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Dec. 17, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
29:53
Gunboat Diplomacy Trump Declares Full Naval Blockade Of Venezuela

In a rambling social media post last night, President Trump declared that US military vessels off the Venezuelan coast would enforce a full naval blockade of the country until "our land and our oil" are returned to the US. Will the US attack Russian or Chinese ships who do not recognize the blockade?

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Time Text
Trump's Venezuela Blockade 00:07:58
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Doing well.
Doing well.
We have a couple problems left.
We always seem to have a problem or two that we can at least discuss.
And I want to start off with Venezuela.
You know, it's in the news.
I imagine you've noticed that.
Absolutely.
Venezuela is in the news, and Trump is in his news too.
And he wants to, you know, take care of these problems down there.
So the headline in Zero Hedge today is: Trump orders full blockade of sanctioned oil tankers off terrorist Venezuela.
Oh, well, they're terrorists.
Well, that's the reaction.
Maybe a lot of American people will want to stop the terrorists.
Terrorists may come to this country.
Oh, no, they're already sending them.
All our crimes are created by people sent in, which is a problem.
I don't want to belittle that because that is a mess.
But I think the criminal problem that this country originally was intended to be a state matter and local matter and a Second Amendment matter, taking care of people who are going around and causing a lot of trouble.
But this was an announcement yesterday.
It was a big deal.
And Trump said that we're going to really crack down on all this oil going in and out to penalize Venezuela.
And all I could think of on this horrendous blockade and trying to further injure everything that's going on in Venezuela is that when the United States stopped the oil going into Japan prior to World War II, guess what?
Did the Japanese back down and say, hey, we better buckle down because they're a powerful nation.
No, we started probably one of the worst, of course, there's always competition for it.
But that didn't work at all.
And that's why eventually, and I think we'll come across one of these articles, mentions how many ships and boats that we have confiscated or put into 18 or something like that.
They said, this is a big deal.
This is like start, you know, in one part of the world, we helped finance starvation.
And now we're in this part of the world, when you deny all oil and tell them, well, you're okay, just buy windmills from us.
We'll take care of you.
Something stupid like that.
So anyway, they've done this and the sanctions.
And as usual, that's not the best road to diplomacy.
I think it's getting out of control.
I think the administration ought to take a close look at this.
And I think the American people ultimately are the ones who have to look at it.
It's the people, the American people, who allow this to happen, this type of a foreign policy.
So wars sometimes very often get started by neglect.
They end when the American people get sick and tired of the tragedy of war and the money being spent.
And so this is just the wretcheding up again of this conflict that we have with Venezuela.
And hardly would an individual who believed of a non-interventionist foreign policy would endorse what's going on down there.
Well, this is an administration that campaigned on no new wars, ending the old wars.
Now he claims to have ended, what, 18 wars.
I don't remember how many.
They all have fallen back apart because they weren't ending wars.
Cambodia and Thailand are now shooting at each other again.
There was never any peace in Gaza.
People are getting killed every day by the Israelis there.
It's a fantasy.
It's a fantasy world that if you invent a term for something, it becomes that thing.
You know, if you invent that this is now peace, they're now at peace, then they're at peace.
If you invent a term called narco-terrorist, that means you can kill whoever you want.
And Trump is getting more and more frustrated because the bluster doesn't work.
The intimidation of Venezuela by putting these war vessels off its coast hasn't worked.
Maduro didn't flee for his life.
And so now he takes it up a notch.
And I think people have noticed if you go on X and you see the reaction to his social media posts that they do seem more and more unhinged.
And this one is no exception.
And I will read most of it in a second.
But go to that first clip.
This is what we're talking about.
This is a good write-up of it, by the way.
Last night is when this came out.
Dr. Paul, I emailed you immediately and I said Trump has lost his mind.
Go to that next clip.
This is what Trump wrote.
This is the President of the United States.
And this is what he wrote.
Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest armada ever assembled in the history of South America.
It will only get bigger.
And the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before until such a time as they return to the United States of America all of the oil, land, and other assets that they previously stole from us.
The illegitimate Maduro regime is using oil from these stolen oil fields to finance themselves, drug terrorism, human hijack trafficking, murder, and kidnapping for the theft of our assets and many other reasons, including terrorism, drug smuggling, and human trafficking, et cetera, et cetera.
