Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
US Seizes Venezuelan Tanker, Does Not Bomb It
The US Navy seized a Venezuelan tanker in the Caribbean on Wednesday, claiming it was transporting oil in violation of US sanctions. This is the latest provocation from the Trump administration as it tries to find a fight that Mr. Trump can win to look like a great leader. Venezuela appears to be the target for this campaign. What is interesting here is that, rather than bomb it to bits as with the drug boats, the White House took the ship and cargo into custody. Mr. Trump will take the oil for the US, while the crew may face trial. The policy is consistent only because Mr., Trump wants a fight.
This journal believes Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is a worthless scumbag who deserves a cell in the Hague. The same is true of Mr. Trump. Neither man deserves the benefit of the doubt.
That said, the US has put Venezuelan oil under sanctions because Mr. Maduro lost the last election but remained in office. Sanctions are not just American. The EU, UK and Canada are also participating in these efforts. The America sanctions were imposed by executive order, relying on the Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Act of 2014. It is significant that there are no UN sanctions.
The Maduro regime maintains that the sanctions are illegal and are economic warfare. As a result, the seizure of the ship is called "piracy" by Caracas. The law is not all that clear cut either way.
"In legal terms, there are really two layers here: what the United States can justify to its own courts, and what is defensible under the law of the sea," Salvador Santino Regilme, a political scientist who leads the international relations programme at Leiden University in the Netherlands, told Al Jazeera.
"Domestically, Washington has constructed a broad basis for seizing tankers linked to sanctions evasion . . . On that level, it is very likely that this operation will be treated as 'legal' in US law," he said.
The legality is far less certain under international law, however, Santino Regilme added.
Much of the law turns on the flag under which the ship sailed. According to Guyana, which is next to Venezuela, the Skipper (as the ship is currently known) was falsely flying a Guyanese flag and that the ship is not on its registry.
In international law, this allows any state the "right of visit," that is, the right to find out whose ship it is by checking the documents on the bridge. If that does not clear things up, more invasive actions are allowed. Without a definite answer, the ship can be considered stateless, the worst possible position anyone can have under international law. Yet it still might not justify the American actions.
"Statelessness clearly opens the door to boarding and identification, but it does not automatically create a general licence to enforce any unilateral regulatory regime," said Santino Regilme. "That step from 'right of visit' to full seizure of ship and cargo sits in a grey zone that recent scholarship explicitly describes as a 'jurisdictional lacuna' [a gap in the law] rather than a settled rule."
In international law, such a lacuna means might makes right. The US will seize the ship, will interrogate the crew and take possession of the cargo. The crew may face charges or they may be held to be flunkies of no importance and repatriated to wherever home is.
How different it is from the bombing and killing of crews of the small alleged drug boats that the US Navy has been sinking. The difference here is that Mr. Trump thinks he can sell the oil, but he could not really sell the drugs. For him, everything is about turning a profit, or at least, collective a fee.
The decline under the Trump administration continues to accelerate.
© Copyright 2025 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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