Israel’s Somaliland Gamble is Repeating the Bloody History that Created Al-Shabaab

The Boxing Day recognition will not bring stability but will ignite a conflict that empowers extremists and spills into Ethiopia’s troubled east.

By Abdiweli Garad

January 19, 2026

Source: African Arguments

Israel’s Foreign Minister in Hargeisa, Somaliland, December 2025. | Image via African Arguments

On Boxing Day 2006, Ethiopian troops, endorsed by the United States, rolled into Mogadishu. Their intervention, aimed at crushing the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) and installing “a weak, decentralised client state … willing to settle for ongoing state collapse rather than risk a revived Arab-backed government in Mogadishu”, shattered a fragile moment of order and birthed the regional jihadist monster known as Al-Shabaab.

Nineteen years later to the day, another seismic shock struck the Horn of Africa. Israel’s recognition of the secessionist region of Somaliland has been met with vehement repudiation from Somalia, the African Union, the Arab League, the EU and the United Nations Security Council. The diplomatic crisis is evident. The impending security catastrophe is being perilously disregarded.

History is not merely rhyming; it is preparing to repeat its most violent verse. In Somalia, clans, not the state, control territory. Somaliland claims the territory of British protectorates, including Isaaq, Gadabursi, Issa, and Daarood Harti clans. Ironically, Somaliland does not control the eastern part, which is part of the Federal Government and known as the Northeastern State of Somalia. Most Gadabursi and Issa populations want to join Somalia. The western region, called Awdal, is named after the Adel state led by Ahmed Gurey, who conquered current Ethiopia. Gurey’s legacy, documented in the 16th-century chronicle Futuh Al-Habasha, remains a potent symbol that can be invoked to frame modern conflicts as a timeless religious struggle. The eastern region traces back to Dervishes who fought colonial powers: the British, Ethiopia and Italy, making Somalia the first African country to be bombed from the air. It is into this deeply fractured and historically charged arena that Israel has now intervened.

Israel’s move, driven by its own strategic needs to attack the Houthis and because Somaliland agreed to relocate Gazans, recreates the exact toxic conditions of 2006: a controversial foreign power colluding with a local faction, fracturing Somali politics and alienating its population. The result will be the same: a devastating empowerment of Al-Shabaab and a bloody spillover of conflict into the fragile states of the region, particularly Ethiopia.

The 2006 blueprint: the nationalist bridge to Jihad

To understand the future, we must confront the past. In mid-2006, the ICU had done the unthinkable in Mogadishu: it restored security. “The Courts achieved the unthinkable, uniting Mogadishu for the first time in 16 years, and re-establishing peace and security.” People walked the streets free from the tyranny of warlord checkpoints. This stability, born—though not exclusively—of a conservative brand of Salafist rule, was broadly popular and framed in terms of Somali nationalism and sovereignty.

The Ethiopian invasion, blessed by the US as part of the War on Terror, shattered this. It was justified as a mission to remove a terrorist threat, but its effect was to turn a domestic political entity into a cause for resistance. Critically, the intervention itself transformed the ideological landscape. The ICU’s initial platform was not one of global jihad. However, the foreign invasion provided the catalyst for a fateful pivot. Sufi-oriented scholars within the ICU, like Sheikh Abdulqadir Ali Omar, saw their nightly, soft-spoken radio sermons shift from governance to an explicit call for defensive jihad—a direct and radicalising response to the US-backed Ethiopian incursion. This created a bridge: first, a legitimate nationalist grievance against foreign occupation, which was then channelled into a religiously framed conflict. The US and Ethiopia justified their actions mainly by viewing the ICU as a potential threat to their security interests. The subsequent statistics tell the story of the brutal blowback that followed: over 16,000 civilian deaths, 30,000 wounded, and 1.3 million displaced. From this cauldron, Al-Shabaab emerged, mastering the fusion of Somali as “nationalist as well as a transnationalist.”

