US forces have seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, in a major escalation of Donald Trump’s four-month pressure campaign against the South American country’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro.
Next time Iran or the Houtis steal a tanker, they can point at the US and smile.
Nah. The US can do what they want, but don’t those other countries DARE fall out of line. That’s why the Ukraine was forced to give up nukes, but the USA is fine to keep theirs
USA Piracy
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what should venezuela do?
I don’t think there is much they can do. No one is going to want to stand up against the US in this, and any escalation from Venezuela would be incredibly costly for them. I suppose there are two things they can hope for; hope the US population throws up enough of a stink the trump changes his mind or wait for something else to come around to occupy his attention.
resist
Now we get to the meat of the matter.
The arabs hire trump muscle to knock off the Venezuelan government putting the arabs in charge, this gives the arabs unlimited unrestricted gulf drilling access.
The Saudis have run out or are almost out of oil. They like making billions for doing nothing and do not want the big bucks to stop.
So the gulf is drilled unrestricted, the oil shipped up to east Houston refineries, then shipped out to the nations paying the most for it.
What a deal.
When will trump start working for Americans?
Huh, I wonder why they seized it instead of shooting it like the others? It couldn’t possibly be for the oil, right?
In contrast to people, oil has a market value.
Never heard of human trafficking?
Oil is just a lot more profitable and easier to work with.
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Trump has plenty of experience as a human trafficker, but those were underage models in his little fake modeling agency, Trump Model Management, which was a friendly competitor to Epstein’s MC2 Model Management.
But I can understand him not wanting to draw on that experience here. That and Hegaeth is a murderous fuck, and he was the one awake enough to give the order.
You’re not getting paid top dollar for your people? You should see my people guy, he do you a good deal.
That can be changed. Pretty sure Trump is not opposed to slavery.
I genuinelly believe at least some people in positions of power inside and around the MAGA-Fascist party have plans to make Slavery legal again.
(I would certainly bet that Peter Tiel is one of those).
It is already legal. You just have to be in jail.
I mean, I know what your point is, but can we actually just be thankful that they did not in fact blow up an oil tanker and spill all that into the sea?
Just tow it outside the environment.
Into another environment.
There is nothing out there - all there is is sea, and birds, and fish.
And 20,000 tonne of burning crude oil.
That’s space bro. You’re describing outer space
Yes, I did miss this. I’ve seen that video but it’s been forever, forgot how great it is. Thank you
The deep water horizon did not show America too concerned about oil in the Gulf. I’m not sure they care where it goes if they can’t have it.
What, have they escalated to blockading Cuba now?
We begin to care about it as soon as it shows up as black sandy globs on the beach and sticks to our feet.
And, uh, kill all of the innocent people on board. Sorry, I just feel like that should be said.
Well when I had made the comment, there was no news on whether or not they had done that anyway.
We should not be thankful to nazi shit
No. I will not thank them for seizing the ship. That’s a ludicrous suggestion.
That’s not what they said.
It’s equivalent to what they said. If someone comes over and punches you in the head should I be thankful they didn’t stab you?
You can, in fact, be thankful that you weren’t stabbed while also being upset that you were punched. Adults can have more than one emotion at a time. Never heard of a “silver lining”? It’s an idiom for a reason.
Who am I being thankful toward? Who am I giving thanks to in this specific case?
It’s equivalent to what they said.
It’s not.
For sure. They shouldn’t have blown up the other boats either, but spilling the oil into the sea would certainly have been bad.
Technically the other ships they blew up spilled oil in the sea.
blowing up a tanker would cause a huge hazard to the area, spilling oil all over the ocean.
When you put it like, that, that sounds like exactly what they’d want off the coast of Venezuela right now.
Venezuelas oil infrastructure is in such bad shape, that oil spills are pretty common. Lake Maracaibo has them on a regular bases.
I can think of a few reasons why the US Navy wouldn’t want to fire high explosives into a contain full of flammable materials, depending on the range of their artillery.
Also definitely possible they’re just doing Privateer shit with Navy assets. I do wonder whether the vessel gets impounded or just escorted to a friendly port in El Salvador or Honduras and quietly re-flagged and titled.
Hegseth issuing letters of marque
They don’t really use actual artillery anymore, it would be missiles from the ship or a plane.
Starting a nonsense war under the guise of “spreading democracy” just to take their oil reserves so that rednecks back home can pollute the air and warm the earth with their oversized trucks. Can it get any more American this?
He wants to declare war on Venezuela next year (or hopes that he can agitate them enough to commit an act of terror on the US) so he can deny midterm elections because he knows the GOP majority will potentially be cooked
Remember how much his eyes shifted when he was told that elections can be delayed due to a country being at war
He’s not 100% wrong.
I’m sure he remembers fondly how every single news network praised him profusely when he dropped the MOAB on Afghanistan.
He knows very well how much the US loves a warmongering president.
are you talking about the bunker buster in Iran?
No, this was in his first term.
Here’s an article on it: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-39598046
But yeah, every single news outlet sang his praises after this. I specifically remember being on the treadmill in the gym, watching CNN, and I’ll quote Fareed Zakaria: “In that moment, he became president of the United States.”
This country loves war to the point of absolute absurdity.
I’m starting to get the impression that a large fraction of Americans have lustful thoughts at the idea of mass murdering civilians (including children) as well as at the idea of their “leaders” having sex with children.
Theirs is a diseased relationship with power.
