Trump's new foreign policy boils down to 'Americas first'

Unfortunately, in this case, “it” was not a toy, but an oil tanker that was boarded and captured in a military-led operation seen by much of the Western world as piracy.

- MARY DEJEVSKY

The tanker, the US attorney general said, was on a US sanctions list “due to its involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organisations” and it appears to have been en route from Venezuela to Cuba -although it is not clear whether it was fuel-starved Cuba, politically awkward Venezuela, or the tanker itself that was the primary target for the US. Any, or all, probably suits the Trump White House just fine.

How much further the US goes to exert its will over Venezuela remains to be seen. It has already sunk more than a dozen ships in the Caribbean, claiming they were drug-running, and declared the country's airspace closed. The ultimate measure would be for Trump to remove president Nicolas Maduro - seen as the illegitimate beneficiary of a rigged election - either by pressure or by force.

The risk here is that there seems to be little appetite for such drastic action among US voters, and a botched operation with less than a year to go before the US midterm elections would be a far bigger liability for Trump and the Republican Party than leaving Maduro in place, where he could be politically useful as a poster boy for external threats.