 The 2025 catalyst: laying the nationalist plank

Fast forward to the present. Israel’s recognition of Somaliland is not an act of altruistic diplomacy. Israeli sources frame it as a strategic necessity: to secure the Red Sea from Houthi attacks and to relocate Palestinians from Gaza, potentially. For the isolated Somaliland elite, it is a desperate, decades-long quest for recognition, finally answered by a powerful but deeply controversial partner.

The dynamic mirrors 2006 with chilling precision, and the ideological playbook is already in motion. Just as the Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG) was seen as a puppet of Addis Ababa, the Somaliland administration will now be painted—across Somalia and much of the Islamic world—as a client of Tel Aviv. We are witnessing the critical first phase of the 2006 replay: the construction of the nationalist grievance. Following the Boxing Day recognition, Sheikh Adan Sunni, a high-ranking member of Al-Shabaab’s leadership and originally from Hargeisa, issued a warning statement. Significantly, its tone was not initially one of fiery jihad, but of Somali nationalism—a deliberate framing to attract, recruit, and lead broader Somali opposition to what is framed as a Zionist-abetted betrayal of Somali unity. This is the essential first step. It lays the nationalist plank over which the jihadist march will later travel. The group’s narrative is being carefully set to defend the Somali nation under the Islamic banner. The near-universal condemnation from the UN, EU, AU and Arab League validates this nationalist framing, ensuring the crisis creates a vast pool of alienated Somalis from which Al-Shabaab can recruit. While rooted in Somaliland’s understandable, decades-long pursuit of sovereignty, this partnership with Israel comes at a catastrophic cost to regional stability.

The permeable border: from “don’t ask, don’t tell” to open door

Critically, this crisis will rupture a delicate, existing balance. While many Somalis allege direct ties between Somaliland elites and Al-Shabaab families, the more accurate relationship has been a pragmatic, “don’t ask, don’t tell” coexistence. My own research in the region confirms this permeability.

In one telling encounter, a former MP and international consultant described being in a mosque during a Friday sermon in Harageisa and realising the man a few feet away was Ibrahim Mecaad, aka “Ibrahim Afghan,” a notorious Al-Shabaab facilitator. “When he realised, I recognised him, he left the mosque,” the former MP told me. This anecdote reveals a stark truth: Al-Shabaab elements have moved in spaces where official Somaliland authority is tacitly ignored.

A full-blown political and military crisis over recognition will destroy this fragile understanding. Somaliland’s security forces will be stretched thin as they defend a new, contested international status. Internal opposition will flare. In the resulting chaos and governance vacuum, Al-Shabaab will not just slip through—it will march in, positioning itself as the true defender of Somali unity. Sheikh Adan Sunni’s nationalist framing is the recruitment poster; the coming conflict will be the training ground where that nationalism is hardened into jihad.

The spillover: lighting Ethiopia’s eastern front

The fallout will not be contained within Somalia’s colonial borders. Al-Shabaab has long coveted access to Ethiopia, viewing it as a key frontier. A revitalised Al-Shabaab, armed with a potent new nationalist cause and a burgeoning recruitment drive in the north, will direct its energised forces eastward.

Ethiopia, beset by internal rebellions, drought, and deep ethnic fractures, is a tinderbox. A confident Al-Shabaab, now leading a cause that resonates from Bu’aale (Al-Shabaab’s headquarters) to the Bali region of Oromia, will be the spark. The group’s prayers for access to eastern Ethiopia will have been granted. The conflict will metastasise from a Somali civil dispute into a direct assault on the stability of Africa’s second-most populous nation, with catastrophic humanitarian consequences for the entire Horn.

Conclusion: a predictable catastrophe, phase by phase

The script for this disaster is being followed, phase by phase. We have seen this film before: foreign intervention, local clientism, nationalist grievance, ideological pivot, militant backlash, and regional conflagration. Sheikh Abdullahi Ali Omar’s call in 2006 and Sheikh Adan Sunni’s nationalist framing in 2025 are not disconnected events. They are Act I, Scene I of the same tragedy—the deliberate construction of a popular, defensive platform that will be used to legitimise and fuel the coming jihad. In seeking tactical advantages in the Red Sea and Gaza, Israel is not just altering a map; it is activating a deadly radicalisation algorithm with known outputs.

