More empty Trump threats on Venezuela?

US President Donald Trump has ordered “a total and complete” blockade of all “sanctioned” oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela ports, which is technically an act of war.

- Gwynne Dyer

How seriously should we take this?Mr Trump has certainly threatened war with Venezuela in the past. Former US national security advisor John Bolton reports that Mr Trump said during his first presidential term (2017-2020) that invading Venezuela would be “cool” because it is “really part of the United States’

Andrew McCabe, former deputy director of the FBI, says that Mr Trump told him in 2019 that Venezuela was “the country we should be going to war with. They have all that oil and they're right on our back door”

Gustavo Petro, the current president of Colombia, says that his predecessor, Ivan Duque, was approached by Mr Trump in 2020 with a plan to invade Venezuela via Colombia. Mr Trump's advisers talked him out of that one.

He was still at it two years ago, when he said at a press conference in North Carolina: “When I left {the presidency in 2020], Venezuela was about to collapse. We would have taken over it, we would have kept all that oil.”

It sounds pretty damning, until you recall that Mr Trump is a blowhard who almost never acts on his threats. (““Taco” — “Trump Always Chickens Out”) Or just count the numbers and realise that there are not enough US troops in the Caribbean region at the moment to make a full-scale invasion of Venezuela a viable military option.