Business & Economics
U.S. Boards and Seizes Venezuelan Crude Tanker ‘Skipper’ Hours Before Legal Deadline
On 10 Dec 2025, U.S. Coast Guard commandos fast-roped onto the Guyana-flagged Skipper and diverted its 1.9 m-barrel Venezuelan crude cargo to Texas, marking Washington’s first outright confiscation of Venezuelan oil under Trump’s expanded sanctions regime.
Focusing Facts
- Judge Zia Faruqui’s warrant authorizing the seizure was signed 26 Nov 2025 and would have expired on 10 Dec 2025—the raid occurred the same day, just before midnight.
- The Skipper had off-loaded ~50,000 barrels to a secondary vessel headed to Cuba and was itself bound for the Cuban port of Matanzas before U.S. forces intercepted it; U.S. officials say the oil will be kept and sold in the United States.
- Since September 2025, U.S. naval and air assets have destroyed over 20 small boats near Venezuela, killing nearly 90 people in operations labelled ‘counter-narcotics.’
Context
Washington has used maritime muscle to police its backyard before—e.g., the 1902–03 Venezuelan Blockade by European powers that prompted Roosevelt’s 1904 corollary, and the CIA-backed 1954 Guatemalan coup securing United Fruit—but this is the first time since the 1989 Panama invasion that U.S. troops have physically seized a cargo linked to a sitting Latin American government. The raid extends a 200-year Monroe Doctrine impulse to deny external rivals (then Europe, now China and Iran) footholds in the hemisphere and reprises a petroleum playbook seen in the 1953 Anglo-American coup in Iran: leverage sanctions, choke logistics, then install friendlier market rules. Whether this tanker grab becomes a footnote or a Sarajevo-style tripwire will hinge on long-term energy trends—U.S. shale output is flattening while South America’s share of untapped heavy crude is rising. On a centennial horizon the episode matters less for the oil itself than for what it signals: the re-normalization of gunboat diplomacy in an era of multipolar great-power jostling, where control of supply chains, not ideology, dictates interventions.
Perspectives
Business and foreign-policy analysis outlets
e.g., Fortune, National Post/Yahoo, Modern Diplomacy — Portray Washington’s tanker seizure and wider military buildup as a hard-nosed bid to secure Venezuela’s vast oil reserves and curb Chinese influence under a revived Monroe-style doctrine. By focusing on strategic resource logic they risk normalising or even rationalising intervention while giving relatively little weight to legal or humanitarian objections raised by the targeted states.
Cuba-aligned and other left-leaning/anti-US intervention outlets
e.g., Firstpost, The Guardian, NaturalNews — Frame the boarding of the Skipper as outright “piracy” and “maritime terrorism,” casting it as proof that the U.S. aims to plunder Venezuela’s oil and strangle Cuba economically. Their coverage heavily foregrounds Cuban and Venezuelan government statements and may underplay evidence of sanctions-busting or terrorist financing to present the U.S. as an unprovoked imperial aggressor.
Mainstream news reports amplifying the official U.S. security narrative
e.g., Dawn, The Epoch Times — Stress that the Skipper was part of a Hezbollah–IRGC sanctions-evasion network, depicting the seizure as lawful enforcement against narco-terror and illicit oil trading. By leaning on law-enforcement talking points and U.S. officials’ quotes, these reports tend to accept Washington’s allegations at face value and give limited scrutiny to the legality of the operation under international law.