The international community, currently focused on diplomatic outrage, must look ahead. It must see the looming security nightmare and act decisively to de-escalate this recognition gambit. To ignore the lessons of Boxing Day 2006 is to guarantee a future of bloodshed that will dwarf the horrors of the past. The alternative is to watch, again, as a geopolitical calculation births a generation of terror. The lessons of 2006 are not just history; they are a blueprint for the disaster now being assembled.Email

Abdiweli Garad

Abdiweli Garad is a researcher and analyst specialising in security and politics in the Horn of Africa. He holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham.

MLK DAY IN U$A

It’s Time Again for Good Trouble

By Robert Reich

January 19, 2026

Image by National Park Service, Creative Commons 2.0

Today we honor the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.

Trump has removed MLK Jr.’s birthday from the National Park Service’s fee-free days and substituted his own birthday of June 14 as a fee-free day.

I write this more in sorrow than in anger.

All told, I feel profound sorrow for America. Sorrow for the people of Minneapolis who are enduring this Trump-made hell. Sorrow for Renee Good’s three children and wife.

I also feel sorrow for Greenlanders and Venezuelans and others around the world fearing what the sociopath in the Oval Office may do next. Sorrow for everyone justifiably worried about the future of America and the planet because of him.

I’m old enough to remember when Martin Luther King Jr.’s mission seemed impossible. Just as the mission you and I must now engage in — defeating Trumpism and creating a new and better America out of the rubble and chaos he is wreaking — may seem impossible at this moment.

Martin Luther King Jr. accomplished more than anyone thought he could when he began. He did it with patience and perseverance, with the strength of conviction. He did it with calmness, reason, and quiet passion.

And he did it with civil disobedience — what one of his assistants, the late great congressman John Lewis, called “good trouble.”

Good trouble meant mobilizing the nation against racial injustice by making sure almost everyone saw its horrors. Night after night on the news — watching peaceful civil rights marchers getting clobbered by white supremacists.

I remember watching Bull Connor, commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, and his goons use firehoses and attack dogs against Black people — including children — who were peacefully standing up for their rights.

The scenes horrified America and much of the world. Yet were it not for our painful national exposure to racist brutality, we wouldn’t have gotten the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act.

I’ve been thinking of those scenes as I’ve watched ICE thugs patrolling Minneapolis. Watched armed agents pulling people out of cars, using chokeholds, demanding proof of citizenship. Masked agents in unmarked vehicles grabbing neighbors off the streets, using tear gas and pepper spray, shooting innocent people exercising their First Amendment rights to protest.

This time it isn’t Bull Connor and his racist goons. It’s Donald Trump, JD Vance, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and their fascist goons. It’s armed agents of the president of the United States who are bullying and brutalizing people. Committing a cold-blooded murder of a middle-class white woman in broad daylight who tried to get out of their way. Shooting and injuring others.

This time it’s Trump and the thugs around him making up stories to justify this brutality, lying about the protester’s motives, and threatening even more brutality.

Take a wider look and you see their lawless bullying on a different scale: a criminal investigation of the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board for failing to lower interest rates as fast as Trump wants. Criminal investigations of U.S. senators and representatives for telling America’s soldiers that they don’t have to follow illegal orders. Criminal investigations of the governor of Minnesota and mayor of Minneapolis for refusing to cooperate with Trump’s brown shirts.

The Justice Department searching the home of a Washington Post reporter and seizing her laptops and other devices.

Trump raising tariffs on our trusted allies — until and unless they support him in taking over Greenland. Greenland!

A crazy old man saying “fuck you, fuck you” and giving the finger to an American factory worker who criticizes him in public. The crazy old man is president of the United States, and the worker has been suspended from his job because he dared criticize that crazy old man.

