Ten thousand troops aboard 10 US warships, including a nuclear submarine, several destroyers and a guided missile cruiser, are patrolling the southern Caribbean Sea in the largest US military offensive in the region in decades. At least seven boats allegedly carrying drugs have been bombed, resulting in the extrajudicial killing of more than 32 people. And now the US administration is threatening Venezuela with direct military action. The Pentagon has reportedly drawn up plans for military strikes in Venezuela, and President Trump has authorized the CIA to conduct deadly covert operations.
All of this is aimed at removing Maduro, whom Trump says is the leader of a vast criminal organization. “Maduro is the leader of the designated narco-terrorist organization Cartel de los Soles and is responsible for drug trafficking into the United States,“ said Secretary of State and longtime Venezuela hawk Marco Rubio, to justify the US military posture in the region. The United States has also put a $50 million bounty on the Venezuelan president's head.
The official narrative is a fabrication. The existence of the Venezuelan government-run “Cartel de los Soles“, let alone its control of the transnational cocaine trade from Venezuela, has been largely disproven. And while the “Tren de Aragua” is a real criminal organization with a transnational presence, it does not have the capacity to operate in the way the United States suggests; it certainly pales in comparison to the power of cartels in Colombia, Mexico, or Ecuador.
It is telling that the 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment of the United States Drug Enforcement Agency does not even mention Venezuela. And a classified report from the National Intelligence Council found that Maduro does not control any drug trafficking organization. There is no denying that there is some drug transit through Venezuela, but its volume is insignificant compared to the cocaine that currently passes through the routes along the Pacific coast of South America. And Venezuela plays no role in the production and export of synthetic drugs such as fentanyl, nor in the broader opioid crisis in the United States. Simply put, if the Trump administration really wanted to crack down on drug trafficking, Venezuela would not make sense as a target.
So what is US policy really about? And where might this dramatic escalation lead?
At first glance, the US show of force off the coast of Venezuela looked like political theater: an attempt by President Trump to showcase his “tough on crime” approach to a domestic audience, including enthusiastic MAGA supporters. “If you’re smuggling drugs into our shores, we’re going to stop you in your tracks,” US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last week. Recent polls show that crime remains a top concern for Americans.
Another interpretation has been that Trump’s buildup is a political move designed to appease neoconservatives in his administration, sections of the foreign policy elite in Washington, and radical elements of the Venezuelan opposition, including María Corina Machado, the new Nobel laureate and leader of the hardline opposition who has called for foreign intervention in her own country. Unlike Venezuela’s more moderate opposition leaders, all of these figures are hostile to any normalization of relations with Venezuela and oppose Trump’s recent granting of a license to operate to Chevron. In this light, the tension looks like a typical Trump bluff: showing toughness toward Maduro while simultaneously securing access to Venezuelan oil.
One possible scenario is that the escalation in rhetoric of the past few weeks will not be followed by direct attacks on Venezuela, and that the US extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean will simply continue as they have for the past month and a half. In the absence of a serious US policy on drugs – especially on important issues such as consumption or money laundering – satellite images of small boats blowing up in the Caribbean Sea serve Trump’s agenda well, albeit with tragic consequences for the boats’ unknown passengers and their families.
But the scale of the U.S. military buildup today does not fit the idea of a cynical political move, nor does Trump’s decision to cut off all diplomatic channels of communication with the Venezuelan government and revoke the credentials of special envoy Rick Grenell to contact Maduro. The more we look at the military deployment and the increasingly bellicose rhetoric of Trump’s staff, the more the pursuit of regime change by military means seems the most plausible explanation.
Rubio and his fellow Florida Republicans have, of course, been ardent advocates for a more aggressive approach to Venezuela for years. For Rubio, overthrowing the Venezuelan president – and perhaps, if he can seize the moment, even overthrowing the Communist Party in Cuba – is a generational goal, more symbolic than strategic, and rooted in political passions and fantasies of comeback and revenge.
Given that US sanctions, coup attempts, and support for a parallel government in Venezuela in 2019, all measures strongly supported by Rubio, have failed to topple Maduro, it seems that the Secretary of State has concluded that direct military intervention is the only way to achieve this goal, and that he is strongly advocating for this outcome within the administration.