I've designated them a foreign terrorist organization.
Therefore, today I'm offering, ordering a total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil takers going into and out of Venezuela.
The illegal aliens and criminals that the Mizuro regime has sent into the U.S. during the week and inept Biden administration are being returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace, etc., etc.
Okay, this is the point.
So, a couple of things happening here.
First of all, they're being returned to Venezuela.
That means Venezuela is accepting these people back.
So, that's one thing.
But the other one is the fact that all of the other terms that he's given, Dr. Paul, don't work.
So, they're sitting around.
You can imagine them sitting around in the Oval Office.
The American people are against this war.
All of the stuff that we're talking about is not moving the numbers of opinion.
We got to come up with something else.
So, just one final thing.
So, who do you go to?
Your resident neocon, rabid war hawk, Stephen Miller.
He comes up with an idea.
They stole our stuff.
We got to get it back.
Stephen Miller says: American sweat, ingenuity, and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela.
Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property.
These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries, and drugs.
So, what it is, Dr. Paul, is a desperation for something that will stick.
And this is what they've landed upon.
They stole our oil and our land.
Well, it happens to be in Venezuela, but we're going to get it back.
So, that's the new thing.
You know, sometimes it's hard to figure out what they're trying to do.
But how many countries have we gone into, whether it's Syria, the Middle East, or wherever, When there's always a little bit of natural resources, especially oil.
They Stole Our Oil 00:03:23
And how about the Middle East war?
Remember that it wouldn't cost us a nickel.
We're going to get that oil and use it.
It'll be our oil.
And I think it's utterly amazing that now they've turned this around.
All this oil that we have either destroyed or confiscated and took, and they've turned it around and say they stole it from us.
You know, we should we the Venezuelans stole their own oil and all these people that we've stole.
Oh, yes, but they're terrorists.
You have to understand this.
You know, I thought they'd wear out that term a while ago, and I believe they used that term with the Middle Eastern wars.
And just call them a terrorist.
And there's no defense against it.
You know, they don't expect them to be.
But terrorism, you know, someday somebody ought to define it on what has been, how it's been abused, how the word has been abused and used as a justification for doing things like this and talking about sanctions like this.
But it'll be interesting to see a poll maybe tomorrow, the next, maybe the vote tomorrow might have something to do as a reflection of this type of activity.
But I think the American people are ready to wake up.
What I'm impressed with is the American people have gone through the boom boss eras and inflation and wars and all this.
But it seems like the atmosphere is different than it's been before and that the people sense that this is serious.
They went through the 70s and there was a lot of complaining about the high inflation.
The so-called price inflation was worse in the 70s.
But this, the people seem to be very, very unnerved by this.
And I think that they're going to be willing to change their attitude.
I see they usually go through a cycle, neglect, let the war start, get the finances, respond to the military-industrial complex.
Too many people die.
The prices are going up.
And then the American people finally, you know, put their foot down and say, not enough is enough.
And in Vietnam, well, we're going to declare victory.
Then we'll leave.
Then we'll come home.
Well, the more they tried or claimed they were doing it, the worse the problems got.
So we had to surrender and leave.
And Johnson said he'd never do it, but he ended up doing it because we lost the war.
And we lost our reputation for really truly wanting peace in the world and working for peace because this is not going to be working for peace.
Well, this is an interesting development, though, this idea that Venezuela stole our oil and our land, et cetera.
Because yes, American corporations, American private companies, at least I think we still have private property, American private property companies did invest and did get involved in Venezuelan oil.
And there was a nationalization, I think, by Hugo Chavez of the oil industry.
Venezuela's Oil Controversy 00:13:05
I'm not up to speed on all of the legal implications, but there was adjudication.
They took them to court.
As you would do, they felt they were wrong.
The American companies.
I don't know the details of the contracts, but that certainly wasn't the U.S. government involved.
These were private companies, supposedly.
But I see a parallel here, and it's a parallel that I would advise caution because this happened before.
We've seen the movie before in 1953 when Mossadegh decided to nationalize Iran's oil industry.
What happened?
