President Trump’s declaration Wednesday that the US seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela puts the country into unchartered waters, some Massachusetts lawmakers and international relations experts said.
In a mix of social media posts and interviews, they expressed shock, disapproval and uncertainty for what could come next.
“Trump is stepping on the slippery slope to war with Venezuela,” US Senator Edward J. Markey wrote on X.
Markey, a Democrat who has been a vocal critic of the Trump administration’s aggression against Venezuela, called Wednesday’s move “dangerous, illegal, and unconstitutional. Republicans in Congress are banging the war drums. We must stop this madness before it’s too late.”
Boston University global studies professor Jorge Heine said the move puts the US “very much in unchartered waters.”
The seizure marks an escalation in Trump’s campaign against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, who has been charged with narcoterrorism in the US.
Heine, a former Chilean ambassador to China, India and South Africa, views the seizure as the Trump administration “upping the ante” because previous attempts to pressure for regime change in Venezuela have been ineffective.
Since September, Trump has authorized strikes on vessels suspected of transporting drugs to the US. Last month, Trump closed airspace above Venezuela, according to media reports.
But the tanker’s seizure is unusual and dangerous, experts said.
“My sense is that the Trump administration finds itself at a bit of a loss,” Heine said. “The approach of sinking ships and killing alleged drug smugglers… it hasn’t produced the expected effects. The regime still stands. So they’re upping the ante.”
Trump’s stated reason for the increasing pressure campaign against Venezuela is that it exports a significant amount of illegal drugs—predominantly cocaine—into the US, and that Maduro is the drug trade’s effective leader, according to media reports.
Representative Jake Auchincloss of Newton made that point in a series of interviews last week on CNN. He denounced the campaign as a drug interdiction effort, citing his military experience leading a counter-narcotics mission in Central America.
“I know what drug interdiction looks like,” he said.
The “deeper reality” of Trump’s campaign was “a blood for oil version 2.0… Venezuela has the biggest oil reserves in the world, and the President’s oil friends want their hands on it," Auchincloss said.
Luis Jimenez, a political science professor at UMass Boston who specializes in Latin American politics said Wednesday’s oil tank seizure is an “opening salvo” to increased pressure on Maduro, but not one big enough to cause an immediate panic.
“I think they’re trying to send a signal,” Jimenez said in an interview. “They’re putting the pressure on Maduro…but this is way too low cost.”
According to Jimenez, the real threat to national security would come if a civil war were to break out, which could result in increased criminal gang activity in Venezuela.
“If Maduro is removed, and then this leads to having a civil war or some other loss of authority in the country, it creates chaos right in the middle of South America, which then can expand to other issues,” he said.
Jimenez believes the Trump administration wants to see how Maduro will respond to a “test” of a smaller-scale, but the administration is not thinking of what comes next.
“Getting oil tankers is probably not going to change much because Venezuela is not powerful enough to do anything in response,” he said. “If he [Trump] wants to remove Maduro, he has to do way more than that. There has to be a plan for the day after…it’s just going to be chaos.”
Camille Bugayong can be reached at camille.bugayong@globe.com. Rita Chandler can be reached at rita.chandler@globe.com.