Tag: venezuela

White House Chief of Staff Suggests Regime Change in Venezuela Is Real Goal of Boat Strikes

White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has suggested that the goal of the US bombing campaign against alleged drug boats in the waters of Latin America is the ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, according to a two-part report published by Vanity Fair on Tuesday.

Wiles discussed President Trump’s Venezuela strategy in an interview with Vanity Fair reporter Chris Whipple on November 2, 2025. “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will,” she told him.

While Trump and his top officials have been clear about their desire for regime change in Venezuela, they have framed the bombing campaign against boats as an effort to stop drug shipments to the US. Wiles’s comments suggest that the campaign’s real purpose, at least at the start, is to pressure Maduro.

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US OBLITERATES 3 More Venezuelan Drug Boats Just Hours After President Trump Designates Fentanyl as a Weapon of Mass Destruction

United States Southern Command on Monday announced that Joint Task Force Southern Spear took out three narcotrafficking vessels in the Eastern Pacific. 

A total of eight “narco-terrorists” were killed in the strikes. “Intelligence confirmed that the vessels were transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and were engaged in narco-trafficking,” US SOUTHCOM said.

Video from the strikes shows massive explosions on each boat, turning them into burning piles of rubble.

US Southern Command said in a statement on X,

On Dec. 15, at the direction of @SecWar Pete Hegseth, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted lethal kinetic strikes on three vessels operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations in international waters. Intelligence confirmed that the vessels were transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and were engaged in narco-trafficking. A total of eight male narco-terrorists were killed during these actions—three in the first vessel, two in the second and three in the third.

Trump signed an executive order earlier on Monday to designate fentanyl as a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) and empower his administration to take on the “concentrated, large-scale terror attacks by organized adversaries.”

This will likely be used to justify the defense of America against drug cartels further, as the order directs the Secretary of War and Secretary of Homeland Security to “update all directives regarding the Armed Forces’ response to chemical incidents in the homeland to include the threat of illicit fentanyl.”

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The Siren Song of War

In October of 2002, I shocked many in my Congressional District and beyond by voting against giving President George W. Bush authorization to use military force in Iraq.

The night before that vote, my older sister told me a Knoxville television station had conducted a poll which found that in its viewing area 74 percent were for the war, 9 percent were against, and 17 percent were undecided.

When I pushed the button at about 3:00 the next day to cast that vote, I wondered if I might be ending my political career. My vote was so highly publicized that it was clearly the most unpopular thing I had ever done.

However, after three or four years and much to my amazement, that vote became the most popular of the more than 16,000 I cast during my 30 years in the U.S. House.

Unfortunately, the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) that the Congress passed then is once again relevant because President Trump and his advisers seem to think it gives them authority to go to war in Venezuela without the declaration by Congress called for in our Constitution.

When we went to war in Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein’s total military budget was about 2/10 of one percent of ours. Venezuela’s is even less. Neither of those two countries were or are capable of attacking us in any serious way. Neither has even threatened to do so.

Two polls in late November by CBS News/YouGov and Reuters/Ipsos both showed that about 70 percent of the American people were opposed to going to war in Venezuela, and probably most of the other 30 percent did not really want such a war but just did not want to oppose President Trump.

While the overwhelming majority of the American people do not want more dangerous illegal drugs coming into this Country, far more drugs are coming from China and Mexico and various other places. If we take action against Venezuela, which country is next?

Just before we went to war against Iraq, U.S. News & World Report had a story headlined “Why The Rush To War?” We should be asking the same thing today.

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Decades of Global Drone War Made Trump’s Caribbean Killing Spree Possible

On September 2, 2025, a small fishing boat carrying 11 people was targeted by a U.S. Reaper drone off the coast of Venezuela. Hellfire missiles were fired. Two survivors clung to the wreckage. Their identities and motives were unknown. Their behavior showed no hostility. Moments later, the drone operator launched a second strike — the so-called “double tap” — killing the final survivors. This scene is shocking, but it should not be surprising to anyone who has followed the trajectory of the U.S.’s drone wars. This tactic is familiar from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and, most recently, Gaza, where the Israeli military has used much worse violence to conduct genocide.

