As international protests against the U.S. blockade and other attacks on Venezuela continue to grow, the question on everyone’s mind is: Will U.S. President Donald Trump authorize direct military strikes and/or a full-scale war against that South American country? In a Dec. 18 interview, NBC News asked Trump if a war against Venezuela was a possibility. Trump said: “I don’t rule it out, no.” NBC reminded listeners: “In his speech after he won the election, Trump said he was ‘not going to start a war; I’m going to stop wars.’”
Meanwhile, an article in London’s Financial Times notes that President Trump is inching in the direction of launching a direct military strike on Venezuela. There was “a dramatic raid by U.S. forces last week to storm and seize a tanker off the Venezuelan coast carrying oil valued at about $100 million, part of which was for Maduro’s ally Cuba.” The article quotes Edward Fishman, a former U.S. official and author of Chokepoints, who says that “enforcing a naval blockade and interdicting most, if not all, of Venezuela’s oil cargos, that strikes me as an act of war.” A blockade “is typically a prelude to war, this is not a tool of statecraft.”
FT writes that “as much as a quarter of the active U.S. Navy is now in the Caribbean.”