I remember the good trouble that occurred 65 years ago. I believe it’s time for it again. Time for all of us — every one of us — to cause it.

What kind of good trouble?

A huge national demonstration, far larger than anything before. Everyone in the streets.

A giant general strike where we stop purchasing all products for two weeks (stocking up beforehand).

A massive boycott of all businesses sucking up to Trump.

A coordinated effort to get all our employers, our churches and synagogues, our unions, our universities to condemn this madness.

A loud demand that our members of Congress impeach and convict him of his high crimes.

There is no longer any neutral place to stand. Either you’re standing up for democracy, the rule of law, and social justice, or you’re complicit in the fascist mayhem Trump has unleashed.

That, for me, is the lesson of all this.

Trump and his thugs have brought us to this point. They are the Bull Connors of today.

We stand with the people of Minneapolis and with the people of every other town and city where Trump’s thugs are prowling or will prowl, and where people are resisting.

We stand with the citizens of Greenland and Venezuela. With Canadians and Europeans. With every nation now threatened by Trump’s lawless abuses of power.

We stand proudly and sturdily everywhere the bright lights of freedom and truth still shine.

We will overcome the darkness of Trump’s fascism. We reject the hate, the bigotry, the fear, and the murderous lawlessness of his regime. We dedicate ourselves to causing good trouble — ending this mayhem, and building a new and better America.Email

Robert Reich

Robert Bernard Reich is an American professor, author, lawyer, and political commentator. He worked in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and served as Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997 in the cabinet of President Bill Clinton. He was also a member of President Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board. Reich has been the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley since January 2006. He was formerly a lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a professor of social and economic policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management of Brandeis University.

MLK’s Strugge Against Policing and Surveillance Is Still Alive in Memphis Today

By Earle J. Fisher

January 19, 2026

Photograph Source: Matt Brown – CC BY 2.0

Every year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, elected officials quote King while standing safely at a distance from the risks he embraced. His name is invoked, his image sanitized, and his politics stripped of urgency. The U.S. celebrates a softened King who spoke about love but not power, unity but not confrontation, peace but not disruption. What we rarely confront is this truth: Martin Luther King Jr. was not merely misunderstood in his time. He was actively surveilled, criminalized, and treated as a threat to the hegemonic order in the U.S.

That history is not behind us. It is unfolding again.

In recent weeks, shootings involving federal agents connected to immigration enforcement and homeland security operations in Minneapolis and Portland have raised urgent questions about the expanding reach of federal policing, the militarization of law enforcement, and the dangers of unchecked surveillance powers. These incidents are not isolated. They exist within a long arc of state authority asserting itself most aggressively where dissent, migration, and racialized resistance converge.

To understand this moment, we must tell the truth about King’s.

Under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI conducted an extensive campaign of surveillance against Martin Luther King Jr.: King’s phones were tapped. His movements were tracked. His private life was scrutinized and weaponized. Hoover famously described King as “the most dangerous Negro in America,” not because King was violent, but because he was effective. Hoover feared what he called the rise of a “Black Messiah” — a leader capable of unifying Black people across class lines and mobilizing moral resistance to state violence, economic exploitation, and militarism.

King was not targeted because he preached hate. He was targeted because he preached liberation.

This repression intensified as King moved beyond civil rights rhetoric into structural critique. When he opposed the Vietnam War, organized the Poor People’s Campaign, and challenged economic inequality, King crossed an invisible line. He became not just a moral voice, but a political threat. Surveillance was the state’s response.

That logic did not end with Hoover. It evolved.

I know this not as distant history, but as lived reality. In Memphis, beginning around 2016 and intensifying through 2017 and 2018, people organizing for racial justice found ourselves under police surveillance because of our participation in collective efforts demanding accountability, transparency, and criminal justice reform. Faith leaders, grassroots organizers, and activists connected to the Movement for Black Lives-aligned efforts were engaged in lawful, nonviolent organizing when the Memphis Police Department tracked protests, monitored social media pages, and documented organizing strategies. What should have been protected civic engagement was treated as a threat.