Well, the UK talked the CIA into overthrowing the Mossadegh government and putting in our own puppet, which lasted for a few years until 1979.
We're seeing that parallel now in Venezuela, where they've come up with this new rationale.
We're going to get our oil that they stole back because they nationalized it.
We're going to overthrow Maduro and put in this clown, Machada, this puppet, Machada, to run things.
And you're going to get a reaction because it always happens.
You just said it a second ago, Dr. Paul.
You always will have a reaction.
That would be a reaction to this clown Machada.
She's going to be very vicious and brutal.
She'll be overthrown.
And while we probably won't get an Islamic government in Venezuela, something will happen that will be even more anti-American than previously.
You know, the American people, I was mentioning, when they wake up and they've had enough 10, 20, 30 years in war, they put their foot down and war's come to an end.
There's been so much tragedy that they finally cave in on this.
But that's sort of what happens on currency.
You know, if you can have the World Reserve currency, that means you have a license to steal.
You can print to never-ending printing until the people get sick and tired of it.
And they're at that point right now.
But I think what, you know, when you look at what they're doing to Venezuela, even with their many shortcomings, and they continue, but how many countries don't have some shortcomings?
And they are, you know, doing this for the fact that the people that see these ships coming in, well, they're ganging up on us on the currency business.
They're getting together.
And I think that's one of the reasons why people are seeing a monetary reform and why gold is going up, one of the contributing factors.
But I think they'll do this in foreign policy too.
When you look at it, all those ships that we've been messing around with, I mean, they're probably not organized for it.
And we have some big bombs.
So it is true, intimidation is a serious problem because even if they had enough of this, but I can just imagine somebody one of these days is going to be sick and tired of being pushed around like this.
And how about maybe end up blowing up a couple of these ships?
And just be, I mean, they've taken on our dollar.
So I wouldn't be shocked if they get together and start sabotaging a lot more activity than they're doing now.
Well, one of the things we often talk about on this show is what a mistake Trump has made by once again bringing in neocons into his administration.
And there's, I think, a lot of proof.
There's a lot of certainly strong evidence that this whole disastrous policy toward Venezuela is Marco Rubio's baby.
This is his one chance.
He's in a position now where he can make this happen.
And Trump's not in a position to push back.
He's never been able to push back against neocons.
And I will offer this as evidence that this is Marco's baby.
Go to that next clip.
This is buried in the Hedge article, but I think this little mini paragraph is extremely important to understand, to understanding what's going on.
President Trump's gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean off Venezuela's coast has the effect of a maritime blockade, disrupting oil flows to Cuba and to global markets via shadow fleet tankers.
The Trump administration calculates that choking off this oil trade could trigger cascading economic stress, first in Cuba and then as Venezuela, ultimately accelerating the end goal of regime change in Caracas.
So Marco Rubio is going for broke.
He's going for two for one.
We're going to cut Cuba off and make life miserable for the average Cuban.
And we're going to cut off Venezuela and make life more miserable for the average Venezuelan in the hope that the people will rise up and overthrow their government.
We've seen this movie 800 times before, and it never works.
They never rise up and overthrow their leaders and put in the people that we want.
All they do is become more and more miserable and resentful toward the U.S.
But this is Marco Rubio.
You know, this is escalating and dangerously so.
And when I think back to the 60s, you know, when an administration would be changing over, they might say that, oh, we were elected to stop the war, but they do exactly the opposite.
They put more sanctions on there.
And to the point where it's unreal, you know, how much goes on.
And the point I want to make is that the people who impose these, the Rubios of the world, they never seem to be discouraged.
Sometimes they say, well, this proves our point.
I mean, look how bad they are stealing our oil.
So we got to really hit them hard.
And this is what you would also call corporatism.
These oil companies get involved.
They know there's risk when they invest in a country like Venezuela that may not be politically stable.
They know there's risk.
So why are they able to socialize their risk, socialize their losses on our backs when they certainly don't share their profits with us when they're able to unearth the oil from Venezuela?
I wanted to just do a quick one.
This, I think, is a great comment.
This sort of steps back.
It looks at the broader picture of what this means.
The Islander is an account I highly recommend on X to follow.
Very insightful, very, very good prose.
