Crude Summit: US feared oil sanctions could aid Maduro

The US considered imposing sanctions on Venezuelan crude shipments but feared the move would empower embattled President Nicolas Maduro, former White House national security adviser HR McMaster said.

In a wide-ranging keynote address to the Argus Americas Crude Summit in Houston, Texas, today, McMaster said that while he served as President Donald Trump's national security adviser from February 2017 to April 2018 administration officials worried Maduro could use the economic fallout from cutting off one of the country's few remaining sources of cash to bolster his position.

Blocking Venezuelan crude "is still an option," McMaster said, just hours before the US became the first country to recognize Venezuelan National Assembly speaker Juan Guaidó as the country's acting president amid protests in Caracas aimed at forcing Maduro from the presidency.

"But the key will be for international cooperation to put pressure on Maduro so that he allows an alternative to emerge" that will restore constitutional power, McMaster said.

McMaster, now a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, outlined a vision for the US to meet threats posed by Russia, China, Iran and North Korea using what he calls the 3 Cs: develop a strategy to compete, demonstrate competence and then regain confidence.

He pointed to what he described as successive administrations' stumbles on the world stage, arguing that former president George Bush's administration "was to a large degree blind to the risks of action," while Barack Obama's White House "was blind to the risks of inaction."

But McMaster largely did not criticize the Trump administration's handling of foreign affairs.

McMaster was supportive of Trump's decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement, which traded curbs on Tehran's nuclear program for sanctions relief on Iranian oil shipments. Trump backed off trying to impose a total ban on Iran crude sales, granting temporary waivers to China, India and other major buyers of Iranian oil for fear US sanctions would drive up fuel prices.

"But I think those circumstances will be temporary," McMaster said. "Responsible countries should not want to do business with them, so I believe the only buyers they can rely on ultimately will be China."

McMaster said the US administration's decision to pull out of Syria was "a big mistake" that would undermine a number of key priorities for the US, including a deteriorating relationship with longtime ally Turkey.

"Turkey's drift away from the west could be the greatest geopolitical shift since the end of the Cold War," he said. "When you look at the long-term interests of Turkey, they align completely with ours, with the exception of the support we have given to the Syrian Defense Forces (SDF)." The SDF, a Syrian Kurdish-led militia, did the bulk of fighting against Isis, under the auspices of the US military.

Ankara wants to dislodge the SDF from its border, making the case that it includes YPG and PKK — groups that Turkey brands as terrorists. "But we can resolve that," McMaster said.

Turkey's greater alignment with Russia and Iran under President Reycip Erdogan is ultimately against the country's best interests and is blocking an end to the civil war in Syria. While Turkey would like to see Syrian president Bashar al-Assad removed from power, Erdogan's government is "underestimating the degree to which Iran is perpetuating conflict in the region."

Turkey's recent purchase of a missile defense system from Russia "could be the beginning of the end of a long and very mutual alliance the US had with Turkey."

McMaster was careful in how he characterized his relatively short stint in the Trump White House, stressing his approach of providing the president with a wide range of options and opinions and then helping him carry out his decisions — versus pushing a particular agenda. He said he took a lesson from his studies of former president Lyndon Johnson's administration during the Vietnam War to heart, where he felt some advisers would not tell the president what they truly believed in order to protect their standing with him.

"It can use you up over time in terms of your influence, particularly if there are those who are there to just reinforce a leader's predilections or to advance their own agenda," McMaster said. "But ultimately I believe my role was to provide options and the best ways to implement them."