It does seem like the game of chicken that President Trump has been engaged in with Venezuela just got kicked up a notch.

While the president is appropriately cagey about what he will do in Venezuela when it comes to getting Nicolas Maduro out of power (and remember, there is a robust political opposition that stands ready to take over, so long as the military does not continue to back Maduro), it seems like Trump is ready to make sure that the sanctions against Venezuela have teeth. The president announced on Wednesday that the United States had seized a Venezuelan oil tanker.

“We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela. Large tanker, very large. Largest one ever seized action. And, other things are happening. So you’ll be seeing that later. And you’ll be talking about that later with some other people,” Trump said at the White House.

“It was seized for a very good reason,” he added.

The seizure was led by the Coast Guard and supported by the Navy, a U.S. official told the Associated Press. The Coast Guard and U.S. Southern Command directed Fox News Digital back to the White House, which could not be reached for comment.

The Trump administration is considering launching land strikes on Venezuelan territory in an effort to further ramp up pressure on Maduro, who the U.S. views as the illegitimate leader of Venezuela and the leader of the Cartel de Los Soles drug trafficking cartel.

Trump recently said Maduro’s “days are numbered” and refused to rule out a ground operation in the South American country.

“I don’t want to rule in or out,” Trump told Politico. “I don’t talk about it.”

Oil revenue remains the central pillar of Venezuela’s collapsing economy, with the country relying heavily on discounted exports to China and other buyers willing to navigate sanctions exposure.

The nation moves much of its crude through a shadow network of reflagged tankers, shell companies and ship-to-ship transfers designed to conceal the origin of its oil. Many vessels operate with their transponders off or spoofing locations to avoid detection.

This oil tanker was apparently headed to Cuba, and no less than the New York Times reported on the extremely sketchy transponder history of this particular tanker.

U.S. officials did not publicly name the vessel, but one official told The Times that it was a ship called the Skipper. Although the vessel’s location transponder indicated that it was anchored in the Atlantic Ocean near Guyana and Suriname, The Times found that from late October to at least Dec. 4, the ship was actually hundreds of miles away off Venezuela.

A satellite image captured on Nov. 18 shows the tanker docked at the country’s José oil terminal while its transponder showed that it was elsewhere.

The ship’s location was further corroborated by a photograph taken from land as it loaded oil. The image was provided by TankerTrackers.com, a company that monitors global oil shipping.

Data provided by TankerTrackers.com suggests that the ship has frequently carried oil from countries under U.S. sanctions. The vessel’s tracking data shows multiple trips to Iran and Venezuela over the last two years.

“Skipper has transported nearly 13 million barrels of Iranian and Venezuelan oil since joining the global dark fleet of tankers in 2021,” said Samir Madani, the co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, referring to ships that obscure their true locations. The ship delivered Iranian oil to Syria in 2024 when it was under the control of Bashar al-Assad, helping his government prolong a civil war, Mr. Madani said.

From February to July this year, the ship transported nearly two million barrels of crude oil from Iran to China.

The ship, under a previous name, was placed under sanctions in 2022 by the U.S. Treasury Department, which said the vessel was part of “an international oil smuggling network that facilitated oil trades and generated revenue” to support the Iranian-backed forces of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’s Quds Force.

And while Democrats began to ramp up with claims of “piracy” (seriously, I would bet the Trump White House comms team is going to lean into that with AI, and make a whole video of Trump as a pirate), Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that they had a “seizure warrant” to get this sanctioned vessel.

Today, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security Investigations, and the United States Coast Guard, with support from the Department of War, executed a seizure warrant for a crude oil tanker used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran. For multiple… pic.twitter.com/dNr0oAGl5x

— Attorney General Pamela Bondi (@AGPamBondi) December 10, 2025

The seizure of this oil tanker is a power move, and a necessary one.

Good.

We’ve been sanctioning oil from these two nations and then doing nothing to enforce those sanctions for years. This is an actual worthy use of force.

If America says something, it has to mean something. https://t.co/jvg15trgLe

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) December 11, 2025

I think we would all be deeply uneasy to have American boots on the ground in Venezuela, or we should be. Regime change has not worked out well for us in the last few decades. However, economic sanctions and a blockade to put significant pressure on Maduro? Either the sanctions have the threat of force behind them, or they are meaningless. This type of action is vastly preferable to military action operating on the ground in Venezuela, but it is an escalation. Now we wait to see how – and if – Venezuela can respond.

Featured image: President Donald Trump on November 5, 2025, official White House photo by Molly Riley, cropped, public domain