We do publish some of their work at the Ron Paul Institute.
But this is a good little summary.
A total and complete blockade is not sanctions.
It's not pressure.
It's not rhetoric.
Under international law, it is an act of war.
When a U.S. president publicly declares a naval blockade by social media decree, boasting of armadas and asserting entitlement to another nation's oil, minerals, and land, this is not strength on display.
It is madness, pure and unvarnished, masquerading as manifest authority.
Blockades are not metaphors.
They are violence waiting for a trigger.
They must be enforced.
Enforcement means interception, boarding, seizure, or gunfire.
It means captains who hesitate, ships that refuse to stop, moments where a single miscalculation turns doctrine into disaster.
History offers no comfort here.
Once a blockade is declared, a state either escalates or humiliates itself.
There is no stable middle ground, only collision.
And I don't think he's understating the point or overstating the point in any stretch of the imagination.
This is a serious, serious act of war, a move that the president has made that will have serious implications unless he backs down.
Well, you know, the policy that we're running, it does have the effect that they want, but it never seems to work.
And that is the people that we put sanctions on and blockades and all, they suffer from it, but they don't crawl a corner and forget about us.
They build up their anger.
The problems get much worse.
And, you know, I think, matter of fact, I've even brought in the criticism of interference with markets, tariffs and sanctions.
I don't think they're too many steps away from blockades.
It's token.
It's smaller.
There's no doubt about it.
But it's the same principle.
What about when they have these big vessels coming in?
And there were several that because of the resistance, they just turned around and had to go out.
There has to be some, well, there's the humiliation that they had to do it.
But what about the cost of it?
You know, just the time and the money involved.
It's no easy thing.
But instead of saying, you know, they have to recognize that we ought to be careful of how these people are suffering from this.
But no, I think the Rubios are saying that's exactly what we want.
We want them to hurt.
And so all this stuff that we see as a negative advancing the evil and the fighting and the warmongering is actually what they're looking for because then they can use bigger bombs and get away with it.
They can do that and figure the people will be with it.
So I still go back.
The American people have to know what's going on and they have to someday wake up and try to stop these wars rather than waiting until they get so bad that they can get a consensus and finally get somebody in to do it.
You know, I think there was some hope that this administration would be that administration that would back off in so many places where we could back off.
But it doesn't seem like that's going to happen.
Not right now.
But not only do they want these other people and these civilians in these countries to hurt, they don't care that we're hurt.
Obviously, disrupting the world trade in oil is going to raise oil prices.
You know, we have an oil glut right now.
If you notice at the pump, the prices are down.
This will raise the cost to Americans of pretty much everything because everything travels by truck, et cetera, et cetera, including us.
So it will raise our costs, just like Trump's tariffs raised the costs on all these goods, all these items.
They were taxes on the American people.
They just don't care about us either.
It's not only that they want other people to hurt, they don't care that Americans are hurting either.
And I think Americans are going to react to that.
Sometimes one has to wonder what really motivates them because it seems so apparent what's going on and this stuff has backfired.
And they reconcile this with the guidance that we were supposed to have gained from our Constitution to try to avoid these kind of things.
But it doesn't seem like they have any loss of sleep over these policies.
But how about the families that suffer from it?
And what about now?
People are waking up because the people are suffering from the secondary effect of the inflation and the economy.
People are starting to hurt.
And I think it's just beginning.
And that means that people are going to get very, very angry.
And then there will be the argument will be continued and made worse.
And that is some people seem to be benefiting from this.
And somebody might come along and say, oh, well, the people who are making the bombs, they're still doing pretty well.
Maybe we should change our policies.
Well, here's a wrinkle in this whole new revelation on the part of the administration.
Aha, now we finally found the causes, Belli, because 20 years ago, they took our land and our oil and our minerals.
Here's a wrinkle in this whole thing.
Now, if you go to that, skip the clip and go to the one with the map on it.
And this is a wrinkle, Dr. Paul, because as DD Geopolitics pointed out in a post, Russian shadow tanker Hyperion has just entered the Caribbean waters, departing from the UMBA offshore terminal in Murmansk toward Jose Terminal, Venezuela.
The vessel is under U.S. sanctions.
