"Hostile Takeovers": As U.S. Claims Venezuela's Oil, Trump Seeks "Vassal States" Across the World

In the aftermath of the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, Venezuela has agreed to submit a monthly budget to the Trump administration, which will release money from an account funded by oil sales. It’s a deal for the interim government led by Delcy Rodriguéz that historian Greg Grandin calls “governing under the blade.” In a further shift away from the nation-building foreign policy of the past several decades of U.S. power, “what the United States is planning for Venezuela is basically to run the country as a vassal state,” he says. “This is an arrangement with transactional details that we’ve never seen before.”