LARRY KUDLOW: Trump is bending the arc of history toward freedom

Trump is bending the arc of history toward freedom. 

Today's White House meeting with President Trump and America's leading oil companies is another important step in the process that began last weekend when narco-terrorist and gun-runner Nicolás Maduro, and his communist wife, were forcibly removed through an extraordinary military action that tossed them finally into a Brooklyn, New York jail. 

Oh, and let me never forget Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are from Brooklyn, right? 

I prefer to call all this the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which forbids outsiders from exercising any significant influence in the Western Hemisphere. And I will add, as I have over the past 10 days, that Mr. Trump's brilliant actions are bending the curve of history to stop the march of communism that was taking place in the Americas. Noteworthy in today's meeting, by the way, President Trump said that China and Russia can, in fact, buy oil from Venezuela, but they have to go through the United States to execute the trade. And I assume we'll charge them market prices, not the deep discounts that Venezuela offered their fellow communists. 

Every drop of oil coming out of Venezuela is now controlled by the United States. Russian tankers being stopped left and right off the Venezuelan coast is very important. Venezuela has already put up a 30 million-barrel tranche, which would probably rise to 50 million, then 100 million, and those oil sales will be going into some kind of White House-run fund, where the President, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and others, will decide on disbursements. But the money and the oil will be controlled now by the USA. Venezuela will be purchasing only American-made products, like American agriculture and medicines, medical devices, and various electric grid and energy facilities equipment, according to Mr. Trump's Truth Social.

Now so far, Delcy Rodriguez, who is the acting president, and her brother Jorge Rodriguez, who runs the National Assembly, who are two hardcore Chavistas, have been behaving themselves. But it is an iffy story, and the oil men are all concerned about the stability of the government as they ponder their new investments. They want to help Mr. Trump. They want to be patriotic here. They know how important the stakes are. They can make money at $50 a barrel, incidentally, which is President Trump's target. But to quote the president himself, the transition to any sort of democracy must be "stable, proper and judicious".

The oil men want to know the rules of the game and the overall security picture. Chevron's got the biggest stake and they could move as much as 200,000 barrels a day, which would be up from about 50,000 a couple of years ago. Overall, with the state-run company and the private oil firms, maybe you could squeeze a million barrels per day, up from something like 800,000. 

But I think this whole story is about much more than just oil. Oil is going to care of itself. 

It's really, in my view, about kicking Russia and China out of our hemisphere. It's about choking off Cuba once and for all. And it's even about the potential downfall of the Iranian mullahs as the protests in Tehran intensify. 

Let me say this again. Mr. Trump is bending the arc of history toward freedom. That's what this is really about.