"Maybe it's time to start exploring the Gulf of America again." In one sentence, TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné was pledging his double allegiance to Donald Trump, by taking up Trump's new name for the Gulf of Mexico and also by proposing to drill there again, 15 years after the terrible oil spill caused by the Deepwater Horizon disaster. At CERAWeek in Houston, Texas, the world energy forum held at the beginning of March, Pouyanné answered the call of Trump's America, which is returning the favor with two emblematic projects.
The federal ruling that had blocked work on the French major's huge liquefied natural gas terminal at the mouth of the Rio Grande on environmental grounds has been suspended by the new administration, which has also finally approved a $5 billion loan for its controversial pipeline in Mozambique. "We're all Americans," the world's bosses seem to be proclaiming.
At the White House, it's the sidekicks' parade. On January 21, the founder of SoftBank, Japan's Masayoshi Son, announced a $100 billion investment in artificial intelligence in the mammoth Stargate project. "This is the beginning of a Golden Age in America," Son told Trump, echoing the concept of the "Gilded Age," of the titans of the late 19th century for which Trump is nostalgic.
'Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow'
On February 7, Japan's prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, was told that his country's Nippon Steel would not be able to take over US Steel, the moribund American steel leader, and that tariffs might be imposed. That didn't stop him from saying he felt inspired by the "fearless presence" of a bloodied Trump brandishing his fist after his July assassination attempt, and from stating that "many [in Japan] were eagerly awaiting [his] return."
On March 3, in the same office, the boss of the world's leading semiconductor manufacturer TSMC, Taiwanese C. C. Wei, more soberly thanked Trump for his 2020 "intuition" to invest even more in his Arizona plant. Immediately, Taiwan's nationalist former president, Ma Ying-jeou, accused Taiwan's ruling party on Facebook of having "sold TSMC" to Trump as a "protection fee," and perhaps in vain: "Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow," he wrote.
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