US forces seize oil tanker off Venezuela coast | US foreign policy

US forces have seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, in a major escalation of Donald Trump’s four-month pressure campaign against the South American country’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro.

The US president confirmed the operation on Wednesday, saying: “We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela – a large tanker, very large, the largest one ever seized actually.”

“It was seized for a very good reason,” Trump added, declining to say who owned the vessel.

Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, posted footage of the seizure on X. The grainy, unclassified 45-second video shows US forces landing on the tanker from a helicopter.

In an accompanying statement, Bondi said the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and the US Coast Guard, with support from the Department of Defense, had “executed a seizure warrant for a crude oil tanker used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran”.

She said the tanker had been sanctioned by the US for “multiple years” due to its “involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations”.

Venezuela’s government made no immediate comment on the seizure – but speaking at a rally in Caracas, Maduro urged citizens to act like “warriors” and be ready “to smash the teeth of the North American empire if necessary”.

Speaking on his weekly television show, the interior minister Diosdado Cabello said: “They want to steal our oil … steal our gold … steal our gas … steal our water … They are thieves.”

Maduro has been in power since 2013, when he succeeded Hugo Chávez after his death from cancer. Widely believed to have stolen last year’s presidential election, Maduro has clung to power after launching a wave of repression that forced Edmundo González, the apparent winner of the 2024 vote, into exile in Spain.

Since August, the US has put a $50m bounty on Maduro’s head, launched the biggest naval deployment in the Caribbean Sea since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and carried out a series of deadly airstrikes on alleged drug boats that have killed more than 80 people.

On Tuesday, two US fighter jets circled the Gulf of Venezuela for about 40 minutes. The aircraft flew just north of Maracaibo, one of Venezuela’s most populous cities.

On Wednesday, González’s most important backer, the opposition leader María Corina Machado, was awarded the Nobel peace prize for her “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a peaceful and just transition from dictatorship to democracy”.

Machado’s daughter, Ana Corina Sosa Machado, accepted the prize, telling a ceremony in Oslo that her mother’s struggle to end years of “obscene corruption” and “brutal dictatorship” would go on.

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven reserves of oil and, although years of mismanagement and corruption have done severe damage to its oil industry, oil exports remain Venezuela’s main source of revenue. The main customer is China.

The objective of this week’s reported tanker seizure was not immediately clear.

In an interview last week, Joe Biden’s former chief Latin America adviser, Juan González, said that at around the time of last year’s election he had pushed for the US to station two navy destroyers off Venezuela’s coast “and even impose an oil blockade”.

That never happened, but González believed one possible way out of the current crisis might be for the Trump administration to push Maduro into accepting a recall referendum, perhaps in 2027, but threatening “real hardline consequences” such as a blockade if the result was not respected.

“I think it is potentially a viable option where there should be a very credible and aggressive snapback associated with it,” González said, adding: “Imposing an oil blockade would shut down the entire economy.”

“It’s less aggressive [than a land strike] but it’s still considered an act of war,” added González, who was the national security council’s senior director for the western hemisphere during the Biden administration.

“He [Trump] could take unilateral action by blocking oil tankers from leaving or entering the country, and that I think would precipitate Maduro’s departure.”