President Donald Trump (R) has been increasing the US navy’s presence in the Caribbean Sea and near the coast of Venezuela. Within that, he’s declared a partial blockade against Venezuela, barring sanctioned oil ships from entering or leaving Venezuelan ports, and he has seized a couple of sanctioned oil tankers in Caribbean international waters. Sanctioned oil tankers carry some 70% of Venezuela’s crude oil.

Trump has made no bones about wanting, directly, some of Venezuela’s oil. It was stolen, and he wants it back, he says. He’s referring to the oil production and refining facilities that Hugo Chavez had seized in the years before Maduro took power.

There are two other factors in play, though, that I’ve not seen talked about. One is that Trump’s partial blockade also denies, I think by intent, Venezuelan oil to the People’s Republic of China. In 2024, the PRC imported a bit over $1 billion of oil from Venezuela, which amounted to a skosh under two-thirds of the PRC’s total imports from Venezuela. That’s chump change from the PRC’s perspective, even as it pushes the PRC a little bit more toward needing Russian and Iranian (sanctioned) oil. That brings me, though, to my other thought.

That other is that the moves deny Venezuela’s ability market its oil nearly entirely. Blocking sanctioned oil tankers would deny Venezuela the ability to sell those 70% of its oil exports. In 2025, before the sanctioned oil shipping blockade, Venezuela exported 900,000 barrels per day. If the partial blockade continues, it’ll reduce that oil export to 270,000 barrels per day. That’s a revenue drop, taking the market price as an outer bound on the price Venezuela can get for its shipping-sanctioned oil—$56.52/bbl for West Texas Intermediate Crude as of 19 December—from $54.8 million to $15.3 million.

And these, also, two side effects of the military buildup near Venezuela’s coast. One is Maduro has suddenly stopped gradually building his military presence in eastern Venezuela and threatening to invade Guyana with a view to seizing that nation’s oil fields.

The other is the potential for a cutoff of oil to Cuba, threatening that nation’s ability to function at all. In 2025, Cuba’s two largest sources of imported oil and fuel (Cuba imports more oil than it produces for itself) were Mexico, at 5,000 barrels per day and Venezuela at 27,400 barrels per day. That’s out of a total of 45,400 bpd that Cuba imports. That’s against Cuba’s domestic oil production of 40,000 bpd and the 120,000 bpd that the nation needs to meet demand.