President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is escalating to disturbing new levels, and the prospect of a military intervention is looking more possible than ever. Such an intervention would not only be an unacceptable act of aggression against a nation that poses no threat to the U.S., it could also destabilize the region while undermining Trump’s own foreign policy and political agendas.
On Saturday, the U.S. military conducted its 21st known strike on an alleged drug-trafficking boat, in the eastern Pacific. The next day, the State Department designated Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization and declared that Maduro was its head — a move that Trump suggested would allow him to strike Maduro’s assets and infrastructure within Venezuela. On the same day, the USS Gerald R. Ford, the largest aircraft carrier in the world, arrived in the Caribbean.
Maduro is “a convenient villain” for Rubio’s crusade against left-wing authoritarian leaders in Latin America and for Trump’s quixotic war on drugs.
All of this comes after the U.S. government doubled its reward for the arrest of Maduro to $50 million and Trump admitted that he recently authorized the CIA to take covert action in Venezuela. The president now says he is open to talking directly to Maduro but hasn’t ruled out deploying troops on the ground in Venezuela.
This evidence suggests that the Trump administration is pursuing regime change in Venezuela. The New York Times even reported in October that U.S. officials “have been clear, privately, that the end goal is to drive Mr. Maduro from power.” This could take several forms; Trump appears to be creating possibilities for multiple approaches, perhaps in an attempt to apply maximum pressure on Maduro to seek a negotiated exit from power. But military action is a nontrivial possibility: Trump has deployed major U.S. assets to the Caribbean — there are now about 15,000 troops in the region, including special operations forces. A Marine expeditionary unit is conducting nighttime training this week in Trinidad and Tobago, just 7 miles from Venezuela. Right-wing commentators are already champing at the bit for military action.
Much of this saber-rattling reflects Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s growing influence over Trump’s foreign policy in the Americas. Rubio is an ultrahawk with a track record of supporting regime change via war, including in Latin America. In 2019, he encouraged Trump to back Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó’s unsuccessful efforts to oust Maduro from power. As George Washington University’s Alexander Downes and Boston College’s Lindsey O’Rourke point out, Rubio appears to have won a monthslong internal debate within the Trump administration about how to approach Venezuela. Key to Rubio’s victory was finding a way to reconcile military intervention-backed regime change with Trump’s right-wing nationalism.
Rubio achieved this by rendering Venezuela a threat to U.S. sovereignty by blaming it for the U.S.’s drug problems. This is both a deceptive and an absurd pretext for war. It’s deceptive because Venezuela has virtually no role in the fentanyl trade, and Drug Enforcement Administration data suggests that only about 8% of U.S.-bound cocaine gets to the country through a “Caribbean corridor” (most of that passing through Venezuela). And it’s absurd because there is no evidence in the U.S.’s decadeslong failed war on drugs that a militarized response to drug trafficking reduces demand or the flow of drugs. “Drug supply-reduction efforts, including those that deploy military assets and use of force, have no lasting impact when they leave in place the ungoverned territory and unpunished corruption that allow organized crime to thrive, fueled by the massive profits of supplying demand for prohibited substances,” wrote the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights organization, in a recent report.
International law does not permit a state to go to war with another state because of drug trade flows from that state. A military strike on Venezuela would be a reprehensible act of aggression, and yet more proof that the “peace president” narrative was always a farce. Downes and O’Rourke, who are experts on regime change, explain that airpower alone would be unlikely to dislodge Maduro, and that the level of manpower needed for a ground deployment to achieve regime change would be huge and undermine Trump’s promises to avoid protracted foreign conflicts. And even if U.S. military action led Maduro to step down, Downes and O’Rourke point out that “regime change instead often begets further violence — for example, it dramatically increases the likelihood of civil war in target countries.” If Trump wants to reduce the flow of Venezuelan migrants into the U.S., regime change achieved by military force could easily achieve the opposite effect. Covert actions by the CIA — such as assisting armed dissidents, pursuing efforts to assassinate Maduro or attempting to instigate a coup against him through efforts like encouraging military defections — could also exacerbate Venezuela’s considerable problems and increase the likelihood of civil conflict. If they were to fail — all the more likely given that Trump has openly discussed them — they could also trigger new levels of repression within the country. Maduro is a brutal and incompetent authoritarian who has ruined a once affluent and lively democracy, but that doesn’t mean ousting him by violent, nondemocratic means is prudent or just. As Francisco Rodríguez, a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told me in an interview in October, Maduro is “a convenient villain” for Rubio’s crusade against left-wing authoritarian leaders in Latin America and for Trump’s quixotic war on drugs. But the outcome of their efforts would likely do nothing to advance Trump’s stated policy agenda on drugs and migration while ushering in a new era of war and instability in the Western Hemisphere.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter by clicking the link at the top of this bio. 
