Trump Isn’t “Pirating Ships” — He Must Seize and Sell 300 Venezuelan Oil Tankers to Satisfy an International Court Judgment Owed to U.S. Companies
A lot of people are reacting emotionally to the idea of oil tankers being seized, but most of the outrage comes from not understanding what is actually being discussed.
So let’s slow this down and explain it clearly, legally, and step by step.
This is not war.
This is not piracy.
This is judgment enforcement — the same principle used every day when courts seize bank accounts, property, aircraft, or cargo from someone who lost in court and refuses to pay.
1. What Venezuela did (the part that always gets skipped)
In the 2000s, under Hugo Chávez, Venezuela seized oil projects owned by foreign companies, including major U.S. firms such as ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips.
This wasn’t a policy disagreement.
It was expropriation:
• Contracts were broken
• Assets were taken
• Compensation that had been agreed to was not paid
That is not controversial. It is historical fact.
2. What the courts decided
Those U.S. companies didn’t complain on social media.
They went to international arbitration and U.S. courts — the proper legal venues.
They won.
The rulings were:
• Final
• Binding
• Enforceable
Venezuela lost and was ordered to pay tens of billions of dollars in damages.
3. The real problem: Venezuela refused to pay
Here is the key point most critics ignore:
Venezuela refused to comply with the court judgments.
In any legal system — domestic or international — when a party:
• Loses in court
• Owes a judgment
• Refuses to pay
…the law allows creditors to seize commercial assets belonging to the debtor outside its borders to satisfy the judgment.
This is called judgment enforcement.
Countries do not get a free pass simply because they are countries.
4. Why oil tankers even enter the conversation
Venezuela’s primary commercial asset is oil.
Oil moves on oil tankers.
Those tankers:
• Carry state-owned Venezuelan oil
• Are commercial property, not military or diplomatic assets
• Can be lawfully seized by court order in cooperating jurisdictions
This is no different in principle from seizing:
• A bank account
• A plane
• A shipment of goods
Calling this “piracy” is legally incorrect.
Piracy is theft without lawful authority.
This is court-ordered seizure to collect a debt already ruled on.
5. The math everyone avoids
Let’s use conservative, realistic numbers so no one can claim exaggeration.
• Estimated unpaid court judgments: ~$35 billion
• Oil price used: $62 per barrel
• Typical large oil tanker (VLCC): ~2 million barrels
Value of one full tanker:
• Gross value: ~$124 million
• Net value after realistic court-sale discounts: ~$115 million
Now do the math:
$35,000,000,000 ÷ $115,000,000 ≈ 300 tankers
That’s where the number comes from.
Not one tanker.
Not ten.
About three hundred.
One tanker only covers about one-third of one percent of what Venezuela owes.
6. What this means — and what it does NOT mean
This does not mean:
• Tankers are being randomly grabbed
• This is a military action
• The goal is punishment
It does mean:
• Courts already ruled
• A debt legally exists
• Enforcement is the only option left when payment is refused
When Donald Trump talks about seizing oil shipments, he is not inventing a new power.
He is talking about using existing legal authority to enforce judgments Venezuela already lost.
In plain English:
You took property, you lost in court, you refused to pay — so your commercial assets are seized and sold until the debt is satisfied.
That is how the rule of law works.
7. Why you don’t see hundreds of tankers seized
Because enforcement is:
• Legally narrow
• Jurisdiction-dependent
• Deliberately targeted
Venezuela also structured its exports to:
• Avoid enforceable ports
• Use intermediaries
• Break shipments into smaller pieces
So tanker seizures are rare, careful, and strategic, not mass roundups.
Years ago China imported almost no oil from Venezuela due to a lack of heavy crude refining facilities. Since the establishment of a strategic partnership between the two nations, China invested tens of billions to strengthen cooperation. Specifically, in 2023, the China-Venezuela Petrochemical Plant (中委石化) was built in Jieyang, Guangdong (广东揭阳). This 20-million-ton-per-year integrated refining and chemical project is the flagship of the China-Venezuela strategic cooperation (referred to as the "China-Venezuela Project"). It was designed specifically to refine Venezuelan Merey-16 heavy crude. By 2025, it was expected that Venezuela would provide 800,000 barrels of crude oil per day to the Jieyang refinery, accounting for over 90% of Venezuela's total exports.
Now that Trump has taken control of Venezuela, he has "killed two birds with one stone." The U.S. military has already secured Venezuelan shipping ports (such as the Port of Jose). Consequently, the China-Venezuela Jieyang plant has been cut off from its supply; facing a total lack of oil to refine, the facility is now at risk of becoming obsolete.
By securing this supply, the U.S. can not only feed its own refineries—satisfying their "hunger" for heavy crude—but also intercept the flow of Venezuelan oil to China. This effectively "throttles" Chinese refineries, delivering a precision strike against China's core heavy oil import strategy while simultaneously seizing control over global heavy oil pricing power.
