Oh no, I don’t think he conceptualizes this as a war. This is a shakedown, Mob style like he learnt. “Real nice everything you have here, be a damn shame if someone opened a can of sunshine over it. A real shame. Anyway, you give me access to your oil, at the price I set, and nothing like that’ll ever happen as long as the oil keeps flowing.”

In other words from another fascist, “I am willing to kill half this country to save the other half.”