Category: Venezuela

Venezuelan Foreign Minister strikes up strategic alliance with Turkey

VHeadline News Editor Patrick J. O’Donoghue reports: During a visit to Turkey, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro has signed an important energy agreement with his Turkish counterpart, Ahmet Davutoglu.

The visit is seen as part of the Venezuelan government’s campaign to open up relations with what it considers key countries as part of its pluri-polar foreign policy.

Maduro stated that for Venezuela it is important to achieve agro-industrial, infrastructure and housing development and for that purpose it needed to transfer machinery and supplies from Asia to Venezuela. Venezuela’s approach to Turkey, Maduro declared, is to pursue an economic high-level agenda to establish “a new world financial architecture.”

Turkey’s Foreign Minister highlighted Venezuela’s strategic location with access to the Caribbean and the Atlantic Ocean. Turkey is hoping that it can access the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean via Caracas and Venezuela harbors the same hope to penetrate Asian and Middle Eastern markets through Turkey.

The keynote to the visit was the signing of an energy cooperation agreement to kick-start the strategic alliance. Turkey will invest in the Orinoco Oil Belt and refine Venezuelan crude. Maduro confirmed that Turkey will receive oil from Venezuela and then both nations will make joint oil investments in third countries.

Minister Maduro also met Turkey’s Foreign Trade Secretary, Ahmet Yakici to express his country’s interest in bilateral projects in housing, food and exports. Today, Maduro is expected in the Ukraine to open work sessions agreed to during President Chavez’ visit to that country three weeks ago.

Patrick J. O’Donoghue

[email protected]

November 7, 2010
Venezuela to supply fuel to Turkey

CARACAS, VENEZUELA

Venezuela says it has agreed to sell fuel to Turkey and that the two countries have pledged to invest jointly in oil projects.

The agreements are part of an energy accord signed by Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro during a visit to Ankara.

The foreign ministry said in a statement Thursday that Turkey will receive fuel and that the countries will cooperate in oil projects, including planned Turkish investment in Venezuela’s crude-rich Orinoco River basin.

It did not give details of projected investment or how much fuel would be sold.

President Hugo Chavez has sought to diversify Venezuela’s oil industry and boost exports to allies while reducing dependence on the United States, the top buyer of Venezuelan oil.

November 5, 2010
Barack Obama Is No Jimmy Carter. He’s Richard Nixon.

THE NEW REALISM

By Michael Freedman | NEWSWEEK

Published Apr 25, 2009
From the magazine issue dated May 4, 2009

Republicans have been trying to link Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter ever since he started his presidential campaign, and they’re still at it. After Obama recently shook hands with Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez, GOP ideologue Newt Gingrich said the president looked just like Carter—showing the kind of “weakness” that keeps the “aggressors, the anti-Americans, the dictators” licking their chops.

But Obama is no Carter. Carter made human rights the cornerstone of his foreign policy, while the Obama team has put that issue on the back burner. In fact, Obama sounds more like another 1970s president: Richard Nixon. Both men inherited the White House from swaggering Texans, whose overriding sense of mission fueled disastrous wars that tarnished America’s image. Obama is a staunch realist, like Nixon, eschewing fuzzy democracy-building and focusing on advancing national interests. “Obama is cutting back on the idea that we’re going to have Jeffersonian democracy in Pakistan or anywhere else,” says Robert Dallek, author of the 2007 book, “Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power.”

Nixon met the enemy (Mao) to advance U.S. interests, and now Obama is reaching out to rivals like Chávez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for the same reason. “The willingness to engage in dialogue with Iran is very compatible with the approach Nixon would have conducted,” says Henry Kissinger, the architect of Nixon’s foreign policy. “But we’ll have to see how it plays out.” Hillary Clinton has assured Beijing that human rights won’t derail talks on pressing issues like the economic crisis, another sign of Nixonian hard-headedness. And echoing Nixon’s pursuit of détente, Obama has engaged Russia, using a mutual interest in containing nuclear proliferation as a stepping stone to discuss other matters, rather than pressing Moscow on democracy at home, or needlessly provoking it on issues like missile defense and NATO expansion, which have little near-term chance of coming to fruition and do little to promote U.S. security. Thomas Graham, a Kissinger associate who oversaw Russia policy at the National Security Council during much of the younger Bush’s second term, says this approach by Obama, a Democrat, resembles a Republican foreign-policy tradition that dates back to the elder George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, and then even further to Nixon and Kissinger.

It’s hard to know if such tactics will work, of course. But Obama has made clear he understands America’s limitations and its strengths, revealing a penchant for Nixonian pragmatism—not Carter-inspired weakness.

© 2009

Source: Newsweek, Apr 25, 2009

April 26, 2009