Donald Trump is refusing to deny he might go to war with Venezuela and wants to depose its president, Nicolas Maduro.
Asked by NBC News on Friday whether a full-scale conflict was on the table, he said: ‘I don’t rule it out, no.’
The US president recently ordered a massive build-up of warships and aircraft carriers in the Caribbean after American forces seized a Venezuelan oil tanker and blockaded other tankers.
The move ramped up tensions with the South American nation following months of deadly strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats in nearby waters.
The White House has accused Maduro of using ‘stolen’ oil to finance his government, which is widely viewed as a dictatorship, and helping drug gangs infiltrate US territory.
Maduro denies the allegations, claiming the US action is aimed at overthrowing him and gaining control of Venezuela’s huge oil resources.
In his NBC interview, Trump refused to clarify whether he is planning to overthrow Maduro.
‘He knows exactly what I want. He knows better than anybody.’
The 79-year-old also repeated his warning that more sanctioned oil tankers will be seized near Venezuelan waters.
‘If they’re foolish enough to be sailing along, they’ll be sailing along back into one of our harbours,’ he said.
What is going on with Trump’s Venezuela blockade?
Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, although its oil production is relatively very low due to problems with its industry.
Local companies and infrastructure tied to the industry have suffered due to years of sanctions imposed by the US, EU and several other countries after the Venezuelan government’s violent repression of protests in the 2010s.
Venezuela now sells most of its oil to China, which the White House sees as a strategic rival.
Experts have said that Trump may see the proximity of a country with potentially strong oil output allied to his opponents as a threat.
‘The idea that you have this country, with oil, and minerals, and rare earths in our hemisphere and its main allies being China and Russia, that’s something that doesn’t really fit into Trump’s view of the world’, said David Smilde, a Venezuela expert at Tulane University.
He has not laid out his accusations of oil theft in detail, but they appear to be related to Venezuela’s decision to seize American assets as part of its nationalisation of oil fields in 2007.
Trump previously expressed frustration that the US didn’t push back sooner.
He said: ‘Getting land, oil rights, whatever we had — they took it away because we had a president that maybe wasn’t watching.
‘But they’re not gonna do that. We want it back. They took our oil rights. We had a lot of oil there. They threw our companies out. And we want it back.’
Trump has also claimed Venezuela is using oil to fund drug trafficking and other crimes.
He has said the current military presence around it will last ‘until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us’.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at [email protected].
For more stories like this, check our news page.