Leaders praise King’s dream while avoiding his demands. They quote his words while rejecting his method. They honor his memory while reproducing the conditions that made him vulnerable to state violence in the first place.

I was later called to testify in federal court against Memphis Police Department’s unlawful surveillance practices, and it was revealed that even our church — Abyssinian Baptist Church — had been illegally surveilled. Spaces meant for worship, organizing, and sanctuary became zones of scrutiny. These experiences were later acknowledged by the Department of Justice’s pattern-and-practice investigation, which documented systemic constitutional violations, including improper surveillance and the targeting of Black activists and communities. The lesson was unmistakable: surveillance is not abstract. It is personal, local, and routinely deployed to suppress Black political dissent rather than protect public safety.

Today, we witness new forms of state surveillance justified under the language of “public safety,” “border security,” and “anti-terrorism.” Federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement operate with extraordinary discretion, often in communities already intensely policed and under-protected. When federal agents are deployed to cities without transparency or accountability, and when violence follows, the public is told to trust the process rather than interrogate the power.

But history teaches us otherwise.

Nowhere is this more painful or more revealing than in Memphis.

Memphis is the city where King was assassinated. It is also a city where police were found to have violated a federal consent decree by spying on protesters and activists. It is a city currently living under the weight of an expanded, militarized policing apparatus that many residents would describe as occupation. The Memphis (un)Safe Task Force, with its broad authority and opaque metrics, reflects the same logic that once framed King himself as a threat to be monitored rather than a prophet to be heard.

This is not coincidence. It is continuity.

Let’s remember that King did not inherit a tradition of quiet faith; rather, he stood firmly within the Black Prophetic Tradition. This tradition insists that faith is inseparable from justice, that love without truth is hollow, and that peace without accountability is false. It is a tradition that confronts power, exposes hypocrisy, and names systems (not just individuals) as sites of sin.

The Black Prophetic Tradition refuses the lie that order is more sacred than justice. It rejects the idea that safety can be built on surveillance alone. It insists that democracy is not secured by force but by trust, participation, and dignity. And it understands that when the state treats Black resistance as criminal, it is often because that resistance is effective.

This is why King unsettled those in power. And it is why his legacy remains threatening when taken seriously.

Yet today, King’s name is often used to legitimize policies he would have opposed. MLK Day becomes a “day of service” rather than a day of confrontation. Leaders praise King’s dream while avoiding his demands. They quote his words while rejecting his method. They honor his memory while reproducing the conditions that made him vulnerable to state violence in the first place.

The recent shootings perpetrated by federal agents in Minneapolis and Portland should force us to ask difficult questions about the expanding role of federal policing and surveillance in U.S. life. But in Memphis, those questions carry added weight. What does it mean to invoke King while tolerating unchecked policing? What does it mean to honor a man assassinated under state surveillance while refusing to protect civil liberties today?

The answers are uncomfortable, but necessary.

What does it mean to honor a man assassinated under state surveillance while refusing to protect civil liberties today?

If Memphis leaders truly wish to honor King, they must do more than quote him. They must develop the political consciousness and courage to protect the rights of those most vulnerable to state overreach. That means prioritizing transparency over theater, accountability over aggression, and justice over optics.

Given that neither federal nor state administrations can be relied upon, organizers in Memphis are calling for aggressive court challenges, civil rights litigation, injunctions, and independent investigations to force transparency, halt unlawful surveillance, and regulate joint task force operations. Justice, in concrete terms, looks like disaggregated public data, unmasked federal agents, an end to racial profiling and broken-windows policing, and sustained legal pressure that makes unconstitutional practices costly, visible, and ultimately untenable — demands that apply nationally because the mechanisms of aggressive policing are national.

King warned us that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” He also warned that militarism and racism were twin threats to democracy. Those warnings were not abstract. They were rooted in lived experience, prophetic insight, and political clarity.

