United States President Donald Trump said on Monday (Tuesday AEDT) that the United States will keep crude oil and tankers seized near Venezuela, as he steps up pressure on President Nicolas Maduro and signals a tougher U.S. stance in the Caribbean.
“We’re going to keep it,” Trump told reporters in Palm Beach, Florida, after unveiling a new class of battleships, named after himself.
“Maybe we’ll sell it, maybe we’ll keep it, maybe we’ll use it in the strategic reserve,” Trump said of the seized oil. “We’re keeping the ships also.”
Trump has ordered a blockade of sanctioned oil tankers entering or leaving Venezuela as part of an escalating campaign against the Maduro government.
The U.S. seized a large tanker on 10 December carrying more than one million barrels of oil, according to energy consulting firm Kpler.
A second vessel was intercepted over the weekend, and Trump confirmed that U.S. authorities are pursuing a third tanker.
“It’s moving along. We’ll end up getting it,” Trump said of the tanker. “It came from the wrong location. It came out of Venezuela, and it was sanctioned.”
Asked whether his ultimate aim was to remove Maduro from power, Trump said “it would be smart” for the Venezuelan president to step down.
Venezuela, a founding member of OPEC, holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves. The country is exporting about 749,000 barrels per day this year, with more than half of those shipments going to China, according to Kpler data.
The U.S. has also carried out a significant military build-up in the Caribbean. The Trump administration has launched deadly strikes on vessels it says were trafficking drugs to the United States, although the legality of those operations has been disputed and scrutinised by Congress.
Trump on Monday warned that the campaign could be expanded to land-based targets.
“We’ll be starting the same program on land,” he said. “If they want to come by land, they’re going to end up having a big problem. They’re going to get blown to pieces, because we don’t want our people poisoned.”
Meanwhile, Trump also unveiled plans for a new, large warship that he described as a “battleship”, part of a broader vision to create what he called a “Golden Fleet”.
“They’ll be the fastest, the biggest, and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” Trump said during the announcement at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
According to Trump, the first vessel, to be named the USS Defiant, would be longer and larger than the World War II-era Iowa-class battleships and equipped with hypersonic missiles, nuclear cruise missiles, rail guns and high-powered lasers; technologies that are at varying stages of development within the U.S. Navy.
Both Trump and Navy Secretary John Phelan described the proposed Trump-class warship as a modern successor to the battleships of the 20th century.
Historically, the term referred to heavily armoured ships armed with massive guns designed to engage enemy vessels or bombard targets ashore.
Battleships reached their peak during World War II, with the largest U.S. vessels, the Iowa-class, displacing roughly 60,000 tonnes.
Their role declined rapidly in the post-war period as aircraft carriers and long-range missiles became central to naval warfare.
Although the U.S. Navy modernised four Iowa-class battleships in the 1980s, all were decommissioned by the 1990s.
According to a newly launched “Golden Fleet” website, the proposed guided missile battleship would be roughly the same size as an Iowa-class ship but weigh about half as much, at around 35,000 tonnes, and operate with significantly smaller crews of between 650 and 850 sailors.
