News media and politicians are howling in alarm over the U.S. government’s supposedly dangerous and shocking seizure of “a Venezuelan oil tanker.”
Same framing with more detailed whining in The Guardian:
Amid a bunch of Democratic Party alarm-sounding, the panic is at least partially bipartisan. Sample quote:
Rand Paul, a Republican senator of Kentucky, told NewsNation that “seizing someone’s oil tanker is an initiation of war” and questioned whether “it’s the job of the American government to go looking for monsters around the world, looking for adversaries and beginning wars.”
But it’s not a a Venezuelan oil tanker, though it was carrying Venezuelan oil. It’s a stateless oil tanker, flying the flag of Guyana but apparently not registered with Guyana. The maritime journalist and former Merchant Marine captain John Conrad explains this in detail. As he writes in that long post:
No real flag = stateless vessel.
And stateless vessels have zero legal protections.
Stateless vessels are subject to seizure, and are seized. Legal definitions and discussion here. This example on the other side of the world is from this year:
Sample news story about this April seizure:
A Kremlin-linked oil tanker was detained by Estonian authorities on Friday just outside Tallinn, in what marks the first time the Baltic country has directly targeted Russia’s “shadow fleet.”
The vessel, named the Kiwala, had been reportedly operating under the flag of Djibouti. However, it was caught not flying a flag, which is a violation of maritime law. Although the crew provided a flag certificate, the Djibouti naval authority said it could not find the Kiwala in its national registry.
The seizure of a stateless oil tanker is not shocking, not an unusual act of aggression, and not something that only the administration of Mean Orange Hitler would be likely to do. Resist the panic.
With that said, my best guess is that Senator Chris Van Hollen’s quote in The Guardian is accidentally correct. The senator from MS-13 says that the seizure of the tanker proves that the administration’s story about blowing up drug boats to stop drugs is a lie: “This is just one more piece of evidence that this is really about regime change — by force.”
As I wrote recently, the lethal strikes on drug boats have happened right alongside continued Coast Guard interdictions by normal means, so there’s a logic to the strikes that hasn’t been announced and will only become clear to us as it develops. A long post on X suggests, I think with convincing logic, that the drug boat strikes and the tanker seizure are part of the same effort to starve the Maduro regime to death without fighting a war: “The goal is not a ground invasion or a prolonged conflict. The goal is to create a short, intense financial crisis within the regime that makes Maduro’s continued rule untenable.”
In that sense, the seizure is an act of aggression, but not one that represents a government that is sleepwalking into war. It’s an act of aggression with significant political effects and credible legal cover.
That same logic suggests that the Trump administration is treating drug cartels as state-aligned actors and political entities, regime organs, not merely as criminal enterprises.
My argument stays the same: There’s a strategic effort underway that isn’t entirely clear, and we’ll see it become clear over time. The seizure of a stateless oil tanker carrying Maduro’s oil is aggressive, but it isn’t clearly reckless or an act of “sleepwalking.” We’ll see how it develops.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack, “Tell Me How This Ends.”
