In a major policy flip-flop, the President said that
he is not only keeping American forces in Syria to “secure” its oil fields, he is willing to go to war over them. “We may have to fight for the oil. It’s O.K.,” he said. “Maybe somebody else wants the oil, in which case they have a hell of a fight. But there’s massive amounts of oil.” The United States, he added, should be able to take some of Syria’s oil. “What I intend to do, perhaps, is make a deal with an ExxonMobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly,” he said. The goal would be to “spread out the wealth.”
[...]
Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. could expropriate a portion of Syria’s oil “sounds like the
international crime of pillage,” Ryan Goodman, a former special legal counsel at the Department of Defense who is now at the New York University School of Law, said. Any such move is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions and by the precedents set by the United Nations war-crimes tribunals that the U.S. helped establish in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone. “U.S. military commanders who engaged in pillaging Syria’s oil would risk criminal liability under the U.S. War Crimes Act,” Goodman said. The international rules of war, he added, were designed “to deter nations from engaging in predatory wars to seize other countries’ natural resources.”
[...]
It fit with Trump’s longstanding position that the United States should seize the oil of other countries to pay for its military campaigns. “In the old days, you when you had a war, to the victors belong the spoils. You go in. You win the war and you take it,” Trump said, in 2011. “You’re not stealing anything. You’re taking—we’re reimbursing ourselves—at least, at a minimum.”
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