Nothing is Finished in Venezuela
By 
Well um okay I guess this is good?
The U.S. military boarded a Russian-flagged oil tanker in the North Atlantic that had evaded an American effort to crack down on Venezuela’s energy exports, U.S. officials said, sharply escalating a confrontation with Moscow after the ouster of its ally, President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.
The U.S. military issued a statement on X saying that U.S. forces had “seized” the vessel for violating U.S. sanctions. The Coast Guard boarded the tanker after a roughly two-week pursuit, according to one U.S. official briefed on the operation. The Coast Guard encountered no resistance or hostility from the crew, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive military operation.
The Russian state-owned broadcaster RT published images of a helicopter approaching the Russian-flagged tanker being pursued by the Coast Guard and said it appeared that U.S. forces were attempting to board. The New York Times was not able to determine when the images were captured.
In other news the regime is cracking down hard. Don’t know how things will play out regarding Trump’s effort to do regime change on the cheap, but I guess we’re going to find out. I have deep reservations about the ability of the US to effect change in Venezuela though air and sea power:
Trump has clearly stated his ambitions for controlling the future of Venezuela. Herein lies the problem; on Sunday morning, Trump obliquely threatened to kill Venezuela’s new leader if she did not comply with his wishes. The fact that Trump can almost certainly make good on that threat hardly means, though, that the United States has absolute power over Venezuela’s reconstruction.
During his first term, Trump could not control his own Defense Department or State Department; it was only when he installed loyalists in his second term that he was able to bring his government into even a semblance of obedience. Delcy Rodríguez, sworn in on Monday as Venezuela’s acting president, is not a Trump loyalist, and it is deeply unlikely that any future Venezuelan leadership will be, either.
This is, and has always been, the fundamental limitation of air and sea power. No matter how much destruction the United States can inflict, the power to destroy does not imply the power to control. This has little to do with the will or capacity to pinpoint the location of individual decision-makers. Lethal airpower does not solve the principal-agent problem, which stems from the fact that the agent knows a great deal more than the principal about the job that needs to be done.
The next big thing, I think, is going to be Cuba. More on this in a couple days but I suspect things in Havana are going to be looking very rough for the foreseeable future.
With respect to the legality of the operation, Brad Roth makes a very good point:
International lawyers are fond of the old La Rochefoucauld bromide that “Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.” The point was made with greater particularity by Hedley Bull, in observing that when a state violates international law, “it usually goes out of its way to demonstrate that it considers itself (and other states) bound by the rule in question.” In lying about the material facts or in asserting some facially plausible extension of accepted normative criteria, violators reassure the international political community that they do not seek to upend the overall system of mutual constraint. It is not merely that, as Bull pointed out, “there is acceptance of the need to provide an explanation”; there is also acceptance of a common set of reference points for evaluation of such explanations. Whatever may be said against distortive legal arguments, they avoid the destabilizing impact of a violator saying, in effect, “I did it because I could.”
The Trump Administration’s January 3 military operation in Venezuela has – thus far, at least – been accompanied by no such quasi-legal rationalizations. The news conference given by President Trump and his leading cabinet officers manifested disregard not only for legal constraints, international and domestic, but also for underlying interests and values ascribable to the international community. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (the self-styled “Secretary of War” who has both vocally denounced and removed military lawyers who demand conformity to jus in bello norms) put the point most pithily: “our adversaries remain on notice: America can project our will anywhere, anytime. … [Maduro] effed around and he found out.”
Photo Credit: NS Champion, part of Russia’s shadow tanker fleet. By kees torn – AMELIE 2 & NS CHAMPION, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=103827949