The U.S.’s first drone strike in the Caribbean, and the footage of the incident, reignited a debate about a conflict that Washington refuses to call a war — because it isn’t one. Instead, the Trump administration is using sheer violence to terrorize non-white populations and, as usual, has normalized lethal force far from declared battlefields and without any legal mandate.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has approved at least 21 additional strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific since September, killing at least 87 people. He has aggressively defended the very first operation, insisting he would have authorized the second strike as well — despite claiming he did not see it. Hegseth even misinterpreted the visible smoke on the video as the “fog of war,” seemingly unaware that the term refers to uncertainty in conflict, not the physical aftermath of a missile strike.

The details matter because they reveal something essential: the senior leadership overseeing these operations does not appear interested in the law, accuracy, or the basic meaning of proportionality. Instead, it has embraced escalation and mass murder as official policy.

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The Case Against American Intervention in Venezuela

As the USS Gerald R. Ford—the largest aircraft carrier afloat—casts its shadow along the Venezuelan coast, the United States must confront an uncomfortable question: What national interest is being protected by threatening a country that poses no military, territorial, or existential danger to the American republic?

The answer, made clear by an array of respected American scholars, former officials, and ex-military insiders, has nothing to do with security. Instead, it arises from a familiar mixture of ideology, geopolitical control, and the old reflex of imperial overreach. This is not defense. This is theater—one part provocation, one part political opportunism, and no part necessity.

Among the clearest voices cutting through the rhetoric is professor John Mearsheimer, perhaps the most prominent American realist in international relations. He does not mince words: Venezuela is not a threat to the United States. Its military lacks both the capacity and the intention to project power beyond its borders. Suggesting otherwise is “laughable,” he notes, because the true irritant is ideological. Venezuela’s Bolivarian model—imperfect and embattled as it is—represents a deviation from Washington’s preferred political order, a deviation the US has repeatedly sought to crush in Latin America for decades. For Mearsheimer, even if one entertained the fantasy of using force to change the regime, the idea collapses immediately under logistical absurdity and moral bankruptcy. Invading a nation of 28 million people, and then attempting to occupy and “stabilize” it, would be catastrophic in cost, chaotic in outcome, and impossible to justify.

The national security pretext collapses further under the testimony of Sheriff David Hathaway, a former Drug Enforcement Administration supervisory agent with firsthand experience in Latin America. He dismisses the drug-trafficking narrative not just as false, but as deliberately false. Cocaine originates in Colombia and Peru, not Venezuela, and the US fentanyl crisis has nothing to do with Caracas. There is no vast Maduro-led drug conspiracy, Hathaway explains, only a political fiction designed to mimic past excuses for intervention. He is blunt in stating that Washington has repeatedly used narcotics accusations as camouflage for intrusion, sabotage, and coercion. This is not about drugs. It is about dominance.

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Trump: Strikes on Venezuelan land could begin ‘pretty soon’

President Donald Trump indicated on Thursday that U.S. military strikes on Venezuelan soil could come “pretty soon,” following a recent seizure of a Venezuelan oil tanker.

On Thursday, President Trump was asked by a reporter whether the military campaign against Venezuela is still about stopping drugs from entering the United States, or if the administration is motivated by the nation’s oil resources after the interdiction of a Venezuelan oil tanker.

“Well, it’s about a lot of things, but one of the things it’s about is the fact that they’ve allowed millions of people to come into our country from their prisons, from gangs, from drug dealers, and from mental institutions, probably proportionately more than anybody else,” Trump responded.

“We had 11,888 murderers come into our country, many of them are from Venezuela. We had thousands of Tren de Aragua – the gang – come in from [Venezuela], which they say is the most violent gang,” he continued. “So it has to do with a lot of things, they’ve treated us badly, and I guess now we’re not treating them so good. If you look at the drug traffic, drug traffic by sea is down 92%… anybody getting involved in that right now is not doing well.”

“… And we’ll start that on land too, it’s gonna be starting on land pretty soon,” Trump added without providing further detail.

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The Global War You’ve Never Heard Of

American actions involving Venezuela have stirred up a flurry of theories and narratives around the United States’ strategic intentions.  Some theories highlight apparent contradictions between rhetoric and policy, such as President Trump’s pardons of major drug-traffickers despite his public anti-drug stance. Others frame potential U.S. military threats against Venezuela as being driven primarily by America’s dependence on oil.  Additional narratives have revived allegations of Venezuelan interference in U.S. elections, including claims from a former Maduro regime official about a “narco-terrorist war” against the United States.

