Fears Trump has sparked beginning of war with

Republican Sen. Rand Paul responded to the Trump administration’s seizure of a sanctioned Venezuelan oil tanker as the potential start to a war, as the South American nation shot back, calling the act “piracy.”

After the U.S. Navy seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, President Trump said it was “seized for a good reason,” while Attorney General Pam Bondi elaborated that the ship had beforehand been sanctioned for allegedly transporting oil in an unlawful community that helps the Iranian Revolutionary National Guard (IRGC, Iran’s authorities) and thus the sponsership of terror teams like Hezbollah in Lebanon. 

Venezuela has responded, calling the seizure “a blatant theft and an act of international piracy.”

Within the U.S., the seizure shot up alarms as the Trump administration has already ramped up tensions with Venezuela’s authorities, accusing President Nicholas Maduro of supporting narco terrorism. 

Sen. Rand Paul criticized the seizure in an interview with NewsNation. Paul says the event “sounds a lot like the beginning of a war,” and added that it was not “the job of the American government to go looking for monsters around the world, looking for adversaries and beginning wars.”

Using U.S. forces to take control of a service provider ship is extremely uncommon. It marks the Trump administration’s latest push to increase strain on Maduro, whom the U.S. authorities has formally charged with narcotrafficking.

Venezuela added to their assertion on the ship seizure that, “Under these circumstances, the true reasons for the prolonged aggression against Venezuela have finally been revealed. … It has always been about our natural resources, our oil, our energy, the resources that belong exclusively to the Venezuelan people.”

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The U.S. has constructed up the biggest navy presence in the area in many years and launched a sequence of lethal strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea and jap Pacific Ocean. The marketing campaign is dealing with growing scrutiny from Congress.

The seizure was led by the U.S. Coast Guard and supported by the Navy, according to a U.S. official who was not licensed to remark publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity. The official added that it was carried out under U.S. law enforcement authority.

Trump has instructed that the U.S. will keep the oil taken off the seized ship. Posting a short clip of Navy officers and particular forces boarding the ship, Pam Bondi wrote, “for multiple years, the oil tanker has been sanctioned by the United States due to its involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations.”

The ship departed Venezuela around Dec. 2 with about 2 million barrels of heavy crude, roughly half of it belonging to a Cuban state-run oil importer, according to paperwork from the state-owned company Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., generally identified as PDVSA, that had been offered on the condition of anonymity because the individual didn’t have permission to share them.

The Skipper was beforehand identified as the M/T Adisa, according to ship monitoring data. The Adisa was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2022 over accusations of belonging to a subtle community of shadow tankers that smuggled crude oil on behalf of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group.

The community was reportedly run by a Switzerland-based Ukrainian oil trader, the U.S. Treasury Department said at the time.