The United States military, currently moonlighting as the world’s most expensive repossession agency, has successfully snagged its seventh Venezuelan oil tanker. It’s a milestone of sorts—the kind of achievement celebrated only by boardrooms and those who still believe the Monroe Doctrine was a polite suggestion rather than a blueprint for continental bullying. To call this an act of "asserting control" is the kind of linguistic gymnastics that would win a gold medal in the Olympic Games of euphemism. It is piracy, plain and simple, but because the pirates have a dental plan and a flag with fifty stars, we’re expected to nod along as if it’s a necessary surgical procedure for the health of the global market. The sheer monotony of this seventh seizure is perhaps the most offensive part; it has become routine, a bureaucratic box to be checked in the ongoing theater of imperial maintenance.

On one side of this grease-slicked drama, we have the American apparatus, a lumbering beast of interventionism that cannot help but poke its nose into any hole leaking liquid gold. The logic is as transparent as a window in a glass house: Venezuela is "unstable," therefore its resources must be "safeguarded" by the very people who spent decades ensuring its instability. It’s the ultimate protection racket. The US attacks, then seizes the assets of the attacked under the guise of preventing them from funding further conflict. It is a closed loop of hypocrisy that would be impressive if it weren't so predictably boring. The right-wing hawks will tell you this is about "energy security" and "defending democracy," which are fancy ways of saying they want to control the tap so they can charge the plebs for the privilege of drowning in carbon. They don't want freedom for Venezuelans; they want a cheaper way to fill up their suburban assault vehicles.

Then, we have the Venezuelan side of this tragicomedy. Maduro and his cadre of revolutionary larpers have managed to turn a country sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves into a place where the most valuable export is desperation. To lose seven tankers is not a tragedy; it is a comedy of errors. It suggests a level of logistical prowess usually reserved for toddlers playing with bath toys. They cry "imperialism" at every turn—and they aren't wrong—but their own brand of "socialism" has proven to be little more than a mechanism for redistributing poverty while the elites hoard whatever scraps the Americans haven't yet confiscated. It is a regime that survives on rhetoric and the hope that Russia or China might send a postcard, while their literal lifeblood is siphoned off by the very "Gringo" ghosts they claim to despise. They are effectively handing the keys over through sheer, unadulterated incompetence.

The international community, that collection of well-dressed shadows, watches this from the sidelines with the vacuous stare of a cow watching a train pass. They prattle on about "international law" as if it’s something other than a suggestion for the weak and a punchline for the strong. There is no law on the high seas, only displacement. The tanker is seized, the oil is rebranded, and the profits find their way into the pockets of some faceless conglomerate that probably funds both the "democracy" initiatives in DC and the "sovereignty" foundations in Caracas. It is a carousel of grift where the only constant is that the people of Venezuela remain hungry and the people of America remain blissfully unaware of where their "freedom" actually comes from. It comes from the bottom of a hull in the Caribbean.

We are living in an era where the distinction between a government and a cartel is merely the quality of their stationery. The seizure of a seventh tanker isn't a strategic victory; it's a reminder that we are governed by thugs with better tailors and more sophisticated PR departments. The Left will issue press releases about the "humanitarian impact," ignoring that their favorite revolutionaries are just incompetent thieves. The Right will pump their fists about "American strength," ignoring that they are essentially cheerleading for state-sponsored theft that benefits nobody but the military-industrial complex. And in the middle, the planet continues to choke on the very substance these idiots are fighting over. It is a spectacle of the highest order, a race to the bottom of the barrel, literally and figuratively.

Ultimately, the seventh tanker is just a number in a ledger that no one is actually keeping for the benefit of the public. It represents the utter failure of modern geopolitics to produce anything other than friction and theft. We are watching two failed systems grapple in the mud over a bottle of expensive sludge. The US cannot stop being an empire, and Venezuela cannot stop being a casualty of its own delusions. It’s a perfect match, a marriage made in a boardroom in hell. The world watches, the oil flows into the wrong pockets, and we are told to applaud the efficiency of it all. It’s enough to make one nostalgic for actual pirates; at least they didn't pretend they were doing it for your own good.