The Donroe Doctrine: Crushing Communism by Handing the Oil to the Man Who Helped Loot It

The Donroe Doctrine: Crushing Communism by Handing the Oil to the Man Who Helped Loot It

OPINION BY:Hem Kumar September 2026

A Fox News column published this week asks Venezuela’s critics to accept a simple trade: the United States takes a generational — perhaps century-long; claim on 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan crude, and in exchange, communism dies in the hemisphere. The argument is dressed in the language of liberation. Stripped of its rhetoric, it is a resource-transfer agreement, negotiated with an unelected interim government, defended in advance against the very objection it cannot answer: whose oil is this, and who authorized its sale?

The interim president who “confirmed the core terms” is not a democratic reformer parachuted in to clean house. She served as Vice President under Nicolás Maduro. She sat inside the same ruling apparatus the column spends a thousand words denouncing as a Cuban-captured kleptocracy. The essay wants readers to believe the rot was personal to Maduro and that removing him cleared the machine. It did not name who now runs the machine, or what she did inside it for years before inheriting the safe.

That is not incidental. It is the whole scheme. A regime figure signs away 17 strategic oil fields for a term measured in generations, under the cover of an emergency that her own government helped create, and the American press is asked to call this “crushing communism’s grip.” The grip is not being crushed. It is changing hands.

THE SEQUENCE TELLS THE STORY

The column itself lays out the plan in three phases: stabilization, recovery, transition. Read that order again. Contracts and capital come first. Elections come last — vaguely, conditionally, as something a “future democratic congress” might one day ratify. Not authorize. Ratify. The distinction matters: ratification is what a legislature does to bless a deal it had no part in negotiating. The oil is spoken for before a single Venezuelan casts a vote on the terms.

Even the essay’s own defenders admit the legal architecture doesn’t exist yet. There is no disclosed instrument — no published production-sharing agreement, no concession terms, no equity structure — only phrases like “a secured interest” and “strategic fields.” A $100 billion, multi-decade claim on a nation’s primary resource, negotiated in the dark, is not a foundation for democracy. It is the oldest pattern in extractive politics: the paperwork arrives after the asset is already gone.

And the safeguards the column calls for oil proceeds “fenced off from the old patronage machine and audited,” an “electoral calendar,” courts “not controlled by the ruling party” — are written as demands, not achievements. By the piece’s own admission, none of it exists yet. The deal is signed. The guardrails are a wish list appended afterward.

GUYANA HAS SEEN THIS FILM

Guyanese readers do not need a hypothetical to understand where this goes. This publication has spent months documenting it in “The Stabroek Surrender,” our series on the 2016 ExxonMobil Production Sharing Agreement — a contract negotiated without competitive bidding, without ring-fencing between cost pools, without a decommissioning fund backed by parent-company guarantees, and defended today under the same phrase Washington and Caracas are now recycling: sanctity of contract.

Guyana’s own government has shown exactly how selective that sanctity is. President Ali argued for renegotiating the Stabroek PSA in 2020, before he held the office that could act on it. In 2026, holding that office, he refuses — while his administration has quietly missed audit deadlines and never conducted the gas feasibility study the contract itself requires. Sanctity of contract, in practice, is enforced against the public and waived for the operator. Christopher Ram’s Article 32.1 argument — that renegotiation requires only the counterparty’s consent, not some legal impossibility; remains unanswered by the government that invokes “sanctity” as though it were scripture rather than a choice.

That is the actual lesson Venezuela offers Georgetown: not that foreign capital is inherently predatory, but that a resource contract signed under emergency conditions, defended with patriotic language, and shielded from renegotiation by officials who benefit from the status quo, does not stay temporary. It becomes permanent by design. Uaru, Whiptail and Hammerhead — $32.2 billion in new Guyanese projects — are entering the same undivided, unring-fenced cost pool that just finished absorbing $55 billion in recoverable costs before the state saw its promised 50% share. The infrastructure of Guyana’s own oil sector was built to make exactly the kind of “temporary emergency” arrangement Venezuela is being sold now.

THE TEST THAT MATTERS

In Venezuela, the answer today is no one, until a congress that never negotiated the deal is asked to ratify it after the fact. In Guyana, the answer has been no one, for a decade, because “sanctity of contract” has been deployed to foreclose the very renegotiation the government itself once demanded.

A deal that cannot be reopened by the people who will live with its consequences is not liberation. It is custody. Whether the jailer wears the colors of Washington or Houston makes no difference to the country whose ground it comes from.

— The Board