King was not assassinated because he was misunderstood. He was assassinated because he was clear.

If we are serious about honoring his legacy, clarity — not comfort — must guide us now.Email

Earle J. Fisher

Rev. Earle J. Fisher, Ph.D., is a scholar, pastor, organizer, and public intellectual committed to Black liberation, civic empowerment, and institutional transformation. He serves as Senior Pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee, where he has cultivated a vibrant model of Black faith, cultural expression, and prophetic social witness. Under his leadership, Abyssinian has become a nexus for community organizing, political education, and spiritual formation throughout South Memphis and Whitehaven. Dr. Fisher is the Founder of UPTheVote901, a nonpartisan, Black-led voter empowerment initiative designed to increase political power, information and representation across Memphis and Shelby County bridging the academy, church, and broader public square. Dr. Fisher serves as Associate Professor of Religious Communication and Africana Studies and the Inaugural Dean of Chapel at LeMoyne-Owen College, where he leads Chapel Soul Sessions and advances work at the intersection of Africana intellectual traditions, public theology, and liberative pedagogy. He also teaches at Rhodes College, Memphis Theological Seminary, Claflin University, and Brite Divinity School. The author of The Rev. Albert Cleage Jr. and the Black Prophetic Tradition, Dr. Fisher is a sought-after speaker and commentator whose work amplifies marginalized voices and challenges systems that undermine Black political, spiritual, and cultural agency.

Is It about the Oil?

by Greg Godels / January 19th, 2026

“No War for Oil” is one of the most popular slogans in the many emergency demonstrations sprouting up around the world in response to the criminal kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores from their residence in Caracas, Venezuela and their forced removal to detention in the US.

For many outraged by the naked military aggression on Venezuelan sovereignty, the abduction is an escalated step toward the capture of Venezuelan energy resources by the US government, given that Venezuela has the largest proven petroleum reserves of any country at this moment.

The argument goes that– when you pull the curtain back– the ultimate goal of US imperialist designs is the control over and possible exploitation of Venezuela’s most important resource.

Having argued frequently that oil-imperialism or energy-imperialism is often an important– if not decisive– factor in capitalist foreign policy, this claim is appealing. Since the time when Britain in the early twentieth century turned from coal-burning naval ships to oil, petroleum has become more and more essential for the functioning, growth, and protection of capitalist economies. Consequently, intense competition for a rapidly diminishing, increasingly hard to discover, and growing-costly-to-exploit resource dictates the actions of great power rivals.

History gives us important examples of resource-scarcity spurring devastating imperialist aggression by capitalist powers. Nazi Germany’s Lebensraum program had at its core the necessity of acquiring energy resources to propel its imperialist designs– a program that led to world war. Similarly, Hirohito’s Japan– a resource-poor island nation– launched its Pacific offensive largely to acquire the oil to continue its war against China in the face of a US embargo.

The US embargo to deny oil to Republican Spain was, conversely, an aggressive act in oil imperialism, as is today’s blockade of Cuba. The war in Ukraine is indirectly a war over energy resources, since US resolve was stoked by the opportunity to win the vast EU market from Russia– a convenient, inexpensive, and formerly reliable supplier.

Less well known, the major oil and gas suppliers are constantly influencing global politics through manipulating production and prices. The most well-known example is the 1970’s OPEC oil strike against Israel’s Western supporters (an act that the Arab countries have lost the stomach for in recent times).

As a wise friend speculated once: “Why do you think the US never occupied Somalia after the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993 left 92 US casualties? Because there was no oil!”

Yet many believe that the attack on Venezuelan sovereignty was not about the oil… even with the President of the aggressor state saying that it was!

Instead, they believe it was about Western values, the rule of law, democracy, petty grievances, hubris, or even drug smuggling. Those in the loyal opposition– Democratic Party leaders– share many of these same explanations, but fault the Trump administration for its procedural or legalistic errors.

