It's ok because the US can do whatever they want.

Make up your mind Donnie. Is this about the usual bullshit narco-terrorism script, or is it about the truth: oil, minerals, and the imperial coping reflex?

Because when a U.S. president says “they took all of our oil and we want it back,” the mask slips completely. This is no longer even dressed up as counter-narcotics or humanitarian concern. This is a naked assertion of entitlement over another nation’s sovereign resources, enforced not by law, not by diplomacy, but by the threat of siege.

A “total and complete blockade” is not sanctions. It is not pressure. It is not rhetoric. Under international law, it is an act of war. Blockades mean interception. Boarding. Seizure. Force. They are siege warfare with bad branding, and history is brutally consistent about where they lead: miscalculation, escalation, and conflicts no one controls once the first line is crossed.

So which is it? Are we meant to believe this is about fighting drugs... or about staging a Grenada-style flex to signal dominance after something far more consequential, the empire’s humiliation in Ukraine, where sanctions failed, deterrence failed, and the illusion of unipolar supremacy fully cracked? Grenada wasn’t about security either. It was about optics, a small, theatrical war meant to restore the image of control after strategic embarrassment in Beirut. This feels like the same instinct resurfacing, only in a world far less forgiving.

You branded yourself as the peace president. The dealmaker. The man who would end wars, not invent new ones. Yet this move reeks of the very globalist muscle-memory you once claimed to oppose, extra-jurisdictional coercion, resource claims by decree, and maritime threats issued as policy theater. This is not restraint. It’s reflex. And reflex is how quagmires begin.

And let’s dispense with the oil company fairy tale. U.S. firms were never innocent bystanders. Chevron has continued to refine Venezuelan crude for the U.S. market under special licenses, even amid sanctions, while CITGO — Venezuela’s U.S.-based refining arm — was seized through U.S. courts to compensate American corporations for old disputes. Venezuelan oil has never stopped flowing to American refineries; what changed was who controlled it and on whose terms. Calling this “theft” is not economics or law, it’s grievance politics dressed up as entitlement for actual theft..

And yes, quagmire awaits. Not because Venezuela is strong, but because the world has changed. The Global South is watching. Energy producers are watching. Shipping nations are watching. They are drawing the obvious conclusion, that if oil can be “reclaimed” today, any asset can be seized tomorrow. That’s why parallel trade routes, parallel finance, and parallel security structures aren’t ideological projects, they’re survival mechanisms.

This isn’t about Venezuela alone. Venezuela is the stage. The target is precedent. Once blockades and confiscation are normalized, what's left of the “rules-based order” is exposed for what it always was: rules for temporary friends, force for those who resist.

And no, quagmire isn’t one of Hegseth’s drinking buddies. It’s what happens when imperial theatrics collide with a multipolar reality that no longer freezes when Washington shouts.

History has seen this movie before, when empires confuse intimidation for authority, and optics for power. It never ends the way the empire imagines.