After the recent meeting of a delegation of senior officials from the Joe Biden government with Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, Republican senators presented this Thursday a bill that would ban the import of oil, petroleum products, and natural gas from Iran and Venezuela into the United States.
US Senators Marco Rubio, Dan Sullivan, Steve Daines, Kevin Cramer, Roger Marshall, Thom Tillis, John Hoeven, Rick Scott and James Lankford, said in a statement that the Biden administration “chooses to appease the dictatorships in Iran and Venezuela in exchange for bad deals and false promises.”
Rubio said: “Energy produced in the United States is cleaner and provides good jobs for American workers (…) Under no circumstances should we funnel money into the hands of dictators and narco-terrorists who are also allies of Vladimir Putin. Enough is enough: it’s time to bring energy production home.”
In the document, the Florida state senator recalled that “the United States has an abundant supply of oil and natural gas,” which he considered “a blessing,” and urged the Democratic government to use its own hydrocarbons.
Press reports indicate that the Biden government is studying lifting part of the sanctions on the Venezuelan oil sector that his predecessor, Donald Trump (2017-2021), imposed to contain energy prices following the Russian attack on Ukraine.
But earlier the United States government itself lowered expectations on an immediate relaxation of oil sanctions on Maduro. And he assured that no concession was made in exchange for the release of two imprisoned Americans in Venezuela.
“There was no something for somethingNothing,” said a senior US official who requested anonymity during a telephone press conference.
The source stated that the United States has already sent an “important signal” to Maduro by organizing the first trip to Caracas “since the late 1990s” by a White House official, in this case Juan González, who led the delegation. .
“We ask you to respond to that with the release of the detained Americans,” said the source, who attributed the achievement to “months of work” by the State Department’s hostage manager, Roger Carstens.
“At no time did we offer to buy oil in exchange for the release of Americans, we would never do that,” he insisted.
Russia’s attack on Ukraine changed the international landscape, and the United States, according to the official, must “protect its interests.” And he hoped that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not respond with something akin to the Cold War and penalize Washington’s allies in the region.
