00:00What will this do for the already frayed U.S.-Russia relationship that we are seeing playing out?
00:07Because Moscow has come up pretty strong against the U.S. seizing the ship today.
00:14Obviously, Russia has just lost a great ally, a great important ally in Latin America.
00:21But at the same time, this story has all the elements of what it is, after all, about in Venezuela.
00:27You have the oil element, you have the Russian element, you have the Iranian element,
00:32and you have the fact that America is taking assertively a very big role there.
00:39Now, having said this, why in the first place America is doing what it has been doing in Venezuela in the last days
00:46is to say that this is part of my influence.
00:50The oil there is very important.
00:52Do Americans need the Venezuelan oil?
00:54Not really.
00:55They are already the biggest producer of oil in the world.
00:59Do they want it?
01:00Yes.
01:00Why do they want it?
01:01Because they don't want this oil to be the reserve that someone else in the major powers in the world is taking advantage of.
01:10And in this, we are talking about Russia, but most importantly about China.
01:15Yes, Russia is important in this game, but the bigger player, the biggest, is China.
01:21China has been penetrating and infiltrating South America heavily in the last years through Venezuela,
01:28through Guiana, through Brazil, and through Peru.
01:31And it has been creating choking points related to energy and to ports and to logistics in South America.
01:39And now the big banner we are seeing in the American rhetoric is the hemisphere, the Western hemisphere.
01:47This is clearly what Trump is all about, creating an area of power for America
01:52and not letting the huge Venezuelan wealth of energy be in the hands of Chinese and Russians politically or economically.
