WASHINGTON’S seizure of a second ship carrying Venezuelan oil continues its brazen piracy on the high seas.

It’s a further escalation in US aggression against Venezuela designed to bring about regime change.

Donald Trump’s crimes are dramatic, his motives expressed unusually openly. His secretary for war — and the revival of this title instead of defence secretary speaks for itself  — boasts about prioritising “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” The administration is hardly making the effort to pretend its actions are legal.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t lying. It lies constantly, and the official rationale for its Venezuela blockade is a lie — there is no evidence the boats it bombs were smuggling drugs, nor that the Venezuelan oil industry has any connection to the drug trade, nor even of the existence of the so-called Cartel de los Soles that it alleges Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro heads.

But just as when, during his first term, Trump embarrassed his Nato allies by admitting Western militaries were in Syria “only for the oil,” the president’s online rants show the same is true for Venezuela.

Venezuela, Trump rails, must “return to the United States of America all of the oil, land, and other assets that they previously stole from us.”

“They took our oil rights. We had a lot of oil there,” he elaborated a day later. “They threw our companies out. And we want it back.”

On one level that is true. It is also an argument that must be emphatically rejected.

The resurgent far right is everywhere about elevating corporate power over people power. Trump’s policies in the United States, like those of Javier Milei in Argentina, Rodrigo Paz in Bolivia and a host of wannabe imitators, remove social, environmental and democratic obligations on big business, enshrining their right to pursue profit above all other considerations. Sod workers’ rights, sod consumer protections, sod the planet itself.

In a world of sovereign nation states, these states must have the right to assert control of their territorial resources. The Venezuelan people have the right to boot US companies out of their oil sector. And that’s what they did, both in 1976 and again at the end of the 1990s, after parts had been opened up to Big Oil again.

Support for Venezuela is asserting that property rights are not inviolate, and democracy can override them — a prerequisite for socialism.

The blatant character of Trump’s outrages is also a chance to cut through the fog of mystification Western governments spew out around international law.

The second tanker seized was not on the sanctions list, we hear. But the one bound for Cuba on December 10 was.

But the list is a US creation. It has no standing in international law at all, but designates ships the United States accuses of breaching its unilateral sanctions — which for instance stipulate what Venezuela may or may not buy from, say, Iran.

Washington has absolutely no legal right to tell these two independent countries that.

The same applies to the entire “shadow fleet” of tankers accused of transporting oil for Venezuela, Russia, Iran and other targets of US or EU sanctions, always presented in British media reports as some kind of criminal enterprise.

The goods concerned may be sanctioned by Washington or London or Brussels: they have not been sanctioned by the UN security council, and interfering with their transit across international waters is piracy, a “might is right” exercise which exposes how empty the so-called rules-based international order, now mocked by Trump, always was.

Don’t mourn his offences against a hypocritical liberal consensus that has winked for decades at horrific violations of international law, from the illegal blockade of Cuba to the invasion of Iraq.

Use them to expose the predatory character of imperialism itself. No to Trump, no to Nato, no to war.