Tag: venezuela

President Trump on Friday in a radio interview disclosed something which missed the attention of the US and global media. He let slip that a large land site had been knocked out by a strike from US forces in the Caribbean – however without specifying which country was hit (whether Venezuela or perhaps Colombia).

Trump may have actually assumed the attack which he disclosed publicly for the first time was already being reported on, but it had not. He was being interviewed by John Catsimatidis, the Republican billionaire who owns the WABC radio station in New York on his The Cats & Cosby Show, and the two were talking about the Venezuela campaign. 

The United States had knocked out “a big facility” last week, Trump described somewhat vaguely, in apparent reference to a drug facility on the Latin American coast. 

“They have a big plant or a big facility where the ships come from,” Trump said, though he did not explicitly identify the exact location or even country attacked. “Two nights ago we knocked that out.”

According to the full remarks in context, the president said:

“But every time I knock out a boat, we save 25,000 American lives. It’s very simple. And what’s happening is they’re having a hard time employment-wise, they can’t get anybody.

And we just talked out, I don’t know if you read or you saw, they [Venezuela] have a big plant or a big facility where the ships come from. Two nights ago, we knocked that out. So we hit them very hard. But drugs are down over 97 percent. Can you believe it?”

Some unnamed American officials suggested to the New York Times that the Commander-in-Chief was referring to a drug facility in Venezuela: 

Trump did not name the location of the facility, though American officials told the New York Times that the president was referring to a drug facility in Venezuela that was eliminated. The president’s comment is the only report of such an attack. No other Latin American government, including Venezuela, has disclosed a strike of this sort.

But information or confirmation other than that disclosure remains a mystery, as neither the CIA nor Pentagon have commented, as the NY Times notes:

If Mr. Trump’s suggestion that the United States had struck a site in the region proves accurate, it would be the first known attack on land since he began his military campaign against Venezuela. U.S. officials declined to specify anything about the site the president said was hit, where it was located, how the attack was carried out or what role the facility played in drug trafficking. There has been no public report of an attack from the Venezuelan government or any other authorities in the region.

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The United States finds itself at a moment when the gap between power and prudence has rarely been more visible. As American society grapples with structural inflation, deep social fragmentation, a crisis of institutional credibility, and the steady erosion of public trust, renewed talk of military confrontation with Venezuela is once again circulating within Washington’s political and security circles. In recent months, this rhetoric has intensified, driven in part by President Donald Trump and influential figures around him – most notably Senator Marco Rubio – who have pushed an increasingly confrontational line toward Caracas, bringing the country closer to the threshold of conflict. These developments are not the product of a genuine threat, but rather reflect a dangerous habit in U.S. foreign policy: transforming domestic deadlock into external military adventure. The central question is both simple and decisive: who exactly is this war for, and what purpose is it meant to serve?

The first reality that must be acknowledged is that Venezuela, despite its profound economic, political, and governance crises, does not constitute an imminent or existential threat to U.S. national security. Neither its military capabilities nor its regional position – and not even its relations with America’s strategic rivals – place it in the same category as real systemic challenges such as China, or even complex transnational threats like cyber warfare and the collapse of global supply chains. Venezuela is neither capable of striking the U.S. homeland nor of disrupting the global balance of power. The inflation of the Venezuelan threat rests less on sober security analysis than on Washington’s recurring political need to manufacture a “manageable enemy.”

Within this framework, a war with Venezuela offers no direct benefit to American citizens. It does not enhance job security for workers, reduce healthcare costs, rebuild decaying infrastructure, or provide lasting stabilization to domestic energy prices. The experiences of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria demonstrate that early promises of “economic gain” or “market stability” tend to be short-lived illusions, quickly replaced by prolonged instability, rising public debt, and the erosion of social capital. At best, the American public becomes a spectator to a war that yields no dividends; at worst, it becomes the entity that pays for it.

The costs of such a war, by contrast, would be immediate and tangible. Direct military expenditures – at a time when the U.S. defense budget already exceeds the combined military spending of several major powers – would mean funneling tens of billions of additional dollars into an industry that thrives on conflict, not peace. Beyond this, potential shocks to global energy markets, particularly in oil and gas, would translate directly into higher fuel and consumer prices at home. Despite reduced production capacity, Venezuela remains a consequential actor in energy geopolitics, and any significant instability there would reverberate across global markets. The result would be renewed economic pressure on American households still struggling to recover from previous crises.

Migration represents another cost routinely underestimated in early calculations. Any escalation of violence or security collapse in Venezuela would generate new waves of displacement across Latin America and eventually toward the U.S. southern border. This would not only produce humanitarian and ethical challenges, but also inflame domestic political tensions and deepen partisan divides. A war launched under the banner of “threat control” could, in practice, import instability directly into the United States.

If this war is neither about security nor public welfare, where do its real motivations lie? The answer must be found in the intersection of politics, power projection, and the satisfaction of security elites. In a system where foreign policy is heavily shaped by the military–industrial complex and entrenched security networks, war is not an anomaly but a tool for sustaining the existing power cycle. Confrontation with Venezuela – precisely because of the country’s relative weakness – offers the opportunity for a low-risk display of force, one that may benefit politicians, generals, and defense contractors even as it imposes costs on society at large. The recent advocacy by Trump-aligned hawks, including Rubio, fits squarely within this pattern.

This logic is fundamentally diversionary. When governments fail to resolve structural domestic problems, the temptation grows to mobilize public opinion around an external threat, redirecting attention away from internal crises. In this narrative, Venezuela is not treated as a country with real people and complex realities, but as a simplified symbol of “the enemy” – one that appears easy to defeat and whose human costs are often erased from political calculations.

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The House on Wednesday voted down a War Powers Resolution meant to block President Trump from launching a war with Venezuela without congressional authorization, as required by the Constitution.

The bill failed in a vote of 211-213, with nine representatives not voting. Just three Republicans joined Democrats in supporting the bill: Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY), Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA), and Don Bacon (NE). One Democrat, Henry Cuellar (TX), voted against the legislation.

The legislation would have directed the president to remove “United States Armed Forces from hostilities within or against Venezuela that have not been authorized by Congress.”

Before the Venezuela bill, another War Powers Resolution aimed at stopping President Trump’s bombing campaign against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific Ocean also failed. That bill failed in a vote of 210-216, with two Republicans (Massie and Bacon) voting in favor and two Democrats (Ceullar and Vicente Gonzalez (TX) voting against.

The votes came a day after President Trump declared a “complete and total blockade” on “sanctioned” tankers going into and leaving Venezuela, an action that’s widely considered an act of war under international law. President Trump and his top officials have also been clear that their goal is regime change.

“Do we want a miniature Afghanistan in the Western Hemisphere?” Massie, a co-sponsor of the bill, asked on the House floor before the vote.

“If that cost is acceptable to this Congress, then we should vote on it as a voice of the people and in accordance with our Constitution,” Massie continued. “And yet today, here we aren’t even voting on whether to declare war or authorize the use of military force. All we’re voting on is a War Powers Resolution that strengthens the fabric of our Republic by reasserting the plain and simple language in the Constitution that Congress must decide questions of war.”

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