Tag: venezuela

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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President Trump is expected to announce plans to launch a war with Venezuela this evening when he addresses the nation at 9:00 pm EST, a high-placed source on Capitol Hill has told Antiwar.com.

Also, earlier in the day, Tucker Carlson told Judge Andrew Napolitano that he has heard from a member of Congress that Trump is planning war.

“Members of Congress were briefed yesterday that a war is coming and it will be announced in the address to the nation tonight,” Carlson said on the Judging Freedom podcast.

On Tuesday night, President Trump announced a “total and complete” blockade on “sanctioned tankers” going into and out of Venezuela, which came after US forces boarded and seized a tanker carrying Venezuelan oil.

The Trump administration has made clear that its goal is to oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. It’s unclear what kind of military action the president is preparing to take, but according to earlier media reports, he has been briefed on several options, including strikes on government targets, sending in a special operations force to kill or capture Maduro, or deploying a larger force to capture airbases and oil fields.

Any attack on Venezuela without congressional authorization would be illegal under the Constitution. The House is expected to vote on a bipartisan War Powers Resolution today aimed at blocking Trump from launching the war.

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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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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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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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