The assertion by some U.S. officials that Venezuela’s oil “belongs to Washington” is a dangerous historical revision that attempts to cloak a geopolitical power play in the language of legal grievance.
This claim, revived by U.S. Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, confuses the initial foreign development of an industry with permanent ownership of the resource itself—a notion firmly rejected by international law and precedent. Miller has demanded that Venezuela “return to the United States all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”
The modern world order is built upon the principle of Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources, a right solidified by the United Nations in 1962. This principle, born from the era of decolonization, states that a nation’s resources belong to its people, not to the foreign entities that first extracted them. To claim otherwise is to advocate for a 19th-century model of colonial appropriation, not 21st-century international law.
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