The Skipper
Notes on piracy, December 2025
Two helicopters. Ten Coast Guard. Ten Marines. Special operations forces. Fast ropes. Boots on deck. Weapons drawn.
The USS Gerald R. Ford, largest and most advanced aircraft carrier in the United States Navy, one hundred thousand tons of floating military infrastructure. Against a twenty-year-old tanker called the Skipper.
This is the asymmetry. This is always the asymmetry.
The ship left port on 2 December. Two million barrels of Merey heavy crude. Half destined for Cuba. An island already under sixty years of blockade, already being strangled, already being starved of fuel and medicine and machine parts by the most comprehensive sanctions regime in modern history.
The United States seized this oil on 10 December.
Trump announced it during an unrelated White House roundtable. The way you announce a sports result. The way you boast about a deal.
A reporter asked what would happen to the cargo.
“Well we keep it, I guess.”
I guess.
I guess we keep it.
I guess we just take it.
Attorney General Pam Bondi released video of the operation. Men fast-roping from helicopters onto the deck of a commercial vessel. Armed personnel moving through the superstructure. The footage distributed on social media like a trailer for an action film.
This is the spectacle. The operation transformed into content. The seizure packaged for domestic consumption. The violence made entertaining.
Bondi’s statement invoked the usual terms: “illicit oil shipping network,” “foreign terrorist organisations,” “sanctions enforcement.” The legal superstructure erected over the act of theft.
Because that is what this is. Theft.
Venezuela possesses the largest proven oil reserves on the planet. Three hundred and three billion barrels. More than Saudi Arabia. More than any other nation on earth.
This is the material reality that shapes everything else.
The United States does not care about Venezuelan democracy. The United States does not care about drug trafficking. Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president convicted of moving hundreds of tonnes of cocaine into America, on the same day he threatened military strikes against Venezuela for alleged narco-trafficking.
The United States cares about three hundred billion barrels of oil currently under the sovereign control of a government it does not control.
María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader now collecting her Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, has been pitching what she calls “a $1.7 trillion opportunity” to American investors. The privatisation of Venezuela’s oil, gas, and infrastructure.
Regime change as investment prospectus. Democracy as asset liquidation. Freedom as the freedom of Western capital to extract Venezuelan resources at Venezuelan expense.
This is what is being prepared.
Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “This shows that their whole cover story, that this is about interdicting drugs, is a big lie. This is just one more piece of evidence that this is really about regime change, by force.”
Even some of them cannot stomach it anymore. Even some of them have to say it out loud.
The Monroe Doctrine was announced in 1823. The Western Hemisphere as American sphere of influence. Latin America as backyard.
In 2013, then-Secretary of State John Kerry announced that “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.”
It was not over.
It was never over.
The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, released last week, formally revived the doctrine. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth: “The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighbourhood, and we will protect it.”
Protect it from whom? From the people who live there. From governments that attempt to direct their own resources toward their own populations. From any arrangement that does not serve American capital.
Since 1823, nearly four hundred American military interventions worldwide. A third of them in Latin America.
Guatemala, 1954. The CIA overthrows Jacobo Árbenz for the crime of land reform.
Chile, 1973. The CIA backs Pinochet’s coup against Salvador Allende. Thousands tortured. Thousands disappeared.
Nicaragua, throughout the 1980s. The Contras funded, trained, armed.
Honduras, 2009. A military coup against Manuel Zelaya, quietly endorsed by the Obama administration.
Bolivia, 2019. Evo Morales forced into exile after an election contested by the Organisation of American States. The OAS was wrong, as subsequent analysis demonstrated.
The pattern does not change. The justifications rotate. Communism, drugs, terrorism, democracy. But the pattern does not change.
The Skipper was previously known as the M/T Adisa. It was sanctioned in 2022 for alleged ties to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah.
Note the construction. Alleged ties. The allegation becomes the justification. The accusation substitutes for proof.
The United States has arrogated to itself the authority to determine which trade is licit and which is criminal. Which nations may buy and sell. Which ships may sail. The dollar standard enforced by carrier strike group.
Two million barrels of oil.
Half of it bound for Cuba. Fuel for an island already under siege.
This is not sanctions enforcement. This is the enforcement of starvation. The deliberate deprivation of resources to a civilian population as a mechanism of political coercion.
When Russia does this to Ukraine, it is a war crime.
When the United States does this to Cuba, it is policy.
The aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford cost thirteen billion dollars to build. Its strike group includes destroyers, cruisers, submarines. Fifteen thousand personnel.
Deployed against a tanker. Against a cargo of oil. Against the possibility that Cuba might have fuel and Venezuela might have revenue.
The overwhelming application of force to achieve objectives that have nothing to do with security and everything to do with control.
Maduro is a corrupt authoritarian. This is true. It is also irrelevant to the question of whether the United States has the right to seize another nation’s commercial vessels in international waters.
The framing that opposes “dictatorship” to “intervention” obscures the actual stakes. The United States does not intervene in Latin America to install democracies. It intervenes to install compliant governments. Sometimes those governments are democratic. Often they are not. What matters is compliance.
Pinochet was not a democrat. The Honduran coup regime was not a democrat. The juntas Washington backed throughout the Cold War were not democrats.
Democracy is the language. Control is the objective.
Trump: “Largest one ever seized, actually.”
The superlative. The boast. The childish need to have the biggest, the best, the most.
And beneath the boast, the confession. We are pirates now. We take what we want.
Pete Hegseth’s “double-tap” strikes on small boats in the Caribbean. Vessels destroyed, crews killed, on the suspicion of drug trafficking. No trial. No evidence presented. No due process.
The same administration. The same logic. The same collapse of law into force.
The Venezuelan government’s statement: “a shameless robbery and an act of international piracy.”
They are not wrong.
Strip away the legal language. Strip away the invocations of terrorism and sanctions and illicit networks. What remains is a warship taking a commercial vessel’s cargo by force.
This is what piracy is.
The difference between piracy and law enforcement is who writes the rules.
Three hundred billion barrels.
This is why.
There is no other reason. There has never been any other reason.
The oil beneath Venezuelan soil. The wealth that could transform a nation. The resources that the United States believes belong to it by right. By the right of the Monroe Doctrine, by the right of the carrier strike group, by the right of force.
“Well we keep it, I guess.”
This is the empire speaking plainly for once.
We take it because we can.
We keep it because who will stop us.
The helicopters. The fast ropes. The boots on the deck of the Skipper.
Ten thousand miles from home, the most powerful military force in human history descends on a rusting tanker to steal oil destined for a besieged island.
This is American foreign policy in December 2025.
This is what it has always been.
Two million barrels.
They took it.
They will keep it.
And they will do it again.