Donald Trump pressed to attack Venezuela – and what might come after
The US has deployed its biggest naval presence in the Caribbean since the Cuban missile crisis as the US president weighs unprecedented strikes on Venezuela that could spark civil war.
This month, as US President Donald Trump travelled to his Mar-a-Lago estate, he told reporters aboard Air Force One that he had “sort of” made up his mind about whether to launch US military strikes on Venezuela. “I can’t tell you what it would be,” he added.
Publicly the president has been keeping his options open. But behind the scenes, some of the most powerful people around him have been trying to persuade him to attack Venezuela – and remove its president, Nicolas Maduro – in what would be an extraordinary escalation of months-long military build-up in the Caribbean.
Those in favour of the strikes say they could bring democracy and prosperity to Venezuela and provide a way for the eight million people who have fled the country in the past 10 years to return. These include hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who came to the US and who the Trump administration would like to deport from the country.
Critics say the strikes will destabilise the region and could spark civil war, causing waves of mass displacement and a new conflict in the Americas, created by a president who promised to pull his country out of endless wars.
While Trump mulls over whether to launch attacks on Venezuelan territory, the deployment of military assets to the Caribbean continues to grow. Earlier this month, the USS Gerald R Ford strike group arrived near the coast of Venezuela, the biggest naval presence in the Caribbean since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
On Friday last week, the Federal Aviation Administration warned of threats to aircraft at all altitudes flying over Venezuela, citing the “worsening security situation and heightened military activity in or around Venezuela”. Trump said on Saturday that the airspace above and surrounding Venezuela would be closed entirely.
Strikes in recent weeks on what the US has said are suspected drug trafficking boats have killed a total of 80 people.
All the while, the administration’s messaging ricochets back and forth between threats and negotiation. Last week, Trump allegedly approved plans to let the CIA launch covert measures inside Venezuela, according to The New York Times. All the while, according to several people close to the matter, he is pursuing back-channel negotiations with Maduro’s government, a tactic one described as “information warfare”.
Saturday week ago, Reuters reported that the US would begin a new phase of Venezuela operations “in coming days”, including a possible plan to overthrow Maduro. Two days later, the administration declared the Venezuelan president the head of a terrorist organisation. And yet Trump also said that he would be willing to talk to Maduro, a conversation the socialist dictator has long sought.
On Thursday, in a Thanksgiving holiday address, Trump said that the US would start targeting Venezuelan drug trafficking by land “very soon”.
According to interviews with more than a dozen current and former US officials, White House advisers and people close to the US foreign policy on Venezuela, the president has edged increasingly towards being in favour of strikes on the country to depose Maduro.
The strategy is being driven by Stephen Miller, a 40-year-old Californian whose power stretches far beyond his relatively modest title of deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser.
Miller is the president’s most trusted enforcer: the man in charge of “getting s*** done”, as one adviser said.
“When you step back and see the entire chessboard I think the grand strategy comes from Stephen Miller – this connects his anti-immigration [stance] with the source of a lot of the problems,” said Steve Bannon, Trump’s former top adviser.
He added that Marco Rubio, secretary of state, and Pete Hegseth, secretary of defence, were the “tacticians”.
It wasn’t always like this. Earlier this year, two sources close to the White House said Trump had been focused on making deals with Venezuela that would allow US oil companies to profit from its vast reserves.
That changed over the northern summer. Rubio, the child of Cuban immigrants who grew up in deeply anti-communist south Florida, convinced the president that Maduro, a socialist dictator, should not be seen as head of state.
Instead he should be viewed as a drug kingpin: head of the Cartel de los Soles. It is a shadowy organisation Rubio claims is run by Maduro and the Venezuelan regime that has trafficked tonnes of cocaine to the US. Last week the administration designated it as a terrorist organisation.
“Venezuela is a central hub for narcotics trafficking across the western hemisphere,” Miller told reporters earlier this month. He later added: “We know that the Maduro regime is the Cartel de los Soles which is a recognised narco-trafficking organisation.”
Yet experts and analysts studying Latin America have said the Cartel de los Soles is not one hierarchical, structured cartel organisation. It is rather a loose configuration of groups within Venezuela’s armed forces that are implicated in a range of criminal activities, from drug trafficking to illegal mining and corruption.
The Trump administration, however, has promoted the claim – denied by the Venezuelan government – that Maduro is a “narco-terrorist” who has been engineering the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans by flooding the country with fentanyl. In August, the government announced a $US50m ($77m) reward for information leading to his arrest, double that offered for Osama bin Laden after the September 11 attacks.
The Wall Street Journal reported this month that a secret Justice Department memo described fentanyl – a powerful synthetic opioid which is often mixed with other drugs – as a potential chemical weapons threat, part of an attempt to outline a legal justification for the strikes.
Within the Department of Defence (recently renamed by the administration as the Department of War) and the intelligence community, there are rising concerns over the legality of the strikes on alleged drug boats, the reliability of the intelligence used for targeting them and the lack of transparency with Congress.
Last month, Admiral Alvin Holsey, the head of the US Southern Command, resigned from his post. The admiral is understood to have disapproved of the attacks on boats, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
The UK has stopped sharing intelligence with the US about suspected drug trafficking boats, because it is concerned about the legality of the strikes, according to officials.
Miller also sees the administration’s foreign policy from an immigration perspective. Since Maduro came to power in 2013, appointed by his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, nearly eight million Venezuelans have fled the country, escaping economic collapse and political oppression.
In 2023, Miller told a conservative podcast that the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law, could be used to conduct large-scale deportations; it allows the president to detain and deport the citizens of an enemy nation during wartime in the name of national security.
The administration used the law to send more than 200 Venezuelans to El Salvador this year, claiming that they were members of the Tren de Aragua gang and posed a national threat (they deny this). But since then, it has been stymied by the courts, who have ruled the argument that the US is being “invaded” by migrating Venezuelans or subjected to warfare by Tren de Aragua is without merit.
Geoff Ramsey, non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council focusing on Latin America, said: “It’s difficult to untangle the administration’s policy towards Venezuela from its immigration policy … this administration has made clear that it is interested in invoking the Alien Enemies Act to provide a basis for deporting hundreds of thousands of people, potentially. Once you invoke a law that describes Venezuela as an enemy force that’s actively invading your country, I think the next logical step is to try to advance a force posture to justify that approach.”
Looming over the discussions of whether to escalate by launching attacks on Venezuelan territory is the question of what would come next. Maria Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, whose movement won elections last year that were stolen by Maduro, has repeatedly said that she is ready to assume leadership of the country.
She dismissed concerns that ousting the regime could spark a civil war. Last week, Machado wrote in the Economist that the US-led “pressure is cracking the system from within”.
Another option touted by some Trump advisers is to pile on pressure in the Caribbean by moving in enough weaponry and manpower that someone close to Maduro pushes him aside. It could provide a surface-level change to the regime that may allow Trump officials to claim a victory.
Both of these outcomes are based on a misreading of the regime, two experts on Venezuela said, which has endured a long time under immense US pressure – bending without breaking.
Instead, Venezuela could be left “unmanageable” for some time, one said – a war could throw the region into chaos.
American strikes on Venezuela could also be unpopular among voters. A YouGov survey last month found that 47 per cent of Americans would oppose the US military conducting strikes on Venezuelan territory. Only 19 per cent approved.
Yet a senior source close to the White House said that he believed that Trump had made up his mind that Maduro “had to go”.
The only question, he said, was the timing – and how much US force would be used.
The Sunday Times
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