Same framing with more detailed whining in The Guardian:
Amid a bunch of Democratic Party alarm-sounding, the panic is at least partially bipartisan. Sample quote:
Rand Paul, a Republican senator of Kentucky, told NewsNation that “seizing someone’s oil tanker is an initiation of war” and questioned whether “it’s the job of the American government to go looking for monsters around the world, looking for adversaries and beginning wars.”
But it’s not a a Venezuelan oil tanker, though it was carrying Venezuelan oil. It’s a stateless oil tanker, flying the flag of Guyana but apparently not registered with Guyana. The maritime journalist and former Merchant Marine captain John Conrad explains this in detail. As he writes in that long post:
No real flag = stateless vessel.
And stateless vessels have zero legal protections.
[snip]
Sample news story about this April seizure:
A Kremlin-linked oil tanker was detained by Estonian authorities on Friday just outside Tallinn, in what marks the first time the Baltic country has directly targeted Russia’s “shadow fleet.”
[snip]
The seizure of a stateless oil tanker is not shocking, not an unusual act of aggression, and not something that only the administration of Mean Orange Hitler would be likely to do. Resist the panic.
With that said, my best guess is that Senator Chris Van Hollen’s quote in The Guardian is accidentally correct. The senator from MS-13 says that the seizure of the tanker proves that the administration’s story about blowing up drug boats to stop drugs is a lie: “This is just one more piece of evidence that this is really about regime change — by force.”
As I wrote recently, the lethal strikes on drug boats have happened right alongside continued Coast Guard interdictions by normal means, so there’s a logic to the strikes that hasn’t been announced and will only become clear to us as it develops.
[snip]
In that sense, the seizure is an act of aggression, but not one that represents a government that is sleepwalking into war. It’s an act of aggression with significant political effects and credible legal cover.
[snip]
My argument stays the same: There’s a strategic effort underway that isn’t entirely clear, and we’ll see it become clear over time. The seizure of a stateless oil tanker carrying Maduro’s oil is aggressive, but it isn’t clearly reckless or an act of “sleepwalking.” We’ll see how it develops.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack, “Tell Me How This Ends.”
* Original Article:
https://thefederalist.com/2025/12/15/trumps-oil-tanker-seizure-another-shocking-and-unprecedented-act-that-isnt-shocking-or-unprecedented/?utm_source=rss