A sensible strategy — though an expensive and time-consuming one.
In two posts, I’ve covered what was specifically wrong with President Trump’s Truth Social diatribe about Venezuela — as opposed to the general wrongness of its tone and content. Now, let’s deal with something that could be productive, although it, too, is being lost in the bombast.
The president said he was ordering a “BLOCKADE.” Depending on its extent, a blockade can be an act of war under international law. At least initially, many construed Trump’s announcement that way because he couldn’t help himself but pronounce that it would be “A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE.” If you kept reading, however, it turned out that the “TOTAL AND COMPLETE” modifiers were misleading. The Trump-ordered blockade is “OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela.” In reality, then, it is a partial and incomplete blockade — or, if you prefer, a carefully targeted “quarantine.”
That’s a sensible strategy, but it doesn’t much change the status quo.
In 2007, Hugo Chávez, dictator Nicolás Maduro’s mentor and predecessor, expropriated U.S. oil company assets. Beleaguered by the Iraq War and fearful of roiling oil markets, President Bush took no meaningful action in response. Seven years later, in response to crackdowns on protests after Maduro replaced Chávez, President Obama invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to declare a national emergency as the predicate for imposing sanctions — not on the oil industry but on individuals implicated in the regime’s abuses.
Then, in his first term, Trump used Obama’s IEEPA emergency declaration to impose sanctions on the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA). The most serious were announced in 2019, freezing Venezuelan assets and barring Americans from buying Venezuelan crude or conducting transactions with PDVSA (unless they got licenses exempting them). Subsequently, Trump’s Treasury Department imposed secondary sanctions on tankers and shipping firms that were believed to be helping Maduro evade sanctions — including Chinese-, Russian-, and Greek-linked companies.
In 2023, President Biden gave Maduro sanctions relief, attempting to cajole him into democratic reforms. After Maduro stole the election, the sanctions were reimposed.
Consequently, for a couple of years, several vessels and companies have been under U.S. sanctions, in addition to the U.S. sanctions against PDVSA. Our government should have been interdicting the relevant vessels all along — just as our forces seized the tanker last week.
Based on the president’s post, it now appears that the U.S. air and sea assets in the region will stop such sanctioned vessels from getting in and out of port. That’s not much of a change legally; practically speaking, though, it is now much less likely that sanctioned vessels will try to sail into or out of Venezuela.
The question, of course, is how long the president can afford to keep the armada he has deployed in the waters outside Venezuela. There are many hot spots in the world, especially in East Asia and the Middle East. Every day that U.S. assets stay in the Caribbean is a day when they are not furthering America’s vital interests someplace else. That can’t go on for very much longer, one would think.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, Maduro depends on exporting oil via sanctioned vessels to generate the revenue — around $8 billion a year — that he needs to keep his regime viable. Clearly, President Trump would far prefer to squeeze the Venezuelan dictator into vacating power than to launch a risky war for regime change about which his base is at best ambivalent. That’s the right instinct, but, whether we call it a blockade or a quarantine, the strategy is very time-consuming and resource-intensive.