Trump is escalating global tensions with reckless rhetoric after claiming that Venezuela is surrounded by the largest armada in South American history, a statement that is factually and legally false but deeply dangerous. Under international law, a naval blockade is considered an act of war, and history shows that claims of encirclement often precede military conflict. Trump’s post goes further by asserting that Venezuelan oil and assets belong to the United States and by suggesting the country has been labeled a terrorist organization, neither of which followed any required legal or diplomatic process. Experts warn this is not policy but provocative language without institutional backing, the kind that fuels instability, panic, and escalation. When a president speaks as if war is already underway, even when it is not, words alone can move the world closer to conflict.
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If President Trump thinks military action the right way to handle a country nationalising its assets, even from ownership by foreign companies (not countries) someone teach him about the Suez Crisis.
The canal was built by the French, but became British controlled. President Nasser's unilateral seizure of it without compensation sparked a needless conflict that really, only Egypt could "win". Both sides were in the wrong, but it should have been solved by diplomacy, not force.
Here though, Venezuela compensated the foreign oil-companies licensed to extract the oil; but the deposits are in that nation's territory and there is nothing illegal in a nation taking its physical assets into its own ownership.
