Venezuela Just Shattered Trump’s Oil Leverage

Donald Trump has intitiated a blockade of Venezuela's oil and whilst you might think that's it for this story so far - it's actually already backfiring. Right, so Trump says this is about drugs, which is convenient, because the drug story fell apart the moment he started blowing boats out of the water without showing any evidence, and then finished the job by pardoning a former Central American president who was literally convicted of drug trafficking offences while running what prosecutors described as a narco-state. From there it only gets worse for him. Sanctions weren’t enough, so he moved to seizures. Seizures weren’t enough, so he declared Venezuela’s government a terrorist organisation. And now we’re at a full-blown oil blockade, enforced by warships, justified by assertion, and sold as law enforcement. You don’t need to speculate about motive to see what’s happening here. It’s all about the oil and if Trump can’t have it, then nobody can. When the story collapses, force steps in to do the talking. And the problem for Trump isn’t that Venezuela is defying him. It’s that every system he’s relying on to enforce this escalation is starting to behave in ways he can’t control. There’s a reason we here in the UK refer to farts as Trumps, who knew the same stink would apply to a sitting President who is catastrophically out of his depth? Right, so Trump has ordered what he himself described as a total and complete blockade of Venezuelan oil tankers. He has backed that order with naval force in the Caribbean. He has justified it by declaring Venezuela’s leadership a terrorist organisation, without publicly presenting evidence to substantiate that designation. Stripped of rhetoric, this is not a tweak to sanctions policy or a law-enforcement measure.