The seizure of a Venezuelan oil tanker by US President Donald Trump’s administration and the accompanying threats of ground attacks, are ominous signs of a return to a dark era of the Caribbean and Latin America thought long behind us.
This latest act of intimidation and outright piracy revives the heavy hand of the United States’ late 19th- and early 20th-century foreign policy, the age of gunboat diplomacy, military occupations, and the casual violation of sovereignty in the name of hemispheric “stability.”
This escalation bears chilling resemblance to the early 20th century’s Caribbean interventions, when Marines landed in Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic under the flimsy banner of protecting US interests. Then as now, high-minded talk of “security” masked simpler motives: the control of trade routes, natural resources (this time, oil and gas in the world’s largest reserve), and regime change.
Today, that same impulse is repackaged in the rhetoric of combating “rogue states” and “narco-dictatorships”. Seizing an oil tanker is merely the latest phase in what increasingly resembles a de facto blockade — one that mirrors the long, punishing embargo imposed on Cuba. Both are acts of coercion rather than diplomacy, driven by political theatre rather than principle.
What we discern as a Trump Doctrine now takes brazen shape in the recent US national strategic plan: a bully’s charter masquerading as statecraft. It scorns multilateralism for the raw calculus of transactional power plays: America as global enforcer, not partner; submission extracted through sanctions, sabre-rattling, and spectacular displays of force against peaceful, if troubled nations. Gone are the fig leaves of democracy promotion or human rights; this is naked imperial entitlement, a 21st-century resurrection of gunboat thuggery that treats the Global South as a playground for American whims. Manifest Destiny has finally been stripped of its pious veneer; it demands that sovereign states bend the knee to American interests or be crushed.
These actions reveal the endurance of a deeper American myth: Manifest Destiny reborn in strategic planning documents as “hemispheric security” or “Western alignment.” The names change, but the assumption remains that the United States possesses the sole right to dictate the future of its southern neighbours. It is a view steeped in its original 19th-century arrogance, unfit for an era that aspires to regional fairness, partnership, and multilateral rule of law.
Speaking of multilateral rule of law, what makes the current episode more disturbing is its threadbare legal pretext. The blowing up of Venezuelan and Colombian fishing boats, purportedly tied to narcotics trafficking but absent of any verified interdictions or judicial process, stretch the logic of unilateral policing into the realm of brazen piracy.
Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) — which was opened for signature in Jamaica in 1982 and came into force in 1994 with its ratification by Guyana as the 60th state — blowing up and seizing vessels has no standing. The irony is sharp: the very framework of modern maritime law, shaped by small Caribbean states in pursuit of fairness and equity on the high seas, is now being flouted by a major power that once claimed to champion international order.
CARICOM must speak with one voice in unambiguous protest. Today it is Venezuela under blockade; tomorrow, perhaps, some island state that chooses a path independent of Washington’s design. We in the Caribbean have fought too long and hard to defeat colonialism and secure our sovereignty to now accept a restoration of imperial habits disguised as policy.
To condone these acts — or worse, to remain silent — is to invite the erosion of the very norms that protect small nations everywhere. It is not 21st-century diplomacy, or indeed is it basic civilised conduct of international relations. It is a regression to an age of might over right. The Law of the Sea, born in Kingston, answered such hubris in 1982: that even the smallest nations can craft a just order for the oceans that bind us. We fear our lives and safety will depend directly upon our insistence that this order be respected.
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