The United States has intercepted and appropriated two tankers transporting oil from Venezuela, seizing and offloading their cargoes in Texas, while also pursuing a third tanker in the Atlantic Ocean that is reportedly linked to Russia. It has also destroyed more than thirty-three small boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean using the justification of “drug enforcement” and killing at least 112 people whose identities and occupations it has not revealed.
On December 16, President Donald Trump ordered a “total and complete blockade” of “all sanctioned Venezuelan oil vessels,” but the real scope of his order is unclear, and legal experts say that these tanker seizures by the United States amount to illegal acts of war against Venezuela.
The United States is claiming the right to seize vessels, disrupt maritime trade, and kill civilian boaters—while at the same time bombing Yemen and condemning its de facto Houthi government for intercepting ships in the Red Sea to counter Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
This contrast exposes a stark double standard. The U.S. government has labelled the actions by the Houthis as terrorism, piracy, and a threat to U.S. national security—even though the Houthi government has presented plausible legal justifications for its actions based on the laws of war. Meanwhile, in this hemisphere, the Trump Administration has tried to normalize—even glorify—its own attacks on tankers, pineros (ferries or water-taxis), and fishing boats, all of which violate the most basic principles of international law.
Beginning in November 2023, Yemen’s Houthi movement launched a naval campaign in the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Arabian Sea in response to Israel’s assault on Gaza. The Houthis publicly announced their criteria, stating they would target only vessels linked to Israel, bound for Israeli ports, owned by Israeli companies, or connected to states materially supporting Israel’s war.
The United States and its allies immediately denounced these actions as criminal. And there were, in fact, legitimate grounds for scrutiny. Human rights groups raised concerns about attacks that struck vessels without obvious Israeli connections, and about the safety and treatment of civilian crews. Over the course of the campaign, the Houthis targeted more than 100 commercial vessels, damaged dozens, sank several, and outright seized at least one ship—the Galaxy Leader—detaining its multinational crew members for more than a year before releasing them in connection with Gaza ceasefire negotiations.
The Houthis have consistently framed their actions as justified by Israel’s grave breaches of international humanitarian law. That legal framework exists. Under the Geneva Conventions and customary international law, parties to an armed conflict have the right—and in cases of grave breaches, the obligation—to interdict shipping that materially supports a belligerent committing mass civilian harm.
Morever, in the case of Israel’s genocide, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has found, and the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) has affirmed, that all states are obliged to cut off all military and economic support for Israel’s assault on Gaza.
The response of the United States was not to pressure Israel to halt its genocidal assault—an outcome that would have also immediately ended the Houthi campaign—but to unleash overwhelming force against Yemen. Beginning in December 2023, Washington organized Operation Prosperity Guardian, a multinational naval deployment backed by extensive U.S. airpower. While the United Kingdom, Canada, Denmark, Greece, and the Netherlands joined the U.S.-led coalition, France, Italy, and Spain also sent warships to protect shipping, but chose not to join the coalition or place them under U.S. command.
During the following year, the United States and Great Britain carried out more than 2,000 airstrikes on Yemen, bombing radar sites, missile launchers, ports, the capital city of Sanaa, and other civilian infrastructure—killing hundreds, or maybe thousands, of Houthi fighters and civilians. A U.S. airstrike on the Ras Isa oil terminal killed more than eighty people, and another airstrike killed sixty-eight African migrants when U.S. bombs hit a migrant detention center in Sa’ada.
But how do the Houthi interdictions compare with the Trump Administration’s actions toward Venezuela?
On December 10, Trump boasted to reporters, “We have just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela—a large tanker, very large, the largest one ever seized actually,” as his administration released a video of U.S. forces rappelling from helicopters onto a civilian oil tanker. This was no conflict zone. Venezuela is not at war with the United States. There was no U.N. Security Council authorization, no armed conflict, and no claim of self-defense.
Under international law, seizing civilian commercial vessels in international waters or imposing a naval blockade outside of an existing armed conflict are defined as “acts of aggression.” The Trump Administration claims its actions are justified by U.S. sanctions on Venezuela. But those sanctions are themselves illegal under international law. Only the U.N. Security Council has the authority to impose and enforce sanctions. Unilateral coercive measures—especially when enforced through military force—violate the U.N. Charter.
According to legal experts, the United States has no jurisdiction to seize foreign-flagged vessels to enforce its domestic laws or unilateral sanctions outside its territory, particularly in another country’s territorial waters.
The distinction could not be more clear.
The Houthis, seeking to end mass civilian slaughter in Gaza, declared a blockade and attacked ships that violated it, based on a legal rationale rooted in the laws of armed conflict. These interceptions ceased when a ceasefire was declared in Gaza.
On the other hand, the United States, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, has seized tankers, destroyed boats, killed people at sea, and threatened a blockade against a country with which it is not at war. And its goal is not to end a war or save a civilian population from genocide, but apparently to pursue extralegal regime change and U.S. control of that country’s most valuable resources.
Now the United States says it has used drones to attack a target on land, a port from where Trump claims drug boats were sailing from Venezuela, although this attack has yet to be confirmed by visual evidence or by anyone on the ground at the site. Whatever Trump’s real plans may be, he is waging a low-grade war and ratcheting up dangerous tensions, to try to politically and economically strangle Venezuela and impose a new regime on its people.
This is the kind of regime change war by which the United States has plunged country after country into endemic violence, chaos, and corruption. It is exactly what Trump has promised to put an end to.
If the United States really wants safety at sea, whether in the Caribbean or the Red Sea, it should stop enforcing illegal sanctions by the illegal use of military force, and also stop enabling genocide in Palestine. U.S. murder and violence against other people and other countries does not become lawful simply because officials in the White House say it is or wish it to be.