You know, is it legal? What happens if there's a different Venezuelan government in the future and they don't feel the same? There, there's a lot of questions here, but let me just ask you, Vijay, you know, as you're thinking about what's gonna matter about this deal, how much it moves the needle, what are you gonna be focusing on most in the weeks and months ahead?

Well, Rebecca, you outlined it pretty well.

There are a lot of question marks about this deal, including some details of the deal we don't know.

But the broad outlines, uh, we, we generally get the idea.

Uh, it's, it's in, in line with, uh, what we heard at the early days of the Maduro snatch-and-grab operation, which were comments from the White House saying that, uh, the US will take this oil.

Uh, this is, uh, going to somehow pay for the operation and, and beyond, and American companies will, will in effect control the sector.

Um, I was reminded immediately because I, I covered an earlier war, uh, originally billed as a war for oil, which was the Iraq invasion.

So I, I'd love you just to walk us through some of the highlights of the arguments you made in your CFR piece on that.

Vijay Vaitheeswaran is Global Energy and Climate Innovation Editor at The Economist.

So when people talk about electrostates, I wonder what they mean, because electricity is a fuel, and petroleum is a fuel, but people mean something different.

It sometimes takes on a totemic value, something like the old Soviet Union versus the US in the Cold War, and positing that somehow there's a battle between electrostates and petrostates.

And I do worry that it oversimplifies the situation.

Most countries, indeed, all are a mix of electricity and petroleum.

That's one thing, right? There's no pure electrostate.

There's no purely electrical country that's normal.

So, you know, talking about solar panels, batteries, EVs, that they are producing at scale and very cost-effectively.