Category Archives: politics

A Few Thoughts on Trump’s Partial Blockade

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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.

Typically Liberal “Misunderstanding”

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It’s William Galston, this time. Galston, in his op-ed for last Tuesday’s The Wall Street Journal disparaged SecDef Pete Hegseth’s alleged disdain for the laws of war.

Leave aside the fact that Galston cynically and deliberately chose not to cite any of these laws of war. Instead, he actually wrote extensively about Hegseth’s supposed disdain for rules of engagement. In this vein, Galston generalized, without logic or facts, Hegseth’s disdain for particular rules into a disdain for all rules of engagement.

However, Galston’s more serious…error…is this. Rules of engagement are not Laws of War. RoE are the particulars, tailored to specific combat and short-of-combat environments, intended for particularized implementation of those general laws of war. Yet he opened his piece with this lede, and his piece continued solely in that vein.

It’s no surprise the US Navy’s September 2 strike on an alleged drug-carrying boat near Venezuela has been controversial. The man who now leads the Defense Department has ridiculed the laws of war throughout his military career.

I’m not that convinced, though, that Galston’s mistake is a misunderstanding Given his high skill as a journalist for a leading news outlet, for whom words are his stock in trade, I lean more toward outright distortion in his use of rules of engagement and laws of war interchangeably.

Oh, and one more “leave aside:” The controversy surrounding that second strike is entirely a journalistic construction. Those of us with actual military experience and who are not trading on that experience for political gain see no fault in sending in a second strike to finish a task that the first strike had not completed.

Nanny State Strikes Again

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The lede has it.

California regulators have given Tesla 90 days to meet compliance after an administrative law judge found the company deceived consumers by falsely implying its cars could drive on their own.

The article got specific down the page.

California’s DMV first brought the case against Tesla in 2022, arguing the automaker’s use of product names “Autopilot” and “Full-Self Driving Capability” amounted to false advertising. The regulator said Tesla’s use of this language implied to drivers that its cars could function as autonomous vehicles.

Ninety days to stop calling an autopilot an autopilot and to stop calling a full-self driving capability a full-self-driving capability. Never mind that Tesla’s instructions also instruct drivers to remain alert and to keep at least one hand on the steering wheel.

Because California’s government officials think California citizens are grindingly stupid and cannot think for themselves.

Right Idea, Bad Plan

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Progressive-Democrat New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani wants to send $6 billion of city taxpayer money to a fancy, glittering new infrastructure of child care centers that he wants to build so mothers of small children—6 weeks old to 5 years old—can get back to work. (As if mothering children isn’t work in its own right, but that’s beyond the scope of this article). Erica Komisar, a psychoanalyst, wants that money sent, instead, directly to the parents for their use in raising their children their way.

That’s the right idea, but it’s a decidedly suboptimal plan.

Instead, reduce the city’s taxpayer bill by those $6 billion. Let all of the city’s taxpayers hang onto their money, instead of giving it up to the city’s government for spending on the favorite programs of whomever happens to be sitting in Gracie Mansion. Those parents of toddlers will benefit at least as much, from the increased city economic activity that tax reduction would generate, activity that would include increasing job availability; increasing wages; increasing availability of child care and babysitters at prices those parents actually could afford; increasing availability of employer-provided child care, not from government mandate but from it being a good business practice.

That economic flow-through won’t quickly develop; there’s a lot of economic destruction from prior city administrations’ Big Government impositions that needs to be corrected. That, though, simply puts a premium on getting a $6 billion reduction in city taxes enacted.

An Empty Promise?

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Supposedly, the US has offered a security guarantee to Ukraine in the form of support[ing] European security guarantees and seek[ing] Senate backing for Washington’s promised role as a means of breaking the current peace talks impasse.

This supposed guarantee

would include monitoring, verification, and deconfliction, the officials said, and would lay out the role the US would play if Russia breached a peace deal and came back to attack Ukraine. They would also include the provision of weapons to deter a Russian force.

Yeah, sure. “Monitoring:” we see you, Russia, resuming your invasion, we’re watching the hell out of you. “Verification:” Yup, Russia really is resuming its invasion. “Deconfliction:” What does this mean? European forces entering Ukraine to fight the barbarian alongside Ukrainian forces? Traffic control to deconflict traffic jams on Ukrainian roads for Ukrainian forces and civilians moving in the other direction? Something else?

“Provision of weapons for deterrence:” This is risible. Europe already is refusing to provide the weapons the UA needs, in the numbers it needs them, or on the schedule it says it needs them. Excuses range from fear of provoking the barbarian to insisting the UA doesn’t really need them like that to claims they don’t have the weapons to provide the UA, having drawn down their armories already with transfers. That last, given Europe’s disdain for any thing military, at least has a measure of plausibility.

The supposed guarantee also purports to include

legally-binding commitments to come to Ukraine’s aid in the event of a Russian attack.

What is the timeline for implementation of a related peace agreement? Would the agreement go into effect before or after “Senate support” had been secured? If after, what support for Ukraine’s continued fight for its survival would be in the offing pending that Senate agreement? If before, how would Ukraine recover or be aided in recovering, from the barbarian’s virtually guaranteed violation of the terms? What would be the Or Else should the barbarian violate the agreement—more monitoring, verification, and…”deconfliction?” All the nations’ governments—including, shamefully, our own—have already been slinking away, their tails covering their crown jewels, from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nattering on about nuclear weapons.

However sincerely offered, this seems like an empty promise. There’s no guarantee that the Senate, with its two-thirds majority treaty ratification requirement, would support such a thing. A simple Senate majority-voted resolution of support would be meaningless, legally, politically, and morally. Nor is there any guarantee that an alternate path to securing support—bills passed in both the House and Senate, which would require only majority votes (after a 60-vote cloture success in the Senate)—would succeed.

There’s this bit, too, that overhangs any security “guarantee” that might be offered Ukraine. Three of the participants in the Budapest Memorandum—the US, the UK, and France via its separate individual assurance—already have betrayed Ukraine by dishonoring the security and territorial integrity guarantees contained in that document. The Memorandum also was a legally binding commitment.