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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   1143 thread views

Transnational Thursday for December 18, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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It's no surprise then that when Trump reached out to industry leaders earlier this week, reps from companies like Exxon and ConocoPhillips said point blank that they had no interest in resurrecting the Venezuelan oil industry with prices at five year lows. It's almost as if he doesn't understand how the laws of supply and demand work. If he were really concerned with how much American consumers are paying at the pump—which isn't much, historically—he'd strike a deal with Maduro to flood the US market with Venezuelan oil and use whatever money he had planned on spending on the war and use it to subsidize the US oil companies outright. This is a terrible policy for a number of reasons, but it's still better than the idiocy we have now.

This is exactly what I'm saying. Some of these reasons seem to be a casus belli based on publicly available (semi-plausible?) information but don't seem to hold water when you dig into them.

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