US Coast Guard pursuing another oil tanker off coast of Venezuela | Trump administration
U.S. Coast Guard officials said Sunday they were tracking an oil tanker in international waters near Venezuela, according to media reports, marking the second such action over the weekend — and the third in the past week.
An official who spoke to Reuters, which first reported the suit, said the tanker was subject to sanctions, but did not provide a precise location of the vessel. An official also confirmed Sunday’s pursuit to The Associated Press, and said it involved “a sanctioned Black Fleet vessel that is part of Venezuela’s illegal sanctions evasion.”
Donald Trump recently declared a “blockade” targeting all sanctioned oil tankers entering or leaving Venezuela.
The US president’s campaign to increase pressure on authoritarian Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has involved a strengthening of the US military presence in the region, as well as more than two dozen military strikes against ships in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea near the South American country. These attacks left at least 100 dead.
Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, said Sunday on CBS News’ Face the Nation that the first two tankers arrested were operating illegally and supplying oil to countries subject to sanctions.
“And so I don’t think people need to be worried here in the United States about prices going up because of these seizures of these ships,” Hassett said. “There are only a few – and they were black market ships.”
But as the seizures increase geopolitical tensions, they are expected to push up oil prices when Asian markets reopen on Monday, an oil trader told Reuters. The trader added that expectations over a possible end to the war in Ukraine could help limit further price increases.
U.S. forces apprehended a second merchant ship carrying oil off the coast of Venezuela in international waters on Saturday, amid a U.S. blockade against the country’s oil, according to the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security.
This stop followed the seizure by American forces of another tanker off the Venezuelan coast on December 10. Both ships were heading towards Asia.
Asked if he would support U.S.-backed regime change in Venezuela, James Lankford, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, responded Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union: “Well, yes, I do.” Lankford said Maduro “is not the recognized leader of Venezuela” as far as the senator is concerned, which appears to be in part an allusion to Maduro’s clear defeat in the 2024 presidential election to former diplomat Edmundo González.
The developments come as Trump and his advisers have refused to rule out the possibility of open conflict with Venezuela, while Maduro has urged his navy to escort the tankers, defying the largest US fleet deployed to the region in decades.
After the seizure of the first tanker, the Venezuelan government said in a statement that the United States had committed “blatant theft” and called the action an “act of international piracy.”
In an interview broadcast Friday morning, Trump told NBC News that a war against Maduro’s regime remains on the table. “I’m not ruling it out, no,” he told the station in a telephone interview.
