On September 2nd, the U.S. Navy attacked a vessel in the southern Caribbean Sea, killing 11 people. The U.S. identified the dead as members of Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which was designated a terrorist group in February. President Donald Trump claimed the vessel was carrying illicit drugs and warned, “there’s more where that came from.” He also specifically called out the Venezuelan government, accusing Tren de Aragua of operating under the control of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro.
President Trump wasn’t kidding. Since that first strike, the U.S. military has destroyed 16 boats and killed 64 people as part of a campaign the White House says is aimed at curtailing the flow of drugs into the United States. Aside from the (dubious) legality of the U.S.s trikes, the campaign has caused the second major crisis in U.S.-Colombia relations this year.1 In October, Colombia accused the U.S. of killing a Colombian fishmerman in one of its attacks, an act Colombian President Gustavo Petro called “ a direct threat to [Colombia’s] national sovereignty.” President Trump responded by cutting off all aid — including counter-narcotics assistance — to Colombia and calling Petro an “illegal drug dealer.” Colombia responded by recalling its ambassador.
It is strange timing to pick a diplomatic spat with Colombia, the U.S.’s closest security partner in South America. And yet the U.S. seems to have larger goals than attacking drug boats. How else to explain the ongoing and increasingly sizable U.S. military build-up in the Caribbean? U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made global headlines two weeks ago when he ordered the deployment of an aircraft carrier battle group to the region. When the USS Gerald Ford arrives next week, it will join a formidable array of U.S. forces that have been trickling into the theater since August, including:
The Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group and the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, amounting to more than 4,500 Marines and sailors
Three guided-missile destroyers, an attack submarine, a special operations ship, two refueling tankers, a hospital ship, and a guided missile cruiser and
10 F-35 fighter jets, P-8 Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft, at least three MQ-9 repeat drones, and more
The U.S. is also upgrading military infrastructure in the region. According to Reuters, the U.S. is rapidly upgrading a Cold War-era airbase in Puerto Rico that has been shuttered for over 2 decades. The U.S. has also moved communications gear and a mobile air traffic control tower to Puerto Rico’s second-busiest civilian airport, Rafael Hernandez Airport. Taken together, these deployments are overkill for an anti-drug trafficking expedition. Moreover, U.S. B1 and B52 bombers have circled Venezuela’s coast twice in the past few weeks, and the White House made a big deal authorizing COVERT2 action in Venezuela. (You know it’s covert when every U.S. publication is writing about it.) For a second time as President, Donald Trump has Venezuela’s brutal, corrupt, narcoterrorist regime in his cross hairs.
The First Time Around
President Trump’s first attempt at regime change in Venezuela was not nearly so martial. Toward the end of his first term, in January 2019, Trump recognized Venezuelan opposition figure Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate and interim president. The recognition was more than symbolic — it meant Guaidó could access Venezuelan government assets held in US banks, such as the Federal Reserve. The U.S. also provided direct aid to Guaidó’s “government” via…wait for it…USAID!3
The lesson from Trump’s first administration was twofold:
1) Trump was unwilling to use military force to bring down Maduro’s government, despite significant neocon pressure to do so, and
2) Venezuela’s battered opposition was not capable of seizing on Guaidó’s gambit to engineer regime change in Caracas.
In President Trump’s own words from 2019: “I will continue to use the full weight of United States economic and diplomatic power to press for the restoration of Venezuelan democracy.” Economic and diplomatic — but not carrier battle groups.
Early into his second term, it seemed that President Trump’s strategy toward Venezuela would continue to be economic and diplomatic. This time around, however, Trump would deal with Maduro directly, rather than base his hopes around an unproven opposition leader like Guaidó or María Corina Machado, the latter of whom emerged as direct competitor for that Nobel Peace Prize President Trump wants so badly.4 To that end, in January, Trump dispatched Richard Grenell as a special envoy to begin talks with Maduro’s government.5 Trump was not unique in his willingness to engage with an unsavory dictator. Franklin D. Roosevelt is purported to have explained his support for Nicaraguan dictator-goon Anastasio Somoza García poetrically: “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”6 And if Trump can stomach Kim Jong Un… he can stomach someone like Maduro.
Early returns on Grenell’s negotiations seemed good. Maduro agreed to release six detained Americans in exchange for hundreds of Venezuelan migrants/gang members. Even as the U.S. imposed sanctions7 on countries importing Venezuelan crude, negotiations between Grenell and Venezuela continued through the summer. And it sounds like the deal Grenell reportedly secured was a great one of the Dealmaker in Chief.
According to The New York Times and the USA Today, Maduro agreed to enormous concessions, including opening up all existing and future oil and gold projects to American companies, giving preferential contracts to American businesses, reversing the flow of Venezuelan oil exports from China to the United States, and slashing his country’s energy and mining contracts with Chinese, Iranian and Russian firms. All Maduro reportedly wanted in return was to remain in power.8 When asked a few weeks ago by a reporter if Maduro had indeed made this offer, Trump replied, “He’s offered everything,” President Trump said. “You know why? Because he doesn’t want to fuck around with the United States.”9
But as has often been the case in both Trump administrations, there are other figures in the administration with profoundly differently goals. Insert “Little” Marco Rubio, the current U.S. Secretary of State and National Security Advisor all in one - they should call that the Kissinger package.
