(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump last week announced a “complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into and out of Venezuela,” ratcheting up the pressure on Nicolás Maduro’s regime as 15,000 U.S. troops and 11 warships stand ready in nearby waters — and leaving questions over the scope of the apparent escalation.
A naval blockade is considered an act of war under international law. But Trump’s reference to “sanctioned” tankers indicated U.S. operations would continue as a law enforcement crackdown by the U.S. Coast Guard, which seized an oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast last week and another over the weekend.
A Coast Guard interdiction is not a military operation; it is a court-authorized enforcement of U.S. sanctions.
According to retired Marine Corps Col. Steve Ganyard, a former State Department official and an ABC News contributor, the president’s orders, announced on his social media platform, amount to a legal quarantine — and not a blockade — because the post references only legally sanctioned tankers.
But Trump also referred to the Venezuelan regime as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), which could implicate any oil tanker that enters Venezuelan waters.
It wasn’t clear how the administration could designate the government as terrorists — or whether Trump was making reference to Cartel de los Soles, which the administration designated as a terror organization and has said is headed by Maduro.
What impact could a quarantine or blockade have?
Trump’s post last week “leaves more questions than answers,” said Clayton Seigle, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “What exactly are we going to do? How are we going to do it?”
“None of that is really detailed,” he said.
Whether the escalated pressure will target sanctioned vessels — or all vessels — remains an open question, but both approaches would impact Maduro, Seigle said.
“If you cut off all oil exports, and the associated revenues — and that’s a big if –then I think in a matter of weeks, the regime in Caracas would face extreme pressure,” he said.
If the U.S. continues to target only sanctioned tankers, “then I think that it could be a more prolonged runway for the regime to try to work something out, find a compromise, or even plan a deliberate exit.”
The U.S. says it has killed more than 100 people in the 25 strikes it says it has carried out on alleged drug smuggling boats since September.
Experts have pointed to President John F. Kennedy’s quarantine of Cuba in 1962 as an analogue to Trump’s approach — with unknown possibilities inviting risk.
“What if a ship doesn’t stop? This was the debate in the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Seigle said. “It’s all fun and games if they pull over and let [themselves] get boarded.”
“What if they don’t? Are you opening fire? Are you sinking ships?”
The announced blockade, though, “looks like it’s a relatively low-risk military operation” designed “to prevent” such a “quagmire,” Seigle said.
“Because if it goes smoothly and they’re able to cut off a lot of Maduro’s oil revenue, then they have a reasonable chance of getting the political outcome that they want, which is Maduro fleeing.”
Yet Trump on Wednesday wouldn’t offer a comment when asked if he sought regime change in Venezuela. Instead, he repeated a claim he said was a premise for blocking tankers.
“You remember, they took all of our energy rights,” he said of Venezuela. “They took all of our oil from not that long ago, and we want it back. But they took it. They illegally took it.”
Trump did not specify which period of nationalizations undertaken by the Venezuelan governments aggrieved the U.S. in his view.
An international arbitration court in 2013 ordered Caracas to pay $8.7 billion to U.S. firm ConocoPhillips, penalizing Venezuela for expropriation of crude assets in 2007 which it found to be unlawful.
Operating in the shadows
The U.S. has sanctioned hundreds of oil tankers around the world which it says are part of an illicit network often called the “shadow fleet.”
27 of those designated tankers are operating in Venezuelan waters, according to Seigle.
Venezuela, Russia, and Iran “share that sanctioned fleet,” he added, and Venezuela’s slice is the smallest of the three.
A full quarter of China’s oil imports are produced by those sanctioned countries, Seigle said, leaving the country with “an outsized concern.”
“This is going to raise eyebrows and maybe raise concerns in Beijing among strategic planners that are responsible for making sure that they have enough oil,” he said.
Sanctioned tankers represent less than a fifth of the oil exported from Venezuela, according to Seigle.
“But I think it can have outsized effects in a number of important areas, including whether and for how long Maduro can hold out in a leadership position in Caracas, and also with regard to Venezuela’s biggest oil customer, which is China.”
Why call Maduro’s regime terrorists?
|As a part of Trump’s lengthy post on social media, the president also said the “Venezuelan regime” was an FTO, which the State Department designated it as in November.
Trump and State officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have repeatedly said Maduro is a narco-terrorist and the head of a narco-terrorist organization, adding that Maduro is not the legitimate leader of Venezuela.
Trump is likely referring to the designation of the Cartel de los Soles when he points to the “Venezuelan Regime” in his post.
The State Department alleges in its designation that Maduro and other high-ranking officials head the Cartel de los Soles and have “corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary.”
Maduro’s government categorically denies the existence of the cartel.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said in November that the designation of Maduro as a terrorist gives the U.S. more military options in its anti-trafficking operation and public pressure campaign on the Venezuelan president.
The FTO designation “brings a whole bunch of new options to the United States,” Hegseth said. “It gives more tools to our department to give options to the president.”
Legal experts have told ABC that the designation does not in itself constitute an authorization of force. But administration officials have consistently pointed to these designations publicly when disclosing strikes on alleged drug traffickers.
Notably, while the Maduro regime has been targeted as a foreign terrorist organization, the country of Venezuela has not yet been placed on the official “State Sponsor of Terrorism” list.
Only Iran, North Korea, Syria and Cuba are currently listed as state sponsors of terrorism.
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