Well, yes, President Trump has offered reassurances that he will guarantee China’s heavy oil supply, but who knows how much will be supplied and under which condition? This "guaranteed supply" will become a strategic bargaining chip for America likely used to pressure China into "oil-for-debt" or "oil-for-tariffs" swaps. Furthermore, while Venezuelan oil was previously purchased using Chinese currency RMB (Yuan), it will inevitably return to USD settlement, ensuring dominance over petroleum finance.
China is a big loser, this is for sure.
My Venezuela experience as head of trading in the region for Cargill.
Cargill was/is the leading producer of critical staple ingredients such as flour, pasta, vegetable oil, and rice in VZ. I am not saying I agree with grabbing the dictator, but I did have a front row seat to the damage a kleptocracy did to innocent people.
1. The government took over our "minute rice" facility at gunpoint because we were "gouging" the nation's poor. The government was never able to run the plant. It never ran again. It was returned years later with no equipment inside
2. There are 1000's of generals in the army. They are each given a slice of the economy to loot. The large number of generals made it difficult to organize a coup against the regime.
3. The government opened grocery stores and sold staples below the cost we sold them to the government. In theory they used petro oil money to lower grocery prices. Our regular grocery outlets were forced out of business. When the government demanded we sell them products below cost we simply had to shut down. The populace became ever more dependent on the government handouts. (PS this is the mayor of New York City's proposal.
4. Dollars- We needed dollars to go buy raw materials like wheat from places like the US and Canada. The government would periodically allocate us some dollars that could only be spent for raw materials and freight. Eventually only the local companies that can and would pay bribes got dollar allocations. We had several facilities closed for lack of raw material
5. My employees liked working for Cargill. The office was an armed compound with access to a gym, high speed internet, global communications, and a weekly box of basic staples. Cargill provided a safe and secure environment if only for the working hours.
6. Employees became very close to others inside the apartment building. Going out on the street with a desperate population was not advisable.
7. I needed wood pallets for feed. We tried to export wood pallets to swap for grain. We refused to pay the bribes it would take to export the pallets
8. I once tried to set up a closed loop wheat planting to flour mill supply chain. A. They came and stole all the seed wheat for food. When we tried to ship in seed wheat in containers via US donors there was no way to get it out of the port without it being stolen
9. Livestock- Our feed business completely collapsed. Even if you could raise a pig, you couldn't defend it from being stolen. People with guns were hungry.
10. Employees- In the end my highly skilled team alone with other highly educated people chose to leave. Cargill often found jobs for them in other Latin countries. The regime was more than happy to see the well-educated leave the country. Setting these employees up with high quality stable jobs after fleeing remains one of the best things I ever did in my career. No one remembers millions in trading earnings.
This is a short list. In my opinion the first money spent needs to happen now and it needs to be food. The US is already on the clock. The current regime does not care if it starves the population. The orgy of theft will actually accelerate if they believe their days are numbered. VZ should be an outstanding customer of US grown ag products. Rice, bread wheat, veg oil ect. Feed the people first.
Jeff Kazin
Former head trading Cargill
This was one of the clearest statements of hemispheric power we’ve heard in decades — and people are still underreacting.
Marco Rubio just said the quiet part out loud.
The United States doesn’t want Venezuela’s oil.
The United States doesn’t need Venezuela’s oil.
What the U.S. will not allow is Venezuela’s oil — and by extension its ports, infrastructure, and security — to be controlled by China, Russia, or Iran.
Rubio spelled it out in plain language:
WELKER: Why do the United States need to take over the Venezuelan oil industry?
RUBIO: Well, we don’t need to— first let me go back up. We don’t need Venezuela’s oil. We have plenty of oil in the United States. What we’re not going to allow is for the oil industry in Venezuela to be controlled by adversaries of the United States. You have to understand, why does China need their oil? Why does Russia need their oil? Why does Iran need their oil? They’re not even in this continent. This is the Western Hemisphere, this is where we live, and we’re not going to allow the Western Hemisphere to be a base of operation for adversaries, competitors, and rivals of the United States, as simple as that.
RUBIO: We also want to see that oil and the proceeds from it— hold on. We want to see the oil proceeds of that country benefit the people of Venezuela. Why have eight million people left Venezuela? Eight million, the single largest mass migration, probably, in modern history, left Venezuela since 2014, because all the wealth of that country was stolen to the benefit of Maduro and his cronies in the regime, but not to the benefit of the people of Venezuela. You know how destabilizing eight million migrants is? The number one fear that Brazil has, that Colombia has, that all these countries in the region have about what’s happening in Venezuela and our involvement, is they’re afraid of another mass migration event. That’s what they fear. This is deeply destabilizing stuff. It’s not going to continue to happen. They are not going to come from outside of our hemisphere, destabilize our region, in our own backyard, and us have to pay the price for it. Not under President Trump.
https://www.schiffsovereign.com/trends/some-clear-thinking-about-this-weekends-strike-in-venezuela-154096/
It’s hard to imagine America being intimidated by a guy named “Little Turtle”. And yet, in the year 1790, he was about as terrifying as it could get.
Little Turtle was the war chief of the Miami nation, one of the Algonquian-speaking tribes in the Great Lakes region, and he had made a name for himself fighting against the United States during the Revolutionary War.
