Why seizing Venezuelan tankers tells us more about Iran than Venezuela

It begins, ironically, with containing Iranian nuclear weapon ambitions under both Presidents Bush and Obama. Under those administrations, especially beginning in 2010 in Obama’s first term with the passage of the Imposing Sanctions Under the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010 (CISADA) and later in 2012 with Presidential Executive Order the ‘Authorizing Additional Sanctions With Respect to Iran”; President Obama put a stranglehold on nearly all Iranian economic activity. All financial transactions were barred through SWIFT processing, embargos of imports and exports, including oil shipments as well as just about anything that wasn’t bona fide sole purpose medical supplies and some kinds of food was barred. Similar measures were passed by the EU and both Russia and China at least nominally played along.

This global pressure campaign brought Iran to a position of negotiation over nuclear weapons development, and nearing the end of his second term, in circumstances I’ve described (and criticized) elsewhere at the time, President Obama traded the sanctions regime of CISADA, his EO, and the EU/Russian/China actions with what what is known as Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA). The JCPA replaced the sanctions regime system with a ‘glidepath’ away from nuclear weapon development for Iran in return for lifting the sanctions. The JCPA was endorsed by the P5+1, which was the UN Security Council + the European Union. It was *not* passed by Congress because it was an ‘executive commitment’, a sort of hand-wavy end run around Constitutional treaty limitations that only exists as long as Presidents choose to honor it and Congress doesn’t push to hard to stop it. But a President can simply stop honoring it at any time, which Trump did during his first term in 2018. Seriously, we’ve all talked about this before, on this page, and I can’t see why you’re not connecting this to Venezuela.

But even outside of the US, within the P5+1 (or P4+1) the JCPA “snap back” provisions that would reverse the lifting of sanctions on Iran in ten years if it failed to adhere to commitments. After Trump’s withdrawal from the ‘executive commitment’ in 2018, Iran also diverted from compliance, leading to escalation that culminated in the 12-day war between Israel and the US against Iran in June. So Iran is *really* not complying at this point – and the snapback provisions of the JCPA went into effect on 18 OCT 2025. There have been attempts by the EU to avoid snapback through negotiations, but those, AFAIK, failed.

Which means effectively the ‘world order’ was reset to the 2012 CISADA sanctions regime network that Bush and Obama had built up to strangle Iran and was partially reimposed by Trump in 2018, now though with all the other prior signatories of the P5+1 like the EU forced to play along.

Sanctions regime, not to foot stomp it, included criminalization of any transport of oil to Iran.

Switch hemispheres and what happened tonight may begin to make sense. And why I’m not losing my mind over it. The tanker in question has a long track record of smuggling dating back at least to the Biden administration. It switches names faster than Hegseth switches Signal logins and has already been marked for smuggling oil and other contraband.

The claim being made is the oil in its hold now is destined for Iran, and that makes it a legitimate target for lawful seizure. There’s existing US law through CISADA (and perhaps later acts), the FBI issued a warrant, and the Coast Guard executed that warrant. Now, don’t get me wrong. This is Trump and a MAGA administration that can’t indict a ham sandwich, and if acting US District Attorney Halligan was the one running the grand jury, we may have a problem.

But this is kind of how we’re supposed to do things. With a US congressional act authorizing the President to undertake activities which are then executed with search warrants and seizures carried out by the very armed service, the Coast Guard, which is designed to conduct these kinds of operations. We detain the people, seize the ship, and let the courts and lawyers figure it out. Now, Trump is claiming he’s going to “seize” the oil might not pass muster, but it depends on the language of CISADA.

I’m far more concerned with the lethal strikes on the speedboats, absent any authorization of the use of military force (AUMF) from Congress, imminent threat, or even colorable justification on our own or international rules of armed conflict. And for a purpose which only a Stalinist could rationalize: reducing the importation of fentanyl in the US by destroying (alleged) cartel smugglers taking cocaine to Europe.

And to the extent there’s a larger operational and strategic concern about this all being a pretext for regime change in Venezuela, there are valid causes for concern there. If Trump continues his adventurism in foreign policy, he’s going to be the third President in as many decades to follow the neocon playbook of committing the US to an armed conflict it has no serious national security stake in, often on completely fabricated justifications. Bush in Iraq, Obama in Libya, and now Trump aiming for Venezuela. And the neocon mistake was not overestimating our conventional firepower and the ability, in the short term, to render a third-rate dictator’s army inert. It’s that the long game of the insurgency and civil wars that followed wouldn’t spiral out of control and destabilize entire regions. Bush’s Iraq invasion destabilized the Middle East. Obama’s intervention in Libya destabilized much of northern Africa and paved the way for the Syrian Civil War to explode even as he failed to account for AQ’s and ISIS’s influence in that war until too late. Trump’s now walking the same path.

But this seizure of the tanker, other than it being unusual for its size and scale of a vessel being seized, is (at least in all appearances of what we know tonight) far more within both international and US law than the attacks on the speedboats. CISADA and other European variants, after the snapback, are the laws of the seas, and a tanker smuggling oil into Iran at the end of 2025 would be as liable for interdiction or seizure under lawful criminal enforcement means as it would’ve been in 2012-2015 before JCPA went into effect.

As always, we may find out more tomorrow. But this appears to neither be the start of a Venezuelan invasion (which may still be coming) nor an escalation in the unlawful use of force (which is already way worse than this incident).