Sparks: US and Venezuela reach 'historic' oil deal, Trump says

Victory resides in the seizure of the enemy’s resources before a single chariot is deployed, for the general who captures the opponent's grain-stores wins without ever tasting the bitterness of a long siege.

My eighteenth-century ancestors would have debated the morality of sovereignty, yet I sit here watching the Dynamo simply consume the map, proving that sixty-five billion barrels of force dictate a law that no constitution can restrain.

Washington spent ten years calling that fellow a dictator, but it turns out there isn't a political principle in the world that can't be smoothed over by a few billion barrels of the neighbor's oil.

This agreement is not a peace but a momentary tension between the hunger of the northern machine and the exhaustion of the southern well, where the liquid gold flows while the underlying enmity remains unchanged.

The claim is that these nations lack the capacity for self-governance, yet we observe that such incapacity is only cited as a fact once their most valuable assets have been successfully transferred to more 'rational' hands.

You boast of a historic deal for the fruits of the earth while the hands that till that earth remain in the shadow of a master's decree, proving once again that your liberty is but a commodity.

The merchant-statesman cloaks this monopoly in the language of national prosperity, but the invisible hand is currently being sat upon by a visible thumb that seeks to divert the natural flow of trade into a single, private reservoir.

We wager the stability of a hemisphere on the flow of a black liquid, distracting ourselves from the infinite silence of the void with the noisy clatter of pumps and the vanity of a signed parchment.

This reform in relations merely formalizes the accumulation of capital across borders, ensuring that the Venezuelan worker is now exploited by a northern conglomerate rather than a domestic tyrant, while the underlying chains remain forged in oil.

When I observe my own inclination to applaud a bargain, I must wonder if I would be so keen on the 'historic' nature of the trade if it were my own cellar being emptied by a more powerful guest.

To call a seizure of property a 'historic deal' is the sort of charming fiction that makes modern diplomacy so much more entertaining than the dull reality of a common robbery.

Men talk of barrels and billions while the path to real freedom stays overgrown with weeds, for no paper signed in a bright room ever loosened the grip of those who profit from another's struggle.

In the markets of Mali or the courts of Delhi, I have seen many a sultan claim the earth's riches as his own, yet the caravans always move on and the desert eventually swallows the boast.

It is a truly remarkable thing to watch a man walk into a neighbor's yard and walk out with the deed to the well, all while convincing the neighbor that he's just done him a life-saving favor.