Tag: venezuela

In the waters of the Caribbean, a surprisingly large U.S. fleet sits with Venezuela in its sights. It includes over 10,000 troops, Aegis guided-missile destroyers, a nuclear-powered fast attack submarine, F-35B jet fighters, MQ-9 Reaper drones, P-8 Poseidon spy planes, assault ships and a secretive special-operations ship.

The fleet is built for war on Venezuela or its drug cartels, but it is engineered to put enough pressure on Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro to push him from power. The justification for the war is stopping the flow of drugs into the U.S. by Venezuelan drug cartels; the justification for the coup is that Maduro is the head of those cartels.

But U.S. officials – often those in the best place to know – have disagreed with all three aspects of the military action: the significance of Venezuela’s drug cartels in the flow of drugs, and especially fentanyl, into United States; the role of Maduro in those cartels; and the use of the military to fight them. For their disagreement, many of those officials have left or been forced from their jobs.

U.S. President Donald Trump has insisted that military force is necessary to stop “narco-terrorists” who are smuggling a “deadly weapon poisoning Americans. He has claimed that “every boat,” the U.S. military strikes off the coast of Venezuela is “stacked up with bags of white powder that’s mostly fentanyl” and “kills 25,000 on average – some people say more.”

But current and former U.S. officials disagree. While most of the boats the U.S. military has sunk have been in the passageway between Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago, U.S. officials say that that passage is neither used to transport fentanyl nor is it used to transport drugs to the United States. 80% of the drugs that flow through that passage is marijuana, and most of the rest is cocaine. And those drugs are headed, not to the U.S., but to West Africa and Europe. Most of the fentanyl that finds its way into the U.S. comes from Mexico.

The military strikes on Venezuelan boats cannot be justified by the war on drugs and “are unlikely… to cut overdose deaths in the United States,” according to officials. “When I saw [an internal document on the strikes],” a senior U.S. national security official said, “I immediately thought, ‘This isn’t about terrorists. This is about Venezuela and regime change’.”

According to U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, 90% of the cocaine that transits into the U.S. enters through Mexico, not Venezuela. And Venezuela is not a source of fentanyl. The dissenting American officials are in agreement with international bodies. The  2025 UNODC World Drug Report assesses that Venezuela “has consolidated its status as a territory free from the cultivation of coca leaves, cannabis and similar crops.” The report says that “[o]nly 5% of Colombian drugs transit through Venezuela.” The EU’s European Drug Report 2025 corroborates the UN report: it “does not mention Venezuela even once as a corridor for the international drug trade.”

U.S. intelligence also disagrees on the Trump administration’s claim that Maduro is at the head of the Venezuelan drug cartels. The Trump administration has insisted that “Maduro is the leader of the designated narco-terrorist organization Cartel de Los Soles.”

Again, though, U.S. officials disagree. A “sense of the community” memorandum dated April 7, 2025 that puts together the findings of the 18 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence directly contradicts the Trump administration’s claim that Maduro is the leader of Tren de Aragua (TDA) drug cartel.

The memorandum clearly states that “the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.” It states that the intelligence community “has not observed the regime directing TDA.”

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President Trump on Wednesday suggested that US strikes on alleged drug shipments “on land” could be coming soon amid the US bombing campaign targeting boats in Latin America.

Trump has made similar comments before, and according to multiple media reports, the US is preparing to bomb Venezuela with the goal of ousting Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and is using cracking down on drug trafficking as a pretext.

The president claimed to reporters at the White House that he had “legal authority” to launch the strikes, but Congress hasn’t authorized the bombing campaign, which the Constitution requires for launching a war. Trump said he may notify Congress of the plans to launch strikes on land targets, but didn’t say he would seek authorization.

“We will hit them very hard when they come in by land. And they haven’t experienced that yet, but now we’re totally prepared to do that. We’ll probably go back to Congress and explain exactly what we’re doing when [they] come to the land,” the president said.

The president previously told Congress that he believes the US is now in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels. Trump has framed the airstrikes as self-defense, pointing to the large numbers of drug overdoses in the US, but they are primarily caused by fentanyl and other synthetic opioids, which don’t come from Venezuela, something Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who has been very critical of the campaign, has pointed out.

“There is no fentanyl made in Venezuela. Not just a little bit, there’s none being made. These are outboard boats that, in order for them to get to Miami, would have to stop and refuel 20 times,” Paul told British journalist Piers Morgan this week.

“It’s all likely going to Trinidad and Tobago. There are a lot of reasons to be worried about this. Number one is the broader principle of when can you kill people indiscriminately when there’s war. That’s why when we declare war is supposed to be done by Congress. It’s not supposed to be done willy nilly. When there’s war you just kill people in the war zone, there are rules of engagement,” Paul added.

Since September 2, the US has bombed at least seven boats in the Caribbean and one in the eastern Pacific near Colombia, extrajudicially executing 34 people at sea, according to numbers released by the Trump administration, without providing evidence to back up its claims about the targets. Sources told The Washington Post on Wednesday that any US airstrikes in Venezuela would likely first target alleged trafficker encampments or clandestine airstrips, but regime change remains the ultimate goal.

“There really is no turning back unless Maduro is essentially not in power,” a person familiar with the administration’s deliberations told the Post.

