Rubio: Venezuela oil quarantine key to U.S. pressure strategy
(Bloomberg) – Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. would use an oil “quarantine” to get what it wants from Venezuela’s new leaders following the ouster of President Nicolas Maduro.
With questions swirling about how the U.S. will deal with members of Maduro’s leadership who remain in power, Rubio said that Venezuela must sever ties to Iran, Hezbollah and Cuba, stop drug trafficking and ensure that its oil industry doesn’t benefit US adversaries.
“There’s a quarantine right now in which sanctioned oil shipments — there’s a boat, and that boat is under U.S. sanctions, we go get a court order — we will seize it,” Rubio said on CBS’s Face the Nation. That’s “a tremendous amount of leverage” for the US to press for change in Venezuela, he said.
President Donald Trump suggested that U.S. oil companies would spend billions of dollars to rebuild Venezuela’s oil industry when he described how the U.S. captured Maduro and his wife and brought them to the US on Saturday to face charges in New York.
Rubio said a global shortage of heavy crude could help spur that transition.
“I haven’t spoken to U.S. oil companies in the last few days but we’re pretty certain that there will be dramatic interest from Western companies,” Rubio said on ABC’s This Week. “Non-Russian, non-Chinese companies will be very interested. Our refineries on the Gulf Coast of the United States are the best in terms of refining this heavy crude.”
“There will be tremendous interest — if it can be done the right way,” he said.
Rubio gave few hints on the immediate path forward in Venezuela after Trump said the U.S. will work with acting president Delcy Rodríguez to transition to a democratically elected government. She and other Venezuelan leaders have thus far appeared uncooperative.
Rubio sidestepped a question on CBS on when Venezuela might hold elections as part of a transition to democracy.
“These things take time — there’s a process,” he said, without elaborating. “We’re going to make an assessment of what they do, not what they say publicly in the interim ... but what they do moving forward.”
Rubio cited Venezuela’s oil industry as the key to a strong economy.
“Right now, it is an oil industry that is backwards,” he told Face the Nation. “None of the money from the oil gets to the people. It’s all stolen by the people that are on the top there and so that’s why we have a quarantine.”
That blockade will remain in place “until we see changes that do not just further the national interest of the United States, which is number one, but also that lead to a better future for the Venezuelan people.”
U.S. forces deployed in the region are “capable of stopping not just drug boats, but stopping any of these sanctioned boats that come in and out and really paralyzing that portion of how the regime generates revenue,” Rubio said.