So the Russians are sailing a tanker toward Venezuela, and Trump has announced a total embargo of any tankers from getting to Venezuela.
I know I don't think that the Russian government is going to necessarily provoke an attack by the U.S.
But what happens if the U.S. demands to board this Russian flag carrier and they say no and they fire on it?
Economies Distorted By Sanctions 00:02:56
This could get pretty nasty pretty quickly.
Yeah, and I think we're in the middle of that escalation that's been going on, and there will be a cost.
And unless we try to understand better, you know, the whole situation and why people are motivated to have policies like this.
And Rubio might have some personal things that interfere with him using a little bit of reservation on this aggressiveness.
But it is such a shame and disappointment that we have to do this.
And yet, the rules, the rules that they could follow seem so to me to be so superior and it'd be so useful.
And that is to get along with people, you have to develop and understand and use the principle of cooperation, you know, agreements.
You know, both sides have to agree to on land and everything else.
But no, it is really bad.
But I guess they have fought over land and everything else for a long, long time.
And we did in this country have tremendous benefits given to us, but many of us now see so much of that dwindling away.
At the same time, though, I still remain optimistic in the sense that there's a lot of people that we know that understands economics a lot better now than they did 100 years ago or so.
And I think that we just need a more effort on this and that we have to decide whether or not we're going to depend on our universities to shift gears and teach different economics.
And I would say we should just get the government out of education and we'd be better off.
The problem is that diplomacy is dead in America.
Diplomacy is where you find a compromise so that you can avoid war.
Because for everyone except the military-industrial complex, war is very, very costly.
It's costly in lives.
It destroys economies.
It distorts economies.
It distorts national priorities.
So the idea is you find some sort of diplomacy that will save face, maybe if that's what you're interested in, but will be able to de-escalate in a mutually beneficial way.
Unfortunately, the neocons do not have the word diplomacy in their lexicon, in their dictionary.
It doesn't exist.
So whereas President Trump could still back out of this and save face, the neocons are determined to back him further into a corner so he has no wiggle room and he doesn't recognize that the people who are shackling his hands and feet are not called Maduro.
They're called Marco Rubio.
And he's not able to see that.
But there is a way out of this.
You can back down.
I'm sure that the Venezuelans would like to have something that would avoid a war that would back down, but they're just not capable of it right now.
Congress And Foreign Aid 00:02:28
So you're right.
We'll see what happens, but this is not going in the right direction, I think.
Right.
So I'm going to close out.
Our half an hour is done.
We've put in our best effort to try to talk about this very important piece of breaking news.
As Dr. Paul mentioned, there will be a vote on a war powers resolution tomorrow, reminding the president that he has zero authority to do what he's doing.
Congress, or a few people in Congress at least, are trying to make an effort to assert themselves according to our Constitution, not only their rights, but their obligations as the people's house.
And so, of course, if you're inclined to do so, you might want to recommend to your member that they vote in favor of this, in favor of our Constitution.
But in the meantime, I will thank you for joining us today and hopefully enlightening you a little bit about some of these things.
Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
I want to close by just mentioning another article that I saw this morning in the paper, and this comes from Responsible Statescraft.
And it has a title that caught my attention as a new survey shows that GOP base is tired of funding Israeli weapons.
And that doesn't surprise me.
We've heard it, but more so now than it was, you know, 20 years ago, because it's been traditional not to even question it.
And my answer to this is: since I'm not for sending any money there to make sure that people wouldn't think that we're picking and choosing our friends and to whom we should send the money, you know, the principle I try to defend, and a lot of Americans agree, why are we giving this stuff away anyway?
Why do we have foreign aid?
And then you don't have to be accused of being discriminatory.
Oh, you're denying weapons to this group, or you're giving it to the other group.
Why don't we just save the money and let the American people decide how it should be spent?
I'd even let people, you know, be involved.
If they would like what's happening in some country and there's a squabble going on, let them go.
Let them engage themselves on that.
But to tax people and to perpetuate this, I think it's totally unnecessary.
And the solution is not to pick and choose who gets our money.
It's just to say, look, foreign aid is not a help to us and it's a danger to us for various reasons.
I want to thank everybody today for tuning into the Liberty Report.
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