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It’s ironic that in the same week that President Donald Trump escalated the drug war in the Caribbean by unleashing the CIA against Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela, the Department of Justice won an indictment against former National Security Adviser John Bolton, the architect of the failed covert strategy to overthrow Maduro during the first Trump administration.

The one thing the two regime change operations have in common is Marco Rubio, who, as a senator, was a vociferous opponent of Maduro. Now, as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, he’s the new architect of Trump’s Venezuela policy, having managed to cut short Richard Grenell’s attempt to negotiate a diplomatic deal with Maduro. Regime change is on the agenda once again, with gunboats in the Caribbean and the CIA on the ground. What could go wrong?

Donald Trump’s penchant for turning the metaphorical war on drugs into a real one by deploying the U.S. military dates back to his first administration, when he threatened to designate drug cartels as foreign terrorists and proposed launching missiles to blow up drugs labs in Mexico. During the recent presidential campaign, he declared, “The drug cartels are waging war on America—and it’s now time for America to wage war on the cartels.” Apparently, he meant it.

Back in office, he named six Mexican cartels, the Salvadoran gang MS-13, and the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) and ordered the Pentagon to draw up plans for military action against them. Early on, White House officials seriously debated military strikes against cartel leaders and infrastructure inside Mexico, but decided that cooperation with the Mexican government would be more fruitful. Nevertheless, the unusual appointment of a veteran Special Forces military officer to head the Western Hemisphere Affairs office of the National Security Council signaled that Trump was still was serious about resorting to military force to wage the war on drugs.

The focus then shifted to Venezuela. The day before the New York Times broke the story about Pentagon planning for action against cartels, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the U.S. government was offering a $50 million reward for information leadings to Maduro’s arrest, accusing him of the “use cocaine as a weapon to ‘flood’ the United States.” Trump claimed Maduro was directing Tren de Aragua in “undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States,” a claim that the intelligence community concluded was untrue, despite pressure from Trump political appointees to make the estimate conform to Trump’s claim. The two senior career intelligence officers who oversaw preparation of the estimate were summarily fired.

In August, the Trump administration deployed a naval task force to the Caribbean, including three guided-missile destroyers, an amphibious assault ship, a guided-missile cruiser, and a nuclear-powered attack submarine. The following month, U.S. forces began air strikes on vessels allegedly smuggling narcotics in international waters off the Venezuelan coast. When Democrats and some Republicans questioned the legality of summarily killing civilians who posed no immediate threat, Trump informed Congress that he had determined that the United States was in a state of “armed conflict” with unnamed “drug cartels,” whose drug trafficking constituted an attack on the United States. Therefore, traffickers were “unlawful combatants” subject to being killed on sight. Admiral Alvin Holsey, commander of U.S. Southern Command, resigned on Thursday, reportedly because of concerns over the extrajudicial killing of civilians in the air strikes.

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Maximum pressure has long been President Donald Trump’s stance towards the government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela — he slapped crippling sanctions on the country during his first term — but in recent days the administration has pushed the stakes even higher.

The Caribbean is currently hosting an astonishing quantity of American naval and air assets, including four Arleigh Burke–class destroyers, a guided missile cruiser, an attack submarine, a Marine Amphibious Ready Group, and a flight of F-35 multirole fighters.

These are ostensibly deployed as part of an antinarcotic and drug interdiction operation, but the volume of firepower employed for what is normally a relatively sedate task has created broad suspicion at home and in Venezuela that a military intervention against the Bolivarian Republic is on tap. Maduro recently sent a letter to the United Nations stating that he expected an “armed attack” against his country in “a very short time.”

His concerns have probably not been assuaged by the formation of a new Joint Task Force last week (again ostensibly for anti-narcotics operations) in SOUTHCOM under the II Marine Expeditionary Force, precisely the kind of unit that would be deployed in a Venezuelan military intervention, still less by the recent New York Times report that Trump has authorized lethal covert operations by American intelligence agents within his borders.

The administration has made its interest in removing Maduro quite clear: it views him as the head of a narcoterrorist organization that is responsible for exporting crime, drugs, and illegal immigrants to the United States. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has declared that Maduro is not the legitimate president of the country, due to his government’s obvious falsification of results in the 2024 election, and the Justice Department doubled the bounty for his capture to $50 million.

But while Maduro is, without a doubt, a usurper of the presidential office and a tyrannical dictator, he is no less the president and head of state of Venezuela. Ideological harangues about the sanctity of democracy will no more remove him from power or render his government moot than American disapproval of the Chinese Communist Party could affect the democratization of Red China, something both sides are well aware of. Removing Maduro will require more than sanctions, threats, or pressure: it will require war, and that possibility looks increasingly likely with each passing day.

While ending Maduro’s dictatorship would certainly be a boon to the Venezuelan people, the intervention comes with a number of costs and risks American policymakers should bear in mind and carefully weigh against the potential benefits of intervention. There is no free lunch in geopolitics.

The most obvious costs are those of the initial invasion. The American invasion of Panama in 1989, to overthrow the government of General Manuel Noriega, was carried out by a force of some 27,000 U.S. troops, 23 of which were killed and hundreds more wounded. Venezuela is vastly larger than Panama, and while its military is very poorly equipped, it likewise dwarfs the forces that were available to Noriega. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates an invasion of Venezuela would require nearly 50,000 troops, some of which will not return home. Any American government should be extremely conscientious about the causes on which it spends the lives of American soldiers.

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