Tag: 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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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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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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“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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There was a time, not long ago, when the U.S. had the social etiquette to conduct its coups clandestinely. That is important because it means they recognized that it is wrong. Coups were carried out by the CIA, and we often only found out years later. Now, they are carried out by the navy for the world to watch on television. The change is a reflection of Washington’s hubris and the belief that they can do what they want.

There may never have been a more public and obvious coup than the coup attempt unfolding in Venezuela. Hardly under cover of the dark of night, the largest aircraft carrier in the world, the nuclear powered USS Gerald R. Ford, brought its, at least, 40 F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, its EA-18G Growlers, its two squadrons of helicopters, its five destroyers and it B-52 Stratofortress and much more to St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, about 560 miles from the coast of Venezuela. Its more than 4,500 troops join the more than 10,000 troops with their 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 who were already in the waters off the coast of Venezuela.

The U.S. military buildup is too small for a full-scale invasion and too large for stopping small boats carrying drugs. But it is perfect for a coup. The threat and pressure it exerts on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is overwhelming and unbearable.

U.S. coups in Venezuela are not new. They were not new in 2002 when the democratically elected Hugo Chávez was briefly removed from office in a coup before the people and the military restored the popular leader to power.

But the script has changed little since they were new in 1908 when the U.S. helped oust the left leaning Cipriano Castro and his objections to American power and influence in Latin America.

From its birth, Venezuela, along with Cuba, has represented an unacceptable challenge to the spread of America’s vision of form of government and leadership in what it perceives as its own backyard. Conceived almost in conversation with the 23 year older American constitution, the first constitution of Venezuela, as Greg Grandin has pointed out in America, América: A New History of the New World, sought to balance America’s preoccupation with individual liberty with the common good. The constitution calls for the “renunciation of the dangerous right to unlimited freedom” and insists that “because governments are constituted for the common good and happiness of men, society must provide aid to the destitute and unfortunate and education to all citizens.”

From Francisco de Miranda and Simón Bolívar, who fought first for Venezuela’s independence and then for a united Latin America, to Hugo Chávez who united and galvanized the Latin American left, Venezuela has been a challenge to the spread of American ideology and hegemony in the western hemisphere.

But the American response has never been so public and bellicose. In late November, Donald Trump spoke to Maduro by phone. The phone call lasted less than 15 minutes. Precisely what transpired on that phone call remains unknown. But one thing is clear. Like a sheriff in a bad western movie, Trump, with guns drawn, Trump told Maduro to get out of town. He told him that he had one week to leave.

What happened next is not clear. It is not entirely clear whether Maduro refused to leave or if Trump refused Maduro’s conditions for leaving. According to reporting by The Miami Herald and Reuters, Trump told Maduro that safe passage would be granted to him, his wife and his son if he agreed to resign right away and flee Venezuela for the destination of his choice.

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They are getting all of their ducks in a row for a war with Venezuela.  Do you think that it is just a coincidence that Southern Command just canceled leave for Thanksgiving and Christmas?  And do you think that it is just a coincidence that the Trump administration just designated “Cartel de los Soles” as a foreign terrorist organization?  This is going to allow the Trump administration to take military action against Venezuela without formally declaring war.  As you will see below, so many of the things that we would expect to see just before a major military operation commences are happening right now.  The following are 6 major warning signs that indicate that military strikes on Venezuela could be imminent…

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