On Friday’s broadcast of MS NOW’s “Morning Joe,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said that President Trump has been going after oil tankers because there’s “this ghost fleet that helps keep Venezuela’s regime alive. He should be using those same tools to interdict the ghost fleet that helps fund Russia’s brutal war machine, that helps keep the Iranian regime alive, and helps support North Korea.”
Coons said, “[I]n Venezuela, he’s been sleepwalking, without a clear policy or a clear path forward, into a conflict with one of our hemisphere’s most capable authoritarian regimes. Has this really been about interdicting drugs? Maduro’s willing to negotiate about stopping the regime’s support for drug trafficking. Is this about access to oil? That is something President Trump’s talked about, and his Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, admitted in a Vanity Fair article that, frankly, this is about regime change. In neither case does it make sense, with no plan for what would come next, for us to use American soldiers and military force to directly try to overthrow Maduro. So, this might be the off-ramp that Trump needs.”
He added, “He’s been using our military to interdict oil tankers, because there is this ghost fleet that helps keep Venezuela’s regime alive. He should be using those same tools to interdict the ghost fleet that helps fund Russia’s brutal war machine, that helps keep the Iranian regime alive, and helps support North Korea. He’d get bipartisan support for more actions to get tough on Putin and to begin to slow the flow of money into Putin’s murderous war machine against Ukraine.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