In my effort to better understand the factors driving the building tensions around Venezuela, I decided to strip away all the explanations and start with what we know is happening.  The United States is striking small vessels, referred to as go-fast boats, reportedly carrying cocaine meant to be transferred onto ships bound for the Gulf of Guinea.  This sea route and the next step of the voyage have come to be known as Highway 10 because Venezuela is connected to the Gulf of Guinea via the 10th Parallel North on the globe.  The gulf includes several countries that tend to lack the resources necessary to patrol for and prevent the shipments.  From there, the payload can be passed on to the even poorer countries of the Sahel desert, where al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Russian mercenaries of the Africa Corps (not to be confused with the German unit of World War Two) have a certain level of autonomy and can move the cocaine to the Mediterranean Sea.  From there it enters the hands of Europe’s various iterations of the Mafia.  This drug route and the players involved has been laid out in a pretty detailed manner by the Argentine independent journalist Ignacio Montes de Oca under his X handle, @nachomdeo.

With this new information in mind, we can then apply events that we know have happened.  At the starting point of Highway 10, you have the United States destroying the go-fast boats before they can liaison with the ships bound for the Gulf of Guinea.  In the middle of the drug route you have the countries on the Gulf of Guinea, two of which have had coups in the last two months.  The first took place on November 26 in Guinea-Bissau, a key stopping point on Highway 10.  The second appears to be a failed coup that took place on December 7 in Benin, another country known to be on the Highway 10 route.

So at the starting point of the route, you have the U.S. striking go-fast boats.  In the middle, you have coups.  What’s happening at the finish point?  Well, in Italy, the Carabinieri are carrying out large-scale operations against the unpronounceable ’Ndrangheta.  The ’Ndrangheta happens to be one of the criminal organizations the independent journalist Montes de Oca cites as central to this route.  For his part, French president Emmanuel Macron has been leading the call to intensify the fight against organized crime in Europe.  France even sent a battleship to the Caribbean.

I have no idea if the strikes on boats, the coups along the Gulf of Guinea, and the crackdown on organized crime in Europe are all coordinated or even connected, but I do know that within a small time frame, a series of events have taken place that make it difficult to be involved in the drug trade at the beginning, middle, and end of Highway 10.

So how do you condense all of this into a concept we can discuss without getting lost in tropes about war for oil or American imperialism?  Well, the first thing to do is give it a name to make it more manageable.  The Highway Ten War feels succinct to me.

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The Next Wars Were Always Here

The first U.S. missiles that struck the boats in the Caribbean in early September 2025 were described by Washington as a “counter-narcotics operation,” a sterile phrase meant to dull the violence of incinerating human beings in an instant. Then came the second strike, this time on survivors already struggling to stay afloat. Once the details emerged, however, the official story began to fall apart.

Local fishermen contradicted U.S. claims. Relatives of those killed have said the men were not cartel operatives at all, but fishermen, divers, and small-scale couriers. Relatives in Trinidad and Venezuela told regional reporters their loved ones were unarmed and had no connection to Tren de Aragua, describing them instead as fathers and sons who worked the sea to support their families. Some called the U.S. narrative “impossible” and “a lie,” insisting the men were being demonized after their deaths. U.N. experts called the killings “extrajudicial.” Maritime workers noted what everyone in the region already knows: the route near Venezuela’s waters is not a fentanyl corridor into the United States. Yet the administration clung to its story, insisting these men were “narcoterrorists,” long after the facts had unraveled. Because in Washington’s post 9/11 playbook, fear is a tool. Fear is the architecture of modern American war.

The U.S. did not emerge from the Iraq War into peace or reflection. It emerged into normalization. The legal theories invented and abused after 9/11 – elastic self-defense, limitless definitions of terrorism, enemy combatants, global strike authority – did not fade. They became the backbone of a permanent war machine. These justifications supported drone wars in Pakistan, airstrikes in Yemen and Somalia, the destruction of Libya, special operations in Syria, and yet another military return to Iraq. And behind every expansion of this global battlefield was a U.S. weapons industry that grew richer with each intervention, lobbying for policies that kept the country in a constant state of conflict. What we are seeing today in the Caribbean is not an isolated action; it is the extension of a militarized imperial model that treats entire regions as expendable.

