What a difference a year makes. While Joe Biden spent four years begging OPEC for oil and pretending Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro was a problem too complicated to solve, Donald Trump did what actual leaders do. He acted. And now, less than two months into his second term, the results are stacking up in ways that would have been called fantasy during the Biden years.
On Saturday, speaking at the Shield of the Americas Summit in Doral, Florida, Trump laid it out plainly. Since the January operation that captured Maduro, the administration has been working with Venezuela’s new acting president, Delcy Rodriguez. And here’s the part the press buried under the Iran headlines: American oil companies are now pumping Venezuelan oil, Venezuela is making more money than at any point in its history, and the United States is getting a cut.
“We’re taking out tremendous amounts of oil,” Trump said. “They’re making more money now than they’ve ever made in the history of their country.”
That’s not a talking point. That’s a result. A regime that was arming Iran, sheltering drug cartels, and starving its own people is now doing business with American energy companies under American rules. The Treasury Department issued a license Friday that explicitly bans companies from Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Cuba from doing business with Venezuela’s state gold company. In one move, Trump restructured the western hemisphere’s energy relationships in America’s favor.
And there’s more. Trump announced a formal gold deal with Venezuela, opening up the country’s mineral wealth to American markets while simultaneously cutting off every hostile actor that used to benefit from it. This is what foreign policy looks like when you actually want to win.
Then came Cuba.
Trump’s message was clear:
“As we achieve a historic transformation in Venezuela, we’re also looking forward to the great change that will soon be coming to Cuba. Cuba’s at the end of the line… They’re very much at the end of the line. They have no money, they have no oil. They have a bad philosophy. They have a bad regime that’s been bad for a long time. And they used to get the money from Venezuela. They get the oil from Venezuela, but they don’t have any money from Venezuela. They don’t have any oil.”
He’s right on both counts. Cuba spent decades surviving on Venezuelan oil and cash funneled through Maduro’s regime. That pipeline is now gone. Trump declared a national emergency over Cuba back in January, slapped tariffs on countries supplying the island with oil, and the results are already showing up: millions of Cubans have lost power as the regime’s energy crisis deepens.
Trump went on to add, “Cuba is in its last moments of life as it was. It’ll have a great new life, but it’s in its last moments of life, the way it is.”
He told the assembled leaders that four of them privately asked him to handle Cuba. His response was simple: “I’ll take care of it, okay?” The crowd applauded.
Critics will call this reckless diplomacy. The same critics who spent years insisting that engagement, patience, and dialogue were the only path forward while Cuba remained a communist police state and Venezuela descended into chaos. How’d that work out?
When you remove a bad actor, the ecosystem around it starts to change. Maduro’s gone. Venezuela’s new government is cooperating. Oil flows to American companies. Cuba loses its lifeline. And Trump is now at a summit with the leaders of Argentina, El Salvador, Guyana, Costa Rica, and Chile, all aligned and all looking to Washington for leadership.
The Biden administration couldn’t even get our European allies to agree on which language to use in a joint communique. Trump is reordering the western hemisphere in real time.
Cuba knows what’s coming. That’s the point. When Trump says a deal could be made “very easily,” he’s not extending an olive branch. He’s giving them a last off-ramp before the pressure becomes unbearable. The regime has a choice: negotiate or collapse. Given what just happened to Maduro, they’d be wise to take that seriously.
America First doesn’t mean America Alone. It means America sets the terms. And right now, in the western hemisphere, we’re finally setting them.
Originally reported by Fox News.
