Venezuela's interim government, installed after US ouster of Maduro, is reforming the oil sector to attract foreign investors.

The plain fact is that a change in the name of a government does not a change in the nature of power effect. The ingenuity spent describing this as a “reform” of the oil sector is itself evidence of its force; for when men speak of “attracting investment” in a land where the previous administration was removed by the hand of a foreign power, they are not discussing the principles of commerce, but the mechanics of a new form of occupation.

We are presented with a narrative of renewal, a tale of an interim government seeking to mend the broken machinery of the Venezuelan state by inviting the world to participate in its reconstruction. The language is polished, the intent is presented as purely economic, and the goal is framed as the restoration of a global market. Yet, if we strip away the gloss of “reforming sectors” and “attracting investors,” we find a much more ancient and less pleasant transaction. We find the attempt to establish legitimacy not through the consent of the governed, but through the solvency of the treasury.

To apply the moral weight test to this arrangement is to look past the boardroom in Washington or the oil rigs in the Orinoco and to look instead at the man in Caracas who has seen his currency become as worthless as the paper on which it is printed. The proponents of this new era argue that the flow of capital will bring stability. They speak of “economic recovery” as if it were a weather pattern that descends upon a nation by divine providence, rather than a consequence of political agency. But we must ask: what does this policy actually ask of the Venezuelan people? It asks them to trust a government that derives its authority not from the ballot, but from the benevolence of foreign capital and the shadow of American influence. It asks them to believe that the extraction of their primary resource, now managed by a new set of hands, will somehow result in a different harvest for the hungry.

There is a profound self-deception at work in the claim that this is a movement toward democratic legitimacy. The argument suggests that if the oil flows, the legitimacy will follow. This is the logic of the merchant applied to the soul of a nation. It assumes that a state is merely a corporation with a flag, and that if the dividends are sufficient, the question of who holds the mandate becomes a mere technicality. The proponents tell themselves they are bringing order to chaos; in truth, they are attempting to purchase order with the very substance of the nation’s sovereignty. They believe they are building a foundation, but they are merely painting a ruin.

The cost of this experiment is never borne by the architects of the “reform.” The men who negotiate the terms of these new oil concessions do not feel the sting of a devalued peso; they do not experience the anxiety of a nation whose political future is tied to the fluctuations of a commodity market. They propose a solution from the warmth of their offices, far removed from the reality that a government which relies on foreign investment to prove its right to exist is a government that has already surrendered its right to lead.

History provides us with a long and somber record of such transitions. We have seen many times when a new administration, installed under the guise of liberation, finds that the tools of its liberation are the very instruments of a new dependency. When the legitimacy of a state is measured by the interest of foreign investors, the state ceases to be a community of citizens and becomes a mere site of extraction. The tragedy of the Venezuelan situation is not merely the loss of wealth, but the attempt to replace one form of exploitation with a more polite, more “reformed” version of the same. Let us hear no more of “attracting investment” as a substitute for the difficult, unglamorous work of building a mandate that can stand without the support of a foreign treasury.