(At one point he literally butchered his captives after a lopsided battle.)
More than a century before, Little Turtle’s people had waged a long war against the Iroquois over control of the land in what is today Indiana and western Ohio. So, when the American Revolution was over, he continued fighting against settlers that he felt were encroaching on his tribe’s territory.
Roughly 1500 American settlers were killed between 1784 and 1789. And when it finally became clear to the US government in 1790 that the violence would not stop, they sent an expedition under the command of General Josiah Harmar to fight the Miami.
Little Turtle was ready. And on October 21 at the Battle of Kekionga in northeastern Indiana, Little Turtle vanquished American forces.
In terms of casualty percentages, it was one of the worst defeats in US history. More importantly, given how small America’s military was at the time, the defeat became a national security nightmare. The US essentially didn’t have an Army after the battle.
In response, Congress passed a series of laws known as the “Militia Acts”, which, among other things, federalized state militias for use by the federal government.
But the new laws also gave the President sweeping authority to take command of these forces under certain circumstances, including invasion or threat of invasion “from any foreign nation or Indian tribe”.
Fast forward more than two centuries, and these Militia Acts are among the foundational legal arguments in favor of the Trump administration’s actions in Venezuela over the weekend.
Now, tremendous amounts of ink have already been spilled over Venezuela in the past 48-hours.
What I found so interesting, however, is that most of the legacy media articles, not to mention social media commentary, devolved into typical ignorant tribalism, i.e. people are frequently for/against something based on whether or not they’re for/against the person doing it.
In this case, the Left is predictably howling that the President’s use of the military was illegal and unconstitutional– an assertion that is being repeated and reposted by millions of people.
These same people who protested against “no kings” are now raging in defense of a dictator. They imported millions of illegals and enabled billions in fraud in order to win votes, yet they’re upset because they think the military strike was against the law.
I find this fascinating, because the vast majority of Americans (including many who serve in Congress) have never once read the Constitution and wouldn’t know the difference between Article I and a hole in the ground.
Yet in their expert opinions they have deemed this “unconstitutional”. Just like the ICE raids, Presidential use of the national guard, etc.
Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the exclusive power to declare war. Yet “war” has never actually been defined. Do air strikes and Delta Force raids constitute war? If so, then nearly every military conflict waged in US history is illegal and unconstitutional.
Joe Biden struck Syria in 2021. Obama struck Libya in 2011. Bush junior interred suspected terrorists at Gitmo. Bill Clinton sent troops and dropped bombs all over the world. Bush senior invaded Panama. Reagan invaded Grenada. . .
This history goes back to the early days of the Republic.
Yet the Supreme Court has always stayed out of it because they view the definition of “war” in Article I as more of a political argument than a legal one. In other words, it should be up to the voters, not a panel of unelected judges.
So, does what happened this weekend constitute “war”, and hence fall under the exclusive authority of Congress?
Or does it fall under the sweeping powers provided to the President under Article II (as Commander-in-Chief), combined with numerous legislative acts ranging from the militia bills in the 1790s to the War Powers Resolution of 1973…?
Naturally these questions aren’t actually being debated. The legacy media simply devolves into “Orange Man Bad” without bothering to examine the facts or the actual merits of the decision.
And there’s plenty of merit. Many of our readers know that I predicted this a couple of years ago– that the US would essentially make Venezuela the 51st state in order to tap its vast oil reserves.
We’ll discuss this more later in the week, but given declining US shale production, oil supply is clearly a strategic benefit to the United States. So is toppling a global drug cartel.
At the moment there are a lot of people on the Left complaining that the world is now less stable, more dangerous, etc. as a result of this weekend’s military strike.
They said the same thing after the US airstrike in Iran several month ago– that the world would plunge into chaos and danger because of unilateral US aggression.
They were wrong. And I argued back then that the world was actually less inclined to war as a result of the Iran strikes. I believe the same to be true today.
As I explained months ago, the airstrikes against Iran pitted US military technology (F-35s) against Chinese military technology (air defense systems, etc.). And China got embarrassed.
This weekend, a joint force (i.e. Army, Navy, Air Force, etc.) destroyed high value targets in Venezuela while the most elite special operations forces in the world extracted a dictator, with minimal casualties, and it was all over in a couple of hours.
That’s an astonishing military achievement (not to mention the CIA’s success in providing the necessary intelligence).
Conducting any large-scale joint operation is REALLY hard to do. The sheer amount of interservice coordination, i.e. Navy fighter jets talking to Air Force bombers talking to the commandos on the ground– everyone being in sync, on schedule, and hitting their objectives with surgical precision– is extremely difficult.
Doing so in a heavily populated area adds an even higher degree of difficulty.
And yet the US military pulled this off almost flawlessly.
After several years of embarrassments for the military– from the withdrawal from Afghanistan to Joe Biden’s transgender admirals, to the lowering of physical fitness standards, to countless DEI initiatives– this weekend’s actions in Venezuela prove to the rest of the world that the US military is back.
After witnessing these precision strikes, there is not a leader in the world– not Xi, not Putin, not the second coming of Little Turtle– who would even think about conflict with America.
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