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Top 5 Mistakes Bush Made in Iraq That Trump Is Making in Venezuela

Juan Cole Informed Comment
Violate the UN Charter and the laws of war. Create false pretexts. Make no plans for the day after. Fantasize about seizing another country's oil wealth. Under-estimate the potential for destabilization. Lessons not learned are mistakes repeated.

Trump, Big Oil and China – Three Articles

Ben Lefebvre, Zack Colman, James Bikales (Politico) Guney Yildiz (Forbes) Sarah Rumpf (Yahoo!News)! Politico
Three articles discuss Trump's outreach to Big Oil before and after kidnapping Venezuelan President Maduro, the special place of Venezuelan oil in the world oil market, and the economic and political role of Venezuelan oil trade with China.

King of Cannibal Island

John Lanchester London Review of Books
Today, each of the ten biggest companies in the world is worth more than $1 trillion. Only one of them, the Saudi oil monopoly, Aramco, has nothing to do with the future value of AI. Is it a bubble? Of course it’s a bubble. What happens next?

The Gulf’s Cold War: Saudi-UAE Rivalry Spills Into Africa

Imran Khalid Middle East Monitor
Riyadh and Abu Dhabi appeared to be the twin engines of a new Arab order. That veneer of unity has now, not just cracked; it has been replaced by a series of high-stakes disputes stretching from Southern Yemen to the Horn of Africa.