When countries in the Western Hemisphere feel like they’re being abused by the U.S., they often turn to countries outside the Western Hemisphere. Countries like Russia, China, and even Iran. From Jose Alberto Nino at unz.com:
On December 10, 2025, Coast Guard personnel fast-roped from Navy helicopters onto the deck of an oil tanker in international waters near Venezuela, seizing what the Trump administration called the Skipper, a vessel allegedly involved in sanctions evasion. Attorney General Pam Bondi declared the operation targeted networks financing terrorism and rogue regimes, while President Trump casually remarked about the confiscated oil: “We keep it, I guess.”
The Venezuelan government responded by calling the seizure an act of international piracy, arguing that Washington’s true motives had finally been exposed—not restricting migration, not clamping down on drug trafficking, not promoting democracy, but making an attempt to acquire Venezuela’s vast petroleum reserves.
This brazen maritime interdiction represents merely the latest escalation in a pressure campaign that has already claimed dozens of lives. Reuters documented that the United States acknowledged at least five strikes on vessels near Venezuela, with several dozen people killed in these operations.
The administration and geopolitical strategists sympathetic to Trump invoke the Monroe Doctrine to justify this escalation. Yet this appeal obscures a fundamental reality: Venezuela’s current alignment with extra-hemispheric adversaries such as Russia, China, and Iran represents not unprovoked aggression but a predictable response to decades of American economic warfare and destabilization efforts.
The irony is stark. Washington officials warn about foreign powers gaining influence in America’s backyard, seemingly oblivious to how their own interventionist policies pushed Caracas into precisely these arrangements. The more aggressively the United States confronts Russia, China, and Iran globally, the more these powers deepen cooperation with Venezuela. What American policymakers fear as a new Cuban Missile Crisis is rapidly becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, manufactured not by adversaries’ ambitions but by Washington’s own imperial overstretch.
You should always name a ship after a woman and I thought they banned guns in Australia.
The empire will shrink and turn inward as it becomes a pariah?
Reading that the tanker had a Russian and other Slavs crew.
How the banksters hunger for that WWIII reset and CBDC New Man AI Wakanda workers utopia.
Gut busting laughs are imminent.