Donald Trump announced proudly last week that his administration had reached an agreement giving the United States majority control over the development of some 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s proven oil reserves. The president seemed delighted with the news — perhaps politically convenient amid high oil prices caused in significant part by the war with Iran, a war he chose to enter six months ago. Having helped create the problem, he now has considerable incentive to solve it, or at least to make a deal that can be presented as a solution.
In the same season, Washington has continued sparring with Canada over trade, floated extraordinary demands, and even made inquiries involving the Marshall Islands and the Falklands. It has been a busy season for American ambition.
Even during the colonial era, great powers felt compelled to offer some justification for invasion or appropriation. Missionary work, civilizing missions, the supposed uplift of indigenous populations — the rhetoric was often self-serving, but it acknowledged that naked ambition required a fig leaf. Over the twentieth century, through decolonization, international law, and the growing principle of national sovereignty, the idea increasingly took hold that a country’s natural resources belonged to its people. Corporations sometimes used governments to secure access in ways that resembled appropriation, but the official principle remained intact.
The same pattern held in military affairs. Hitler invaded Poland after staging incidents intended to manufacture evidence of Polish aggression. He invoked the protection of ethnic Germans as he dismantled Czechoslovakia. Putin surrounded his invasion of Ukraine with an elaborate architecture of justification — NATO expansion, threats to Russia, protection of Russian speakers, “denazification.” Even the worst actors felt obliged to explain themselves.
That instinct to justify aggression is not entirely unhealthy. Even a false explanation acknowledges that the world expects reasons. The lie itself pays tribute to the existence of a norm.
A world in which no explanation is needed — in which a powerful country may take what it wants simply because doing so is advantageous — is considerably more dangerous. Once “it is a good deal for us” becomes sufficient justification, there is no limiting principle. A stronger country can always identify something it wants from a weaker one.
International law, institutions, and norms exist to restrain precisely this impulse. They are imperfect and have always been violated, often by the United States itself. But their imperfection does not make them meaningless. They reflect a basic principle: the resources of a country belong to that country.
That is what makes the Venezuelan agreement so unsettling. The United States removed Nicolás Maduro from power by force and then negotiated an unprecedented oil arrangement with the government it helped install and whose position now depends heavily on American power. Trump describes the result as an extraordinary deal for America. But the circumstances of the negotiation cannot be separated from the agreement itself.
There is no “great deal” in which you remove a country’s leader, install his successor, and then negotiate with that successor for control of the country’s resources. The imbalance of power is not incidental to the deal. It is the deal.
For centuries, powerful nations have behaved badly. They have invaded, extracted, coerced, and lied about why they were doing it. The hypocrisy was sometimes grotesque. But hypocrisy contained an unintended concession: there were rules important enough to pretend you were following.
The danger is not only in what is taken.
It is in the idea that nothing needs to be justified at all.