It’s not like the Pilgrim Fathers weren’t a bunch of religious nutjobs
We are a nation that really has never given a crap about bombing civilians en masse. Hell, President Obama, whom many still revere, dropped 20,000 bombs just in the last year of his presidency and killed an American citizen in Iraq ordering a bombing as well.
At one point President Obama had the definition of “enemy combatant” be changed to “Any man between the ages of 16 and 60” because the numbers of “collateral” civilian casualties from the drone attacks he ordered were so bad.
Yup. Obama loved bloodying his hands almost as much as Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Remember
It looked like he thought no one had ever thought of it before, and that he was a genius.
Do you have a link to that clip of the shifty eyes?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Military/comments/1mtzau0/trump_to_zelenskyy_during_the_war_you_cant_have/
Sorry this was the only place I could find it fast
same tactic bush used to get elected, make a ware gives brownie points to the election in thier favor.
Can it get any more American this?
Yes. Yes, it can.
Tradition!
Let me guess… It was carrying drugs? Just packed full of cocaine? Can’t wait to hear the justification for this one.
Oil is drugs mmmkay
It is addictive…
The mere though of getting their hands on so much “free” oil made many in this Administration high.
It was carrying drugs?
This type of drug has several street names, among them, black gold and Texas tea.
Hamas actually \s
It has been under US sanctions since 2022 for supplying the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. It was spoofing its position. It was flying a false flag.
As to the legal justification, there are technicalities that could be argued. But that’s incidental to the intention here probably.
“Where’s my Nobel Peace Prize?”
All you get is a soccer peace prize.
*Football ball-fondling prize
Some random trophy from a pawn shop with a fresh coat of gold paint from a spray can should work.
Somebody give him an enlarged version of this and tell him it’s the Nobel Peace Price.
He reminds me so much of my little nephew sometimes. He’s obsessed with trophies and medals. When we’re in a store where they sell trophies, he asks me if they are “real” and i try to explain to him that trophies aren’t “real” they are just a symbol. Sometimes for nothing. And he tries to understand. And then when i ask him if i should buy him a meaningless trophy, he goes yes pleeeease, a big one.
An oil tanker…full of drugs?
more like a drug tanker
Petro-terrorists.
Anything’s ok as long as you ad hyphen terrorist to the person, place or thing.
Straight out of the USA wartime playbook!
Take/blow up anything you want with this one simple trick
Fucking terrorist country
Remember, USA is against piracy lmao
definitely not about the oil!!!
freedom?
Nah. The Venezuelans are jealous of all the freedom that the yankees have :)
Welcome to the sixteenth century! When Queen Elizabeth couldn’t afford to go to war against Spain so created ‘letters of marque’ which legalised piracy against Spain and its empire. Single handedly created the pirate economy.
Then, welcome to the eighteenth century, when america created the fiction of the Barbary Corsairs to legalise american piracy of the atlantic trade.
Isnt it Mark Twain who states that history rhymes?
Pirates of the Caribbean!
No that was George Lucas
Fack.
I want off Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride already.
Ruh-roh. Trump and Hegseth forgot the US has a 100% losing record against countries that start with V.
Vietnam lost over a million of its people during the US invasion and occupation. It’s all cutesy and smug to tally this as a Big L for Team USA. But I don’t think anyone in that country values the W/L record over the hundreds of thousands of family members, friends, and other loved ones who died to feed the American war machine’s rapacious appetite.
That’s before we even talk about the ecological damage that haunts Vietnam to this day. Or the deaths in Laos and Cambodia racked up in collateral. Or the tenuous diplomatic relationships between the various South Pacific neighbors based on Cold War grudges, which have re-emerged as a shooting war between Thailand and Cambodia just last month.
Also, weren’t the US armed forces prevented from going all out in Vietnam?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program#Torture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre#Killings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange#Use_in_the_Vietnam_War
Read through that and tell me what we missed.
The American military tried everything just shy of nuking Hanoi. Anyone who tells you otherwise is ignorant or trying to sell you something.
Soviet-sponsored air and naval defenses prevent North Vietnam from being saturation bombarded at the scale we inflicted on North Korea a decade earlier. Americans were largely confined to combat against insurgencies in the South. So much of the war was fought against the civilian population that the Americans were ostensibly there to protect from the villainous Communists.
But the idea that we simply didn’t use enough troops or sufficiently advanced weaponry or brutal tactics… that’s all reactionary mythology. If skinning half the population alive would have won the war, we’d have done it. A far more compelling argument is that Americans alienated the entire peninsula with our “all out” invasion (not unlike how we ended up alienating the bulk of the Afghan population following our '02 invasion). A subtler and more strategic approach - like our efforts to stand up anti-communist governments in The Philippines and Indonesia - seemed to have far better results in hindsight.
Are we talking about the same Indonesia where the USA funded and installed a Pro-US puppet government who basically sold out the country to US property development?
I guess that’s better than the country being torn apart by war, but it got torn apart none-the-less.
Are we talking about the same Indonesia where the USA funded and installed a Pro-US puppet government who basically sold out the country to US property development?
I guess that’s better than the country being torn apart by war, but it got torn apart none-the-less.
It is nearly non-existent in US History textbooks, which is a big fat “W” from the perspective of the capitalist-friendly intelligence services.
Actually the US has a shockingly short list of wars they have outright won where they were NOT part of an international coalition.
VCanada
