Yo Ho Ho

The United States has apparently seized a tanker ship carrying oil from Venezuela to Cuba. The stated rationale for this is that the ship has been sanctioned for, at some point in the past, carrying oil from Iran, when that nation was barred from exporting.

I hadn't realized that vehicles could be sanctioned this way. Until now, I'd been under the impression that sanctioned were always leveled against individuals and organizations, whether those were businesses, governments or other entities. I looked at a United Nations page on sanctioned vessels, and it seems the main penalty there is that such ships are to be barred from ports. Which, honestly, seems kind of toothless to me. After all, if someone is sending goods into North Korea, it makes sense that they would simply use ships that had the range to make it all the way there without needing to make any stops along the way.

So in this sense, the Trump Administration seizing the ship makes a certain amount of sense. What I'm a bit dubious about is the fate of the cargo.

Asked what would happen with the oil, Trump said: "We keep it, I guess."

US seizes sanctioned oil tanker off coast of Venezuela, Trump says

Maybe it's just me, but this seems like it's making the United States Coast Guard into commerce raiders at best, and privateers at worse. But maybe there's some rule that says that people ship things on sanctioned vessels at their own risk.

Still, it creates a perverse incentive for President Trump, at least, to wait for sanctioned vessels to load up on cargoes and then seize them, if the cargo is then free for the taking. This is an act that I can see other nations getting in on. Although President Trump does seem to have a real soft spot for anything having to do with petroleum.

But I wonder about the real goal here. It seems fairly clear that this is a means of putting pressure on the Maduro Administration, although knowing President Trump, I'm doubtful that much thought has gone into what happens if it works. There may be an attempt to set up a pro-Washington client government in Caracas, but I'd be willing to bet that any such effort would be doomed to failure, especially if it seemed that the United States was hoping to set up the sort of cheap resource hub that the Bush Administration supposedly had in mind for Iraq. I suspect that Russia and China already have accounts set up to bankroll and anti-American insurgency if President Maduro loses his grip on power.

The United States playing pirate as a way of throwing its weight around will, of course, have consequences. But not for the President or Congressional Republicans. The rest of us will have to wait and see what this most recent act of international bullying costs us. This could be a very expensive tanker's worth of crude, when it's all said and done.