The prospect of a US military presence on the ground, however, still seems incongruous, especially given Washington’s much more pressing geopolitical interests and Trump’s repeated promises, to the applause of his MAGA base, that he will not drag the country into new “eternal wars”. But this is the Western Hemisphere, not the distant Middle East. And in this new multipolar reality, which even Rubio now acknowledges, a return to traditional spheres of influence means that the United States is once again swinging its big stick in its own hemisphere, openly returning to the arms diplomacy that so often rocked the Caribbean in the early 20th century, before the United States became a global power.
The degree of asymmetry of a possible war between the United States and Venezuela cannot be underestimated, nor the ability of the United States to easily overwhelm Venezuela’s conventional forces. But it would be a mistake to think that an invasion of Venezuela would be a repeat of Panama in 1989-1990 or Haiti in 1994, the last times the United States occupied countries in its own hemisphere. Of course, the 20th and 21st centuries have been marked by persistent overt and covert U.S. intervention in the domestic politics of South American states. But unlike Central America and the Caribbean, where smaller, weaker states have become testing grounds for the rise of the U.S. Marine Corps, Washington has never directly intervened militarily on the South American continent. Venezuela, with about 28 million people, has about the same population as Iraq in 2003, and more than 10 times the population of Panama in 1990.
It is also important to keep in mind that even a weakened Chavismo still commands a significant and fervent following. Opposition to any U.S. military intervention is likely to be fierce, regardless of how the pro-government militias that have been mobilized in recent weeks ultimately perform. A violent regime change backed by the United States would almost certainly lead to a long and drawn-out resistance and uprising.
Given the high risk of a ground invasion, another scenario seems more likely – one that involves airstrikes but without amphibious landings of American troops on the Venezuelan coast. Trump would certainly prefer a one-off airstrike, similar to the attack on Iran in June. But there is no reason to believe that such an attack would lead to the mass uprising and military coup that Rubio and his allies hope for.
So far, the Venezuelan military has proven extremely loyal to the Maduro government. It has survived two decades of regime change attempts, including a brief coup in 2002, the Guaido fiasco of 2019-2023, which included an apparent coup attempt in April 2019, and an ill-conceived mercenary invasion in 2020, each with fewer defections than the last. Institutionally, years of draconian sanctions and destabilization by the United States have hardened Venezuela’s security state and fostered a resilience that has surprised many.
It should not be surprising if the first attack does not lead to the promised uprising and the regime change advocates demand another one, and then another. Convinced that the government is on the verge of collapse and needs only one more push, they will likely pressure Trump to continue the bombing and perhaps even support the formation of some form of armed opposition that currently does not exist in Venezuela.
Such a Libya-style war would flood an already unstable region with even more weapons and money. Criminal organizations and irregular armed groups already operating along Venezuela’s western border—and beyond, in neighboring Colombia—would thrive in the chaos, swelling their ranks and profiting from arms and human trafficking: a nightmare scenario for Latin America.
Over the past few years of draconian U.S. sanctions on Venezuela—which have contributed significantly to food, medicine, and fuel shortages—more than seven million Venezuelans have fled their country. This unprecedented wave of migration has had profound consequences across the region and beyond, including in the United States, where it has tipped the 2024 election in Trump’s favor. If U.S. sanctions have led to such an exodus, we can only imagine the scale of the refugee crisis that would result from a real war. Not surprisingly, Brazil and Colombia, Venezuela’s most strategic neighbors in terms of any potential conflict, have strongly opposed U.S. military intervention.
The bitter irony is inescapable: an operation justified by anti-drug rhetoric would create the perfect conditions for the expansion of the influence of drug trafficking organizations. A military buildup off the coast of Venezuela is a dangerous path to armed conflict that could lead to much greater suffering for the Venezuelan people, potential political chaos for the United States, casualties among U.S. soldiers, and catastrophic destabilization of much of the region.
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Guillaume Long is a senior policy analyst at the Center for Economic and Political Research and has held several cabinet positions in the government of Ecuador, including Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Culture, and Minister of Knowledge and Human Talent.