We produce enough oil in this country right now. And oil actually is at a very, it's very, very,

cost very little right now because there is an actually overproduction of oil.

The what's happening here is you have someone like Donald Trump who like literally lives,

I think, in the 1980s, you know, in his brain. And he thinks that the best thing I could do

is get a hold of oil and that makes us a strong country. And, you know, you have someone like Marco Rubio who doesn't, you know, believe that, but knows that he could use that to his advantage to, like, repay whatever crimes he thought were, we would have occurred since, you know, Fidel Castro took over Cuba. But if you talk to our partners around the world and I have friends from other

governments, our friends like NATO allies, they're looking at now do I have to figure out how to

counteract and counterbalance against the United States because the United States is no longer

not just a trusted ally. Now there could be potentially being an enemy.

Hello, and welcome. Why is this happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

Well, it's been, as I'm talking to you, a week since the United States invaded Venezuela and abducted the president there and extracted him to bring him back to the U.S. to face criminal charges.

And one of the most surreal aspects of this action is that from the president on down, the people in the administration have been very explicit that this was kind of, for lack of a better word,

a smash and grab, to get access to Venezuela's oil.

In the beginning of this increasing pressure put on the Maduro regime when we were blowing up

boats that were accused of drug trafficking and the people on them,

killing over, I think, at last count, 80 people.

We don't know who those folks are by and large.

There's some evidence that some of them were just fishermen or people that were sort of maybe running drugs as couriers as a kind of sideline.

But as all this was happening,

the idea was that we were engaged in this attempt to stop drug smuggling into the U.S.

And what's become pretty clear now that this has escalated into a military action against Venezuela,

even though they don't concede that it is, is that all of this is about access to Venezuela's oil reserves. You've heard this line a lot. They have the largest oil reserves on the planet. That's a little misleading, partly because I think there's a good reason to think that those are overstated by the Venezuelan government, and also because the kind of oil that's extracted tends to be more expensive, durier, and harder to process.

All of that said, it does have a huge amount of oil wealth. And Donald Trump has basically said,

...