The Republic has no business running an oil empire abroad

Foreign Affairs & Commerce

National Review reports that President Trump is directing what the outlet calls a "government hedge fund" into Venezuelan oil — an act of sovereign commercial acquisition pursued by executive design rather than by any deliberate legislative grant. I confess I know nothing of the particular mechanics of the twenty-first century energy market, and I will not pretend otherwise. But I know a great deal about what happens when an executive arm reaches beyond its constitutional moorings into the world of commerce and extraction, and what I read here troubles me at the root.

The gravest danger I ever identified in my own republic was not any foreign army — it was the consolidation of power in a single hand, domestic or foreign, that could act in the people's name without the people's meaningful consent. A "government hedge fund" acquiring foreign energy assets is precisely such a consolidation: it places commercial risk on the public treasury, concentrates decision-making in the executive, and entangles the republic in the internal affairs of another nation's resources — all without the deliberate, public, accountable process that a self-governing people is owed.

When I opposed the original Bank of the United States, my quarrel was not with banking as such but with the creation of a private-public hybrid that could act as a government without being a government — insulated from accountability, amplified by public credit. What is described here is its mirror image: a public actor playing at private empire. The citizen who bears the risk if this venture sours has no seat at the table where the wager was made. That is not republican government; that is the old logic of the crown, dressed in the language of the marketplace.

There is also the matter of foreign entanglement. I argued, in my first Inaugural, for "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none." Seizing — or nationalizing, or however the administration chooses to style it — a foreign nation's primary productive resource is not commerce in any honest sense of that word. It is the projection of state power into the economic sovereignty of another people. Whatever one thinks of Venezuela's government, the method here sets a precedent: that the American executive may reach abroad and claim productive assets in the name of a national interest it defines unilaterally. Every republic that has traveled that road has returned from it diminished.

And then there is the debt. If this venture is financed on public credit — as any "government fund" must ultimately be — then the present generation is pledging the labor of the next against returns that may never materialize. I held that no generation has the right to bind its successor with the debts of its own ambitions. An oil play in a politically unstable nation, conducted through an executive instrument beyond ordinary appropriations scrutiny, is precisely the kind of open-ended liability that violates that principle. The National Review's framing of this as "Trump takes his government hedge fund abroad" is, if accurate, a description of executive adventurism underwritten by the public and answerable to no one in particular.

I do not say the citizen should be indifferent to the security of energy supply, or to the geopolitical weight of a hostile state sitting on vast reserves. These are real concerns and I would not dismiss them. But the answer consistent with republican government is deliberation — a public case made to elected representatives, debated in the open, authorized or rejected by the branch that holds the power of the purse. What is described here sounds like none of that. It sounds like a decision already made, a venture already launched, with the accounting to follow. That is the executive habit of power that a constitution is written to restrain. The citizen should be watchful — and the legislature, if it retains any instinct for its own authority, should be asking hard questions before the republic finds itself the proud and indebted owner of someone else's oil field.