Is the Trump administration building up to a military confrontation with Venezuela?
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
By Charlie Savage, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt
The Trump administration is aggressively stoking tensions with Venezuela and its president, Nicolás Maduro, and appears to be creating conditions that could lead to a military confrontation.
A major buildup of U.S. naval forces is underway outside Venezuela’s waters as the administration has stepped up belligerent rhetoric about fighting drug cartels and labeled Maduro a terrorist-cartel leader. All that raises the question of whether the end goal is just to counter drug-smuggling boats, or a potential regime-change war.
President Donald Trump signed a still-secret directive last month instructing the Pentagon to use military force against some Latin American drug cartels that his administration has labeled “terrorist” organizations. Around the same time, the administration declared that a Venezuelan criminal group was a terrorist organization and that Maduro was its leader, while calling his government illegitimate.
Since then, the Pentagon has been moving U.S. Navy assets, including warships, into the southern Caribbean Sea. In response, Maduro announced Monday that he was deploying 4.5 million militiamen around his country and vowed to “defend our seas, our skies and our lands” from any incursions.
The Trump administration has said little about its intentions. On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked about the movements and whether the administration was considering putting forces on the ground in Venezuela. She responded by calling Maduro illegitimate and invoking his indictment, late in the first Trump administration, on U.S. drug trafficking charges.
Trump, she said, is “prepared to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country and to bring those responsible to justice. The Maduro regime is not the legitimate government of Venezuela. It is a narco-terror cartel.”
The Pentagon declined to comment publicly about the specifics of the deployment. But Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesperson, said that cartels “have engaged in historic violence and terror throughout our hemisphere — and around the globe — that has destabilized economies and internal security of countries but also flooded the United States with deadly drugs, violent criminals, and vicious gangs.”
He added that the Defense Department would “undoubtedly play an important role towards meeting the president’s objective to eliminate the ability of these cartels to threaten the territory, safety and security of the United States and its people.”
U.S. officials said that up to three guided-missile destroyers would soon arrive in the region. The naval warships will target boats operated by drug cartels transporting fentanyl to the United States, the officials said, but have not said how they will do so.
Also headed to the region is the Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group — including the USS San Antonio, the USS Iwo Jima and the USS Fort Lauderdale, carrying 4,500 sailors — and the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, with 2,200 Marines, Defense Department officials said.
Those ships and the Marines departed Norfolk, Virginia, this week but had to turn around to avoid Hurricane Erin. They are expected to head back out soon and are likely to arrive in the next several days. Several P-8 surveillance planes and a submarine are also deploying to the region, officials said.
The destroyers heading toward a zone outside Venezuelan territorial waters are the USS Jason Dunham and the USS Gravely — both warships that recently featured in the campaign against the Houthi militia in the Red Sea. A third destroyer, the USS Sampson, now in the eastern Pacific, may soon join, one official said.
These warships are Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers, equipped with more than 90 missiles, including surface-to-air missiles. They can conduct antiaircraft and anti-submarine warfare, and shoot down ballistic missiles.
Deploying them against drug cartels would be like “bringing a howitzer to a knife fight,” one defense official said Thursday.
The U.S. Navy has long intercepted and boarded ships suspected of smuggling drugs in international waters, typically with a Coast Guard officer temporarily in charge to invoke law enforcement authority. But the scale of the forces the Pentagon is moving into place, coupled with Trump’s order, suggests that the administration is contemplating actions that go significantly beyond law-enforcement-style maritime interdictions.
“By sending three Arleigh Burke destroyers off the coast of Venezuela, President Trump is bringing serious land attack capability via Tomahawk missiles,” said Adm. James Stavridis, a former head of U.S. Southern Command, now retired. “Also sophisticated intelligence gathering, six advanced helicopters, a thousand sailors and sophisticated command control to run counter narcotic operations at sea.”
The administration’s specific operational intentions are being unusually closely held, even inside the executive branch, according to several officials. It remains unclear what criteria or rules of engagement the administration is considering for any operations using armed force.
Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and a specialist in the laws of war, said the administration should go to Congress for authorization if it wants to use military force against Venezuela. While there are plenty of examples of countries that have looked for incidents to use as a pretext to start wars, he said, “if the U.S. goes out of its way to pick the fight, that’s not self-defense.”
But Finucane also said the situation was difficult to read because the Trump administration has contradictory goals with Venezuela. Its desires to use militarized force against drug cartels and to get Maduro out of power conflict with its desire to persuade Maduro to cooperate in taking back more deported Venezuelan migrants, he said. Finucane added that the military buildup could turn out to be part of a pressure campaign to achieve the latter goal.
During the period when Trump was out of power, a wave of Venezuelans, most fleeing the political and economic chaos under Maduro, flooded toward the United States. Some members of Venezuelan criminal gangs, including one called Tren de Aragua, were apparently among them.
In March, Trump signed an order declaring that he could use the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th century wartime deportation law that had not been invoked since World War II, to send suspected members of Tren de Aragua to a notorious Salvadoran prison without due process hearings. Court rulings have since paused such transfers.
In invoking the law, Trump declared that Tren de Aragua was effectively an arm of the Venezuelan government and was committing crimes in the United States on Maduro’s instructions. But U.S. intelligence agencies do not believe that the Venezuelan government directs and controls the gang, according to officials familiar with the matter and a memo declassified in May.
It is not clear how the administration is interpreting domestic and international law regarding the scope and limits of its ability to use force against suspected cartel members.
One question is whether it wants the military to use wartime rules even though Congress has not authorized any armed conflict, or just to add more muscle to operations that still fall under law enforcement rules. Troops on a battlefield may kill enemy combatants even if they pose no threat in the moment. But police instead arrest criminals who pose no threat; it would be homicide to summarily kill them.
Airstrikes targeting suspected al-Qaida-linked terrorists away from conventional battlefields have raised additional complex questions about what standards would be used to determine whether a person has sufficient connections to a cartel and how confident operators must be that the person in the gun sights is who they think he is and that no civilian bystanders will be hurt or killed.
Comments