The center-left, the bogus-left, and the anti-Communist left deny that oil could be the motive because they imagine that it might bolster the case for an explanation based upon classical Leninist imperialism– that the invasion of Venezuela was motivated by corporate interests, by exploitation of resource-rich countries.

Thus,  widely-followed liberal economist Paul Krugman scoffs at the idea that Venezuela was invaded for oil: “… whatever it is we’re doing in Venezuela isn’t really a war for oil. It is, instead, a war for oil fantasies. The vast wealth Trump imagines is waiting there to be taken doesn’t exist.”

Krugman collects and endorses the most popular arguments against the “war for oil” viewpoint:

1. Venezuela reserves are a lie.

2. Venezuela’s heavy crude oil is uneconomic, undesirable, and unwanted.

3. The Venezuelan industry is so decrepit that it is beyond rescue.

4. The US has so much sweet, light crude oil available at low cost that no one would want Venezuelan oil.

The Nobel prize award-winner’s dismissal could easily be dismissed by simply asking why– if acquiring Venezuelan oil is so pointless– did Chevron ship 1.68 million barrels of Venezuelan crude oil in the first week of January, according to Bloomberg?

And then there is the ever-voracious, parasitic Haliburton– the consummate insider corporation– that announced that it’s ready to go into Venezuela within months!

It is worth looking a little deeper into the reasons that Venezuela’s oil is a possible target of imperialist design.

If Venezuela’s oil reserves are even one-third of what OPEC, The US Energy Information Administration, or The Energy Institute concede, their reserves would still be double those of the US.

While Venezuela’s heavy, sour crude is costlier to extract and refine, it remains as a legacy with many refineries in the US that were established before the shale boom. Naked Capitalism concedes that “[i]t is true that the US has motive, in that our refineries are tuned so that 70% of the oil they process is heavier grades, despite the US producing light sweet crudes.” It further quotes The American Fuel and Petroleum Manufacturer’s website:

Long before the U.S. shale boom, when global production of light sweet crude oil was declining, we made significant investments in our refineries to process heavier, high-sulfur crude oils that were more widely available in the global market. These investments were made to ensure U.S. refineries would have access to the feedstocks needed to produce gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. Heavier crude is now an essential feedstock for many U.S. refineries. Substituting it for U.S. light sweet crude oil would make these facilities less efficient and competitive, leading to a decline in fuel production and higher costs for consumers.

Currently, Canada exports 90% of its very heavy, sour oil to the US, accounting for approximately a quarter of its total exports to the US. Oil from the Alberta oil sands is also expensive to extract and refine, but nonetheless amounts to 4 to 4.5 million barrels per day exported to the US. It must be acknowledged that future Venezuelan oil counts as powerful leverage in the recent and continuing political and economic friction between the US and Canada, especially as Canada is defying the US by building “a new strategic partnership” with China.

Much has been made of the state of the Venezuelan oil industry, today producing around a million barrels a day, down from its peak at over 3.5 million barrels per day decades ago. Indeed, the US blockade has stifled investments, shuttered export markets, and denied technological advances. Nonetheless, Venezuela has produced as much as 2 million barrels a day as recently as 2017. Admittedly, it would take significant investment to return to the 2017 level and vast investment to restore the level of the 1970s.

Many commentators are “shocked” by the enormous capital required to upgrade the Venezuelan oil industry. They forget earlier “shocking” assessments of the fracking revolution: “The U.S. shale oil industry hailed as a “revolution” has burned through a quarter trillion dollars more than it has brought in over the last decade. It has been a money-losing endeavor of epic proportions.”

Still, the Trump administration’s gambit has many competitors concerned that US control over Venezuela’s oil “would reshape the global oil map–putting the US in charge of the output of one of the founding members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and, along with America’s own prodigious production, give it a potentially disruptive role in a market already struggling with oversupply.” According to the Wall Street Journal, US oil production, US political and corporate domination of Guyana’s emerging energy sector, and now Venezuela’s reserves, may place the US in a position to unbalance the market, particularly at the expense of the OPEC alliance, a move of enormous political consequence.

