Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) said Friday on MS NOW’s “All In” that President Donald Trump’s agreement giving the U.S. majority control over more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan’s oil reserves is “morally wrong.”
Host Chris Hayes said, “I want to ask you about something he said today. He just announced that having abducted a president of that country, that we are now going to essentially get all their oil reserves. This is a huge deal. And we’ve now taken over, essentially, Venezuelan oil reserves. Do you think there’s still like a core of anti-imperial civic culture in this country, in which just people understand there’s something wrong about abducting a country’s leader to take their oil?”
Khanna said, “Sad to see. It’s like we’ve rolled back the clock 100 years. Yeah, the era of gunboat diplomacy and, you know, the history. So what we did in Guatemala, what we did in El Salvador, what we did in Haiti, but it’s wrong. It’s wrong to have a colonial model of the world. I mean, my grandfather was in jail twice fighting for British independence. And it was FDR who pushed Churchill to decolonize. And I thought America, had stood for decolonization. Trump is rolling it all back because he simply believes in a world where might makes right, where you take what you can. And we need to oppose it on moral grounds. It’s not just that it’s strategically wrong. It’s morally wrong. It’s not what America should be, given our principles.”
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