Frustrated by Iran, Trump at last seizes enriched uranium – but from Venezuela

Donald Trump has succeeded in removing a country’s stash of highly enriched uranium – although that country is not Iran.On Friday, the US Department of Energy announced that “thanks to President Trump’s decisive leadership” 13.5 kilograms (about 30 pounds) of uranium had been removed from a legacy research reactor in Venezuela.The department called the joint operation, involving the United Kingdom, the United States and Venezuela, “a win for America, Venezuela, and the world”.“The safe removal of all enriched uranium from Venezuela sends another signal to the world of a restored and renewed Venezuela,” Brandon Williams, the administrator of the department’s National Nuclear Security Administration, said.The International Atomic Energy Agency said the uranium had been “safely and securely transported by land and sea from South to North America” after “a complex and sensitive operation”. It was taken to a Department of Energy complex in South Carolina having been removed from a site 15km from Venezuela’s capital, Caracas.The Department of Energy claimed the operation sent “another signal to the world of a restored and renewed Venezuela”.After Trump’s controversial decision to order the capture of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, on 3 January the White House has rebooted relations with its longtime adversaries in Caracas.Trump has recognized Maduro’s vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez – threatening Venezuela’s interim leader with an even worse fate than Maduro if she fails to comply with US demands – and set about opening the country to US energy and mining firms.A series of top Trump officials have flown to Venezuela, including the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, and late last month a US commercial flight between the two countries landed in the South American country for the first time in more than seven years. The US embassy recently reopened.Business chiefs have celebrated the start of a new era of commercial relations between the US and Venezuela, which boasts the world’s largest proven oil reserves, but pro-democracy activists have lamented Trump’s decision to embrace Rodríguez and sideline the exiled opposition leader and Nobel laureate María Corina Machado.One of Trump’s key stated objectives after going to war with Iran in February has been forcing it to surrender about 408kg of highly enriched uranium. So far those efforts have failed.