US Media Rushes to Manufacture Legal Legitimacy for Trump’s Venezuela Oil Tanker Piracy

Venezuela oil exports are not “black market” and US sanctions are not “international sanctions.” Why does our media keep saying otherwise?

As Trump ramps up his belligerence against Venezuela, murders scores of Venezuelans in cold blood, parks the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, six destroyers, 75 aircraft and 33 amphibious assault ships right off their coast, orders the CIA to depose Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro , and makes clear he is seeking regime change, American media is predictably falling in line. Press outlets are helping not only soft pedal Trump’s brazen war-mongering but are, increasingly, providing ad hoc international legal legitimacy to Trump’s clearly illegal, unprovoked attacks and potential invasion of Venezuela.

In his latest escalation, Trump “seized” a Venezuelan oil tanker in international waters claiming it was violating US sanctions. Right on cue, The New York Times, among others, rushed to lend credence and faux legal legitimacy to this unilateral act of piracy. Here’s how Times reporters Nicholas Nehamas, Tyler Pager, Farnaz Fassihi, and Alan Rappeport described the hijacking of another country’s ship in international waters in their December 11 report:

The use of U.S. military and law enforcement forces to seize a foreign oil tanker on the high seas is unusual. But the Skipper had been on the radar of the U.S. government for several years, as part of a so-called ghost fleet that smuggles black market oil around the world. Venezuela and Iran have each made extensive use of such ships to smuggle oil and evade international sanctions.

There are two significant lies in this paragraph. First off, the Venezuelan oil in question was not “black market” oil and, relatedly, Venezuelan oil is not subject to “international sanctions.” It is only subject to US sanctions and US secondary sanctions, which are sanctions the US imposes on countries that trade in Venezuelan oil but are not, themselves, sanctions on Venezuela from the countries themselves. Venezuelan oil exports are only “black market” to one out of the 193 UN member states: the United States. To be clear, other countries other than the US, namely EU countries, have imposed light sanctions on specific Venezuelan officials but not oil exports. The only country that has done this is the United States.

I reached out to Times reporters Nicholas Nehamas and Farnaz Fassih asking them if they could cite which specific “international sanctions” Venezuela is violating by shipping its oil to other countries. If they return my request for comment, I will update accordingly.

CNN would also spread this critical misinformation, writing in its December 12 report that “Venezuela is home to the planet’s single-largest known mass of crude oil, but international sanctions and a deep economic crisis have crippled the country’s oil industry.” But, again, Venezuela’s oil industry is not under international sanctions, just US ones. ABC News would join in playing the role of imperial hall monitor, writing, “An ABC News analysis of satellite imagery and tracking data shows the oil tanker seized by the U.S. off the coast of Venezuela may have manipulated its location data — an apparent attempt, experts said, to circumvent restrictions imposed by sanctions.”

While technically true (unlike what CNN and the New York Times wrote), it is misleading in that, like almost every other major report on the tanker hijacking, it heavily implies Venezuela was doing something illegal or shady by exporting its own oil while taking measures to avoid US resource theft. ABC News, like dozens of outlets before it, simply assumes the role of US government sanctions cop without mentioning that Venezuela is under no legal or moral obligation to follow US law. It is only under legal or moral obligation to follow Venezuelan and international law—neither of which it is violating.

Why is this subtle ideological work so pernicious? Because what CNN, ABC News, and The New York Times are doing, with varying degrees of implicit and explicit deceit, is rushing to create the vague whiff of international legitimacy to what Trump is doing—for which there is none. Venezuela is not violating any international law, so one is simply being heavily implied or outright fabricated. Trump stealing their oil tanker is just Might Makes Right bullying without any legal or international basis.

This posture is a common trope in Western media, which often plays the role of US government sanctions enforcer, writing breathless “investigations” about the various ways Official Bad Guy countries “evade” US sanctions without ever noting that it is indeed quite unusual for countries to follow laws of other countries. In February 2024, the New York Times dedicated four reporters and 3,000 words to “reveal how lax government oversight allowed shadowy oil tankers, covered by American insurance, to fund Iran’s regime.” At no point in their deep investigation, which reads like a US State Department memo, did they ever mention that Iran, like Venezuela, is under no moral or legal obligation to follow US law, just as the US is under no moral or legal obligation to follow Venezuelan law or Iranian law, or Azerbaijani law or Serbian law. Indeed, this is what international law is supposed to be for, but the US almost entirely abandoned the concept, refusing to join the International Criminal Court (and has recently imposed sanctions on it for its indictment of Israeli officials). The US has also refused to join major international legal arrangements like the ban on cluster munitions, Mine Ban Treaty, Arms Trade Treaty, Law of the Sea Treaty, Kyoto Protocol, Convention on Biological Diversity, Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and many others.

Absent this desire to join the international community, the US has—through sheer power and assertion, and with the US media’s dutiful help—simply made up an ad hoc “international law” as a foggy PR veneer based entirely on the say-so of US officials.

But isn’t Venezuela a Baddie country? one may ask. Even if one accepts this premise this does not confer any legal or moral right for the US to steal their oil. Indeed, if international bodies or large cohorts of countries sanctioned oil exporters because of oil exporters’ lack of democracy then we would have no global oil markets.

But for Times editors and reporters, these bigger questions are not worth interrogating. Who gets to make these ad hoc determinations? What legitimacy does the US have to steal the oil of other countries? Do governments backing what was increasingly seen as a genocide in Gaza have any right to enforce ersatz legal regimes on other countries without any international legitimacy? None of these deeper, more interesting reporting questions, are something the Times is examining. It was simply assumed US dictates are logical and justified, and the role of US media is to make sure other countries are abiding by these dictates.

China, for example, has sanctioned, among others, US corporations Saronic Technologies, Aerkomm, and Oceaneering International. Does this unilateral action by China mean all these companies’ sales to Taiwan, in direct violation of Chinese sanctions, render them “black market” sales? Would the Times refer to them as such without quotes and a heavy dose of irony? Would reporters write long, detailed scandal-toned reports on how these US companies are sneaking around to “evade” these “sanctions”? No, because this would be absurd toadism for a government. And media, at least in theory, is not supposed to play the role of police on behalf of governments, whether they be Chinese, Iranian, Venezuelan or American. Their role ought to be to best accurately convey objective reality without bias in favor of any powerful institution, which would mean seeking to contextualize and complicate American media consumers’ ignorance about the legal authority of US dictates, rather than simply take for granted their prima facie moral and legal authority.

But US media simply accepts, without pushback or critical thinking of any kind, the US State Department’s premise that the US is the leader of the whole world and gets to unilaterally dictate what is and isn’t “international law.” But they can’t. That’s the thing about international law: It requires some degree, any degree, of international democracy and buy-in. But only one country is sanctioning Venezuela’s oil sector—the United States. If the New York Times or CNN wish to make clear they think the US is de facto dictator of the whole world and ought to have the moral authority to determine what every other country must do with its natural resources then they should say that. They should be nice, obedient state media and make their fidelity to Trump’s dictates clear to the reader rather than misleading its readers—either through implication or explicit lying—that Venezuelan oil exports are breaking international law which they very much are not.