The next wars were always there because we never confronted the political and economic system that made endless wars a profitable cornerstone of U.S. power.

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‘Kill Them All’

“Does anyone know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?”
— Gordon Lightfoot (1938-2023)
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”

As we learn more about the events on Sept. 2, 2025, in international waters 1,500 miles from the United States, the behavior of the United States military becomes more legally troubling than at first blush. We have learned from members of Congress and others who have seen the videos of the attacks on the speedboat that day that the first strike mainly — but not completely — destroyed the boat and killed 9 of the 11 persons aboard.

The two survivors clung to the wreckage for 45 minutes, during which they frantically waved at what they hoped were American aircraft, expecting to be rescued. This attack was the first of many since ordered by President Donald Trump, and it was done without warning. After the passage of 45 terrifying minutes, three more attacks obliterated the two survivors and their wreckage, for “self-defense,” the White House said.

When two courageous persons privy to all this revealed it two weeks ago to reporters for The Washington Post who corroborated the revelations with five others, the Post published the story. Then, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth denied he ordered the survivors killed; it was, he said, “the fog of war.” Then, the White House countermanded that denial. Then, the admiral in charge acknowledged that he ordered the kills pursuant to the secretary’s initial orders.

The military has a duty to rescue the injured and the shipwrecked. And the military has a duty to disregard unlawful orders — a position that Attorney General Pamela Bondi herself argued to the Supreme Court when she was in private practice, and Hegseth himself argued when he was a private citizen.

Not rescuing these survivors was criminal. But the entire killing process is criminal.

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War with Venezuela Won’t Solve America’s Economic Woes

n April 1939, American unemployment reached 20.7 percent. For Henry Morgenthau Jr., Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, this was bad news. In a private meeting he confessed to two senior congressmen: “We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work… After eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started. And an enormous debt to boot.” 

Today, Americans know how the Great Depression ended. It ended with the onset of war in Europe. FDR truly believed that, if Britain and France went to war with Germany, the quagmire would make the British and French Governments heavily dependent on access to U.S. credit markets and resources, thereby ending America’s economic Depression. FDR welcomed the stimulus that war provided.

In 1939, Joseph Stalin hoped war in the West would be a quagmire fatally weakening Germany and its opponents. Stalin believed this development would open the door to a massive Soviet invasion from the East that would supplant Nazism with Communism. Thus, Stalin eagerly supplied the German war machine with the oil, iron, aluminum, grain, rubber, and other mineral resources Berlin needed to launch its war against Britain, France, and the Low Countries.

Ultimately, both FDR and Stalin miscalculated just how costly and risky the new conflict in Europe would be. War broke out in 1939, and in 1940 German military power rapidly defeated Western allies, though Britain fought on. The next year Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

Today, the Trump administration faces some conditions that FDR would recognize. Scott Bessent, President Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary, confronts a national sovereign debt of approximately $38 trillion. Liquidity strains also persist in parts of the financial system, and the dollar’s long-term reserve status is under significant pressure and scrutiny. 

Among the ideas under discussion by Bessent is a more enthusiastic official embrace of stablecoins—cryptocurrencies deliberately engineered to remain boringly pegged one-for-one to the dollar by holding equivalent reserves of cash or high-quality cash-equivalents in regulated accounts. In plain language: digital dollars that promise never to fluctuate like Bitcoin but can circle the globe in seconds without ever touching a traditional bank. 

Bessent publicly argues that well-regulated stablecoins will also extend the dollar’s dominance into the blockchain era. Trump appears sympathetic; there is, after all, not enough gold on the planet to return to a metallic standard, and simply printing more fiat currency will further debase the dollar. Wall Street, ever helpful, is delighted to assist in kicking the can a little further—ideally down a blockchain-paved road.

Meanwhile, the Trump White House is charting a new course to war, this time in the direction of Venezuela. Has the administration concluded that the rapid conquest of Venezuela could induce the kind of economic stimulus that rescued FDR’s failed policies and restore economic prosperity inside the United States?

Compared with the Russian or Iranian armed forces, Venezuela’s military is almost Lilliputian. Nicolás Maduro presides over a hard-left, bitterly anti-American regime that is bankrupt, internationally isolated (save for Havana, Moscow, and Tehran), and yet sits atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves—303 billion barrels, according to OPEC’s latest assessment.

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