Venezuela tore into President Donald Trump’s Tuesday order to blockade the waters near Venezuela and prevent sanctioned oil tankers from passing through as ‘warmongering threats.’
In a statement, the government said Trump’s ‘irrational blockade’ was a ‘grotesque threat’ and an effort to ‘steal’ the nation’s oil wealth.
Caracas formally filed a complaint with the United Nations Security Council Tuesday as the U.S. took aim at a key lifeline: oil shipments to China.
Venezuelan exports fell sharply this week as U.S. actions disrupted shipping lanes. On Tuesday, Trump demanded Venezuela return ‘stolen’ oil assets to the U.S.
‘Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before — Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us,’ he wrote on Truth Social. ‘I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela.’
Trump’s reference to ‘stolen’ U.S. assets stems from a long-running dispute over Venezuela’s seizure of American-owned oil projects more than a decade ago. Beginning in 2007, the Chávez government forced U.S. firms like ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips to surrender multibillion-dollar investments in some of the country’s largest oil fields, triggering arbitration cases that remain unresolved.
Those expropriations targeted corporate property, not U.S. government land, but Trump has cast the episode as a broader theft from the American people as he presses for tougher measures against the Maduro regime.
With most Western buyers off the table, China has become Venezuela’s dominant customer for crude, often taking the vast majority of the country’s exportable barrels. Cutting or constraining those shipments threatens the government’s most reliable source of hard currency at a time when Maduro lives in fear of a potential U.S.-led effort to oust him from the presidency.
Oil accounts for around 88% of Venezuela’s $24 billion in export revenues, according to a recent New York Times report.
Amid dozens of strikes on alleged narco-traffickers in the waters near Venezuela, the U.S. has built up its largest military presence in the Latin America region in decades: 15% of all naval assets are now positioned in the Southern Command theater.
On Dec. 10, the U.S. seized a major oil tanker known as the Skipper, and plans to seek a warrant to seize the oil, worth tens of millions.
Analysts say the regime has few practical ways to hit back without doing even more damage to itself.
Maduro could target U.S. oil interests in Venezuela — Chevron still has a license to operate there — but doing so would almost certainly inflict more pain on his own cash-starved regime than on the United States.