Trump’s blockade of sanctioned Venezuelan oil raises new questions about legality

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Venezuela pushes back

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Trump announced the blockade Tuesday, about a week after U.S. forces seized a sanctioned oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast. The South American country has the world’s largest proven oil reserves and relies heavily on the revenue to support its economy.

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The U.S. has been imposing sanctions on Venezuela since 2005 over concerns about corruption as well as criminal and anti-democratic activities. The first Trump administration expanded the penalties to oil, prompting Maduro’s government to rely on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains.

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The state-owned oil company Petroleos de Venezuela S.A., or PDVSA, has been largely locked out of global oil markets by U.S. sanctions. It sells most of its exports at a steep discount on the black market in China.

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Nicolas Maduro Guerra, Maduro’s son and a lawmaker, on Thursday decried Trump’s latest tactic and vowed to work with the private sector to limit any impact on the country’s oil-dependent economy. He acknowledged that it won’t be an easy task.

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“We value peace and dialogue, but the reality right now is that we are being threatened by the most powerful army in the world, and that’s not something to be taken lightly,” Maduro Guerra said.

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Pentagon prefers the term ‘quarantine’

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It wasn’t immediately clear how the U.S. planned to enact Trump’s order. But the Navy has 11 ships in the region and a wide complement of aircraft that can monitor marine traffic coming in and out of Venezuela.

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Trump may be using the term “blockade,” but the Pentagon says officials prefer “quarantine.”

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A defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to outline internal reasoning about the policy, said a blockade, under international law, constitutes an act of war requiring formal declaration and enforcement against all incoming and outgoing traffic. A quarantine, however, is a selective, preventive security measure that targets specific, illegal activity.

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Rep. Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said he was unsure of the legality of Trump’s blockade.

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“They’re blockading apparently the oil industry, not the entire country,” said Smith, who represents parts of western Washington state. “How does that change things? I got to talk to some lawyers, but in general, a blockade is an act of war.”

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The U.S. has a long history of leveraging naval sieges to pressure lesser powers, especially in the 19th century era of “gunboat diplomacy,” sometimes provoking them into taking action that triggers an even greater American response.

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But in recent decades, as the architecture of international law has developed, successive U.S. administrations have been careful not to use such maritime shows of force because they are seen as punishing civilians — an illegal act of aggression outside of wartime.

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During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, President John F. Kennedy famously called his naval cordon to counter a real threat _ weapons shipments from the Soviet Union — a “quarantine” not a blockade.

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Mark Nevitt, an Emory University law professor and former Navy judge advocate general, said there is a legal basis for the U.S. to board and seize an already-sanctioned ship that is deemed to be stateless or is claiming two states.

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But a blockade, he said, is a “wartime naval operation and maneuver” designed to block the access of vessels and aircraft of an enemy state.

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“I think the blockade is predicated on a false legal pretense that we are at war with narco-terrorists,” he said.