The sight of Iranian gasoline tankers arriving off the coast of Venezuela to deliver desperately needed supplies of gasoline to the crisis-hit country would have been ‘a sight for sore eyes’ for Venezuelan motorists who had had to ‘live through’ a relatively short but traumatic gasoline shortage.
The trauma was entirely understandable. Venezuela reportedly possesses volumes of known oil reserves that are the largest anywhere and cheap gasoline is something that they have long come to take for granted. In that sense the sight of Iranian tankers bringing oil from the Middle East to South America, a circumstance over which US defence policy strategists in Washington must have been fretting, would have had a different effect on Venezuelans. It symbolized the beginning of what President Nicholas Maduro himself described as “the new normal”.
