After news broke that U.S. armed forces seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela on Dec. 10, the government in Caracas accused President Donald Trump of “piracy.”
Hair-trigger condemnation of Trump’s every word or action has become the dreary background noise for a president who, instead of wringing his hands, often takes decisive action against the bad guy.
Add to that Trump’s determined trolling of naysayers with a tone of utter nonchalance, America keeping the ship and its oil, and you have a combustible news cycle. Both the expropriation of the black gold and its cinematic seizure had a distinctly piratical hue. Video of the air assault showed a Coast Guard boarding party dropping onto the deck down lines from helicopters. They carried modern military rifles rather than cutlasses, but you get the picture.
Still, set aside the reflexive excoriation of the Trump-hating Left, and there still remains the difficult question of what action a powerful democratic nation-state may legitimately take on its own when it is moving against international thugs and criminals.
In a world interconnected and entangled in international agreements, is it still OK for the United States, which has taken police actions around the globe on its own cognizance since its founding, to enforce a sanctions policy with what the Pentagon calls a “kinetic” operation?
Some people argue that it needs permission from an international body such as the United Nations. But the U.N. has become a body that, in its structure and intentions, shows it is determined to thwart good when it tries to act against evil. There is a commensurately strong case that America, a force for good in the world, must be free of unwonted restrictions imposed by pariah states that have gained authority within the international body.
There are international sanctions against both Venezuela, where the tanker, sailing under the false flag of Guyana, had just picked up its oil, and against Iran, where it was headed. Most Americans will heartily approve of the federal government making sure that those two countries, which both back anti-American terrorism, cannot benefit from their illegal oil smuggling.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, stressing that all elements of the action against the tanker were being done by the legal book, told reporters on Dec. 11 that “the president is fully committed to effectuating this administration’s sanction policy, and that’s what you saw, as the world saw, take place yesterday.” To which the sensible response is “amen.”
The administration’s national security strategy, published on Dec. 4, lays down a policy of imposing American will and order in the Western Hemisphere, this nation’s backyard. This is a recapitulation of the Monroe Doctrine. Venezuela is run by a dictator who stole the 2024 election and now enables and is enabled in his tyranny by murderous drug cartels and other international ne’er-do-wells.
One of his opponents has just won the Nobel Peace Prize. And one of the ways Maduro stays in power is by selling oil illegally to such people as Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
There is no good reason for the Trump administration to sit by and allow that to happen — and every good reason why it should step in to stop it.
