones. Religious life has been heavily targeted, with most mosques damaged or destroyed. 

Despite the destruction and widening regional tensions driven by Israel’s war, Palestinians continue to prepare for fasting and worship amid loss and displacement.

When will the world demand an end to US-Iaraeli genocide in Palestine? 

🇬🇱Greenland isn’t rich the way you think

It’s not a treasure chest. It’s a hinge. 

The GIUK gap. The Atlantic choke point. The place where naval flows get tracked, boxed, or released. Whoever holds it shapes [things] in the North Atlantic.

And while everyone argues about rare earths, Russia is operationalizing the Arctic.

37.9 million tonnes through the Northern Sea Route. Icebreakers scaling. Doctrine through 2035.

Corridors don’t stay theory. They become infrastructure. Then they become massive leverage.

You’re being sold a minerals story. This is about command of the North Atlantic–Arctic axis.

So when Trump says “we have to have Greenland,” don’t hear real estate.

Hear unlimited basing rights. Hear radar arcs and Golden Dome. Hear ownership without the flag.

Greenland is less about rare earths. It’s about who controls the geopolitical weather in the North Atlantic.

I broke the whole board down — minerals, NSR, icebreakers, Golden Dome, the lot.

Read it on our Substack👇 

https://open.substack.com/pub/islanderreports/p/giuk-icebreakers-and-the-master-key

🎙Subscribe @TheIslanderNews

Radhika Desai: Trump’s TACO Syndrome

Dr. Radhika Desai ‪@InternationalManifesto‬ exposes how Trump tariffs are fueling BRICS economy growth instead of protecting American interests. This geopolitical economy analysis reveals the shocking truth: Trump trade war tactics are performative theater, not genuine economic strategy. As the US economic decline continues, we're witnessing a massive global power shift toward BRICS vs US dominance.

The dollar collapse isn’t just possible; it’s probable as global South rising nations abandon US-centered trade. Desai explains how economic nationalism masks corporate interests, why US tariffs China policies lack an industrial strategy, and how supply chain chaos hurts American businesses more than competitors.

Learn about BRICS currency alternatives, trade realignment away from America, and why the global economic order is fundamentally shifting toward a multipolar world. This isn’t typical economics content—it’s anti-imperialism analysis showing how imperialism’s contradictions are destroying American hegemony. From geopolitics to finance, capitalism’s crisis is creating space for alternative economic models.  

the funnies