A US official told Reuters that Washington will focus its attention on targeting Venezuela oil in lieu of ‘military options’.
Published On 25 Dec 2025
The United States will focus on exerting economic rather than military pressure on Venezuela over the next two months as it continues to pursue sanctioned Venezuelan oil, according to a Reuters news agency report citing an unnamed US official.
The White House has ordered the military to focus “almost exclusively on enforcing a ‘quarantine’ of Venezuelan oil”, the Reuters report said, even as the US continues to apply military pressure in the region.
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“While military options still exist, the focus is to first use economic pressure by enforcing sanctions to reach the outcome the White House is looking (for),” the official told Reuters on Wednesday.
Tensions have been rising in the Caribbean over the past month, where US President Donald Trump has deployed 15,000 troops, aircraft carriers, guided missile destroyers and amphibious assault ships, according to Reuters.
The build-up marks the largest massing of US forces in the Caribbean in decades, and has raised fears that Trump could invade Venezuela on the pretext of protecting the US from international drug cartels and “narcoterrorists”.
In mid-December, Trump ordered a “total and complete blockade” of all US-sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela. US forces have already apprehended two oil tankers and are in pursuit of a third vessel, according to Reuters.
Oil provides a lifeline to Venezuela, although Caracas has been under varying US sanctions since 2005. Sanctions on its energy sector were ramped up in 2019 during Trump’s first term in office.
Despite the ongoing tensions, some media reports suggest that targeting Venezuelan oil could be a form of de-escalation because the enforcement actions will be carried out by the US Coast Guard as opposed to the military.
The Coast Guard is a civilian agency during peacetime and is considered an arm of US law enforcement. Its agents have the right to board vessels under US sanctions. Staging a naval blockade of Venezuela, by contrast, would be considered an act of war.
Venezuela, this week, called the oil seizures “worse than piracy” in a statement to the United Nations Security Council.
US forces have since September carried out air strikes on dozens of boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific that the White House says were transporting illicit drugs to the US.
The strikes were carried out under the order of Trump – and not the US Congress – and have killed at least 105 people in what the White House has called a “non-international armed conflict”.
The White House alleges that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro supports major cartels like Tren de Aragua and Cartel de los Soles, which were named as terrorist organisations by the Trump administration earlier this year.
