The US does not have Venezuela.

It does. It may be illegal, immoral etc., but it does as of now.

The Bolivarian revolution kicked us out before, they can do it again.

Alaska

"It has Texas, Canada and Venezuela", eh.. excuse me?

I thought the same thing, ... where is the "and Greenland!"?

The amount of hard, soft and economic power that are being burned for the bedtime stories of one person is unreal. As are all the cooperators and lobby harnessing conspirators whose actual dreams are getting implemented.

It isn't the fall of the USSR, but it is still a dramatic ceiling bounce.

I mean Venezuela is a touch iffy on how strongly we commit but saying the USA basically owns Canada isn't exactly controversial maybe controls is a more acceptable way of phrasing it? They are a "sovereign" with a lowercase S at best.

Canada fucking hates the US right now and are actively in discussions to deepen their relationship with China, and cut back on their relationship with the US.

I don't blame them.

Canada is actively pursuing more pipeline capacity to the west coast, in order to sell more oil to China.

However, it's also true that if the US builds a new pipeline to the Canadian border, Canada will happily fill it with heavy crude.

I mean the problem with the bed Canada has made is they don't really get a choice.

We're only energy independent in the sense that we export more oil than we import. We're still reliant on foreign oil because we haven't retooled (or built enough new) refineries for a lot of the oil we produce. Allowing the Saudis to own refineries is probably a strong factor there. If the middle east and Canada cut us off, we're SOL. Venezuela barely produces anything right now.

Retooling refineries to a different flavor of crude is expensive, but not that expensive. If push came to shove, the US could transition to oil independence in less than a year.