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The U.S. seizure of a Venezuelan oil tanker has been described as a “significant,” even “dramatic,” escalation of President Donald Trump’s campaign to pressure Nicolás Maduro, the country’s dictator, out of office—but this isn’t quite the case.
The seizure might serve as part of a rationale for regime change, which Trump has been advocating, in part through aggressive rhetoric, in part by deploying military forces to the Caribbean, including more than 15,000 troops and a dozen warships, including an aircraft carrier.
However, the seizure also marks the latest—albeit the most elaborate—episode in a series of maritime confrontations that have been going on for a few years.
Back in 2022, when Joe Biden was president, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on a tanker, then named the Adisa and registered to Panama, for conducting illegal oil trade with Iran. This same tanker, now called the VLCC Skipper, is the vessel that U.S. military forces seized in an operation jointly undertaken by the U.S. Coast Guard, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security. Satellite data showed the ship loading 1.1 million barrels of sanctioned crude from Venezuela’s José terminal. Some reports say it was headed to Cuba, another country under sanction. Maritime data shows that the tanker was also anchored in an Iranian port last July.
In other words, it’s not out of the question that the U.S. might have carried out this operation even if Trump hadn’t been making noises about invading Venezuela or sending a flotilla of warships to make the threat seem real.
According to some reports, the people running the ship were trying to conceal its identity and purpose, having registered it under a false flag and spoofing its radar signatures. This is a common practice of Venezuela’s “dark-fleet” tankers engaging in illicit oil trade. Just last month, in an episode little-covered outside maritime news reports, another tanker, called the Seahorse, which is sanctioned by the U.K. and the European Union, eluded a U.S. Navy destroyer ship as it returned to Venezuelan ports from Cuba.
A video released on Wednesday by Attorney General Pam Bondi shows the VLCC Skipper seized by U.S. forces rappelling onto its deck from a Black Hawk helicopter. The crew onboard reportedly met them with no resistance; no guns were fired from either side.
The fates of the ship, the crew, and the oil have not yet been revealed. At a news conference where he announced the seizure, Trump was asked what would happen to the oil. “We keep it, I guess,” he replied.
It is hard to say whether Trump was speaking with authority (the phrase “I guess” raises doubts), or whether keeping it would be legal. In any case, doing so would, in the eyes of many observers, legitimize a statement issued by Maduro’s government, condemning the seizure as “barefaced robbery and an act of international piracy” aimed at stripping Venezuela of its oil wealth.
Maduro is certainly an attractive object for regime change. He is a brutal tyrant; he has wrecked his country’s economy; and after losing last year’s presidential election to reform candidate María Corina Machado, he seized power in a coup. (Machado has since won the Nobel Peace Prize for the noble protest movement she has led while in hiding under constant threat from Maduro’s security forces.)
Secretary of State and national security adviser Marco Rubio has led much of the administration’s anti-Maduro activities, mainly out of genuine sympathy for the democratic opposition—which he expressed as a senator from Florida, home to many Venezuelan exiles.
Trump cares little about democracy (as his recent 33-page National Security Strategy indicates), and he is clearly a bit jealous of Machado for winning the Nobel Peace Prize, which he avidly desired. But his desire to dominate—and to keep outside powers outside of—the Western Hemisphere clearly puts him in the regime-change camp. (For that reason, Machado has supported Trump’s anti-regime activities and even told him, in a phone call, that he deserved her Nobel.)
Finally, and perhaps more to the point, Trump is attracted to Venezuela’s vast oil and gas reserves, which are some of the largest in the hemisphere but are largely untapped, as a result of the Maduro regime’s incompetence and inefficiencies. Many U.S. energy companies are hoping to exploit those reserves after Maduro is gone. A hedge-fund manager told me that a consortium of several such companies and financial firms are actively planning for the day.
Many Venezuelan citizens would also like to see Maduro go, for political or economic reasons or both. But here, Trump’s militant rhetoric is backfiring, as it allows Maduro to denounce his critics as abettors of American aggression, even as traitors—which, in turn, intimidates protesters into adopting a lower profile, to avoid reprisals from goon squads.
It’s reminiscent of the time during George W. Bush’s presidency when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice publicly touted a $75 million program to assist democratic protest groups in Iran—as a result of which the Iranian government stepped up its suppression of protest groups, calling them CIA spies.
Trump has wavered, and never spoken with more than a vague menace, about whether he really will move to overthrow Maduro. Last month, he pronounced Venezuelan airspace “closed,” then backed away from the stance. He has talked a few times about invading Venezuela with ground troops, though this would be difficult without first securing a nearby base. Last month he in fact played down the possibility of going to war with Venezuela—though at this week’s news conference, where he announced the seizure of the tanker, he cryptically said, “Other things are happening.” Back in October, he said that he’d ordered the CIA to launch “covert operations” against Maduro’s regime—though saying so out loud takes the “c” out of “covert.”
At times “strategic ambiguity” can be a useful tool for coercing foes to act in certain ways or even to step down from power. But Trump is spawning mere confusion. It’s hard for anyone to know just what he wants, or how much he’d spend or risk to get it done. It’s quite possible that he doesn’t know himself.
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