The critics of oil-imperialism fail to understand all of its dimensions. They crudely simplify the politics of oil to the immediacy of extraction and its costs of the moment, ignoring indirect impacts, the wider prospects, and the longer term.

Nor do they grasp the issues that are facing the US domestic oil industry. While fracking has allowed the industry to return to being the largest crude oil producer in the world, the industry faces the perennial question of peak production for a given technology– the ever-present problem of rising costs of discovery and extraction. Further, the exalted Permian Basin is “becoming a pressure cooker”, pressing upon both costs and public acceptance. “Swaths of the Permian appear to be on the verge of geological malfunction. Pressure in the injection reservoirs in a prime portion of the basin runs as high as 0.7 pound per square inch per foot, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from researchers at the University of Texas at Austin’s Bureau of Economic Geology.” As The Wall Street Journal also reports: “A buildup in pressure across the region is propelling wastewater up ancient wellbores, birthing geysers that can cost millions of dollars to clean up. Companies are wrestling with drilling hazards that make it costlier to operate and complaining that the marinade is creeping into their oil-and-gas reservoirs. Communities friendly to oil and gas are growing worried about injection.”

Because of the current glut of oil (likely retaliation by OPEC+ producers seeking to drive down US production below its cost of production and recover market share) the number of operating rigs is down 14% in the Permian. Oil markets are volatile, competitive, and transient. Where Venezuelan crude will fit into these equations remains an open question.

And then there is the Essequibo, a region currently within the borders of Guyana, but disputed by Venezuela. Recent discoveries in the area promise a potential of over 11 billion barrels of oil, with Exxon estimating a production of 1.7 million barrels per day by 2030. This economic plum is now off the table in the conflict between the Maduro government and Guyana and Exxon. As OILPRICE.com puts it succinctly: Trump’s Venezuela Takeover Will Make Guyana Oil Safer… for the US and Exxon.

Let us not forget China. The People’s Republic of China has granted around $106 billion in loans to Venezuela since 2000. Daniel Chavez, writing in TNI, notes that those loans place “it fourth among recipients of Chinese official credit globally.” Estimates vary, but the PRC imports between 400,000 and 600,000 barrels per day from Venezuela, at least doubling since 2020. While it is less than 5% of PRC usage, it is not inconsequential. And it represents a serious penetration of capital and trade in the Western hemisphere– the US sphere of interest.

It underscores the reality that oil-politics is not merely about the immediacy of reserves, extraction, costs, and price, but also about competition and rivalry within the imperialist system. The competition and conflict between the US, Venezuela, Guyana, Canada, PRC, OPEC, and other oil-producing countries is intrinsic to a system that lives and breathes thanks to its exploitation of energy resources. In that regard, it is still most clearly viewed through the prism of Lenin’s theory of advanced capitalism devised over a hundred years ago.

I give the last word to the informed and serious student of the oil industry, Antonia Juhasz:

If the greatest lie the devil ever told was to convince us that he wasn’t real, the greatest lie the oil industry ever told us is to convince us that they don’t want oil. Where do we even begin to think about that as possible? They want to control when they produce it and how, and under what terms. They need to show a growing amount of oil that they can count as their reserves.

There are very few big pots of oil left sitting around anywhere unclaimed. The only way to get that is to increase technology, go into very expensive, technologically complex modes of production that face a lot of resistance. Venezuela is a country that [the big oil companies] were producing in not that long ago and making money in not that long ago and have wanted to get back into but on their own terms.

So I think when they protest publicly, one, it’s to distance themselves from Trump’s extremism, but two, it’s a great public negotiating tactic. They’re basically saying publicly, and the media is repeating it, “We wouldn’t want to operate in Venezuela. Oh, my God, it’s expensive, it’s technologically complex.” I actually think those are ridiculous things if you look where else they operate.

FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Greg Godels writes on current events, political economy, and the Communist movement from a Marxist-Leninist perspective. Read other articles by Greg, or visit Greg's website.