Rubio has been clear about his focus since his first day on the job: “It’s no accident that my first trip abroad as secretary of state, to Central America on Friday, will keep me in the hemisphere. This is rare among secretaries of state over the past century. For many reasons, U.S. foreign policy has long focused on other regions while overlooking our own. As a result, we’ve let problems fester, missed opportunities and neglected partners. That ends now…Some countries are cooperating with us enthusiastically—others, less so. The former will be rewarded. As for the latter, Mr. Trump has already shown that he is more than willing to use America’s considerable leverage to protect our interests. ”10
Rubio was born a U.S. citizen in Miami in 1971 to two Cuban exiles who arrived in the U.S. in the late 1950s. He has gotten into hot water11 about the exact timing of his parents immigration to the U.S., but that’s not interesting for our purposes here — all you need to know is the endurance of the Castro regime in Cuba is deeply offensive to Rubio, and Maduro’s support for that regime puts Venezuela in the “others, less so” category for the Secretary of State. He wants the Maduro regime gone — he doesn’t care about Venezuelan oil or relations with China — in classic neocon fashion, he believes it would be good for U.S. interests if the Maduro regime was overthrown and replaced by an imaginary liberal democracy. According to the USA Today, Rubio has sublimated this view successfully: Rubio has apparently reframed the Venezuela issue for the President by narrowing in on Maduro, changing “from a focus on democracy and regime change to a focus on drug trafficking and criminality.” And since getting tough on migrants and drugs is one of the only things working for Trump in the polls, it makes sense the White House has come around.
Which brings us to the current impasse.
It seems clear based on President Trump’s previous policies that he does not want to invade Venezuela to overthrow a dictator. Trump has threatened the use of military force before — two carrier battle groups got deployed to the Pacific when Trump and Kim Jong Un were comparing the size of their red buttons and threatening fire and fury during Trump’s first term — but when it comes to the use of American military force, Trump’s instinct is not to, and when he feels his hand is forced, as earlier this year by Israel, he prefers unambiguously short campaigns with clear objectives. What makes the U.S. deployments to Venezuela so unnerving is that Trump already got everything he wanted from Maduro, or at least, that’s what the reporting suggests. Maybe Maduro is holding back something additional that Trump is hoping his deployments will extract, but based on the information we have, Maduro has, in Trump’s words, “offered everything.”
If the threshold for ceasing military action against Maduro is an end to drugs being moving across the Caribbean…the U.S. will be at war indefinitely. The sudden resignation of Adm. Alvin Holsey, the head of SouthCom, makes me even more skittish that the U.S. might really be considering this in earnest.12
Then again, President Trump seems to be pretty good at reading polls — and a recent YouGov poll shows that Americans do not want to see a U.S. invasion of Venezuela, or a campaign to overthrow Mauro, or even clandestine or overt attacks on Venezuelan targets. Trump’s poll numbers on his handling of the economy are getting wobblier by the month, and while we don’t have inflation numbers during the government shutdown, our last snapshot and my own anecdotal sense of prices doesn’t support the notion that things are going well in the U.S. economy. That makes me want to put my “conspiracy Jacob” hat on and wonder aloud if this military build-up is about something else — perhaps, say, the Panama Canal, which Trump has threatened to take over, or regime change in Cuba, or stronger leverage in trade negotiations with Mexico and other countries in the region. I don’t know, I’m stretching there, because fomenting regime change in Venezuela feels like a mash-up of two of the worst mistakes in U.S. foreign policy history, a combo Bay of Pigs x Iraq War 2.0 poo poo platter. (That’s the technical term, of course.)
Ironically, or perhaps expectedly, the people most desirous of regime change in Caracas at the hands of U.S. military might, aside from the delusional neocons, are Latin Americans and Venezuelans themselves. The Atlas poll below has its idiosyncrasies (especially the greater support for regime change in Venezuela in countries like Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador), but it suggests people in the region are sick and tired of narcoterrorism and cartels and violence. That’s why Nayib Bukele is doing so well as El Salvador’s dictator — he is clearly a dictator, but he also clearly has brought violence down in the country. Ditto Noboa in Ecuador. Brazil made headlines last week after a police raid of a favela killed over 100 people.13
When I was in Matamoros earlier this year for a research project, I was shocked when several Mexican contacts told me they’d welcome U.S. military strikes against drug cartels — anything to get the cartels out of the daily lives of ordinary people.
But Trump is not elected by Venezuelans or Mexicans or Argentines or Colombians. He is elected by Americans. And Americans don’t want this. Moreover, taking down Maduro is not like cutting off the head of a snake — the cartels won’t wither just because a dictator falls. If anything, the chaos that ensues from regime change in Venezuela will create even more opportunity for the cartels. Power abhors a vacuum, but cartels love it. The U.S. couldn’t win the war on terror because terror isn’t an enemy you can defeat. And the U.S. can’t win this war on drugs because you can’t stop people from wanting to take drugs by fiat or policy. Recent U.S. foreign policy history suggests the U.S. can’t even win a war against Maduro. Sure, it could bring down Maduro, but unless the U.S. is ready to occupy the country indefinitely and rebuild it at unaffordable cost, it will likely just make a bad situation worse.
Which leads me to believe Trump is bluffing. What for, I’m not sure.
Take a deeper dive
Elohim Monard, my guest on the podcast this week, disagrees with me, and I admit his point of view is compelling, and one that needs to be wrestled with even if you disagree with him.
In this episode, we argue about whether Trump’s military buildup is really about Venezuela at all. Elo sees it as the vulgar return of U.S. colonial instincts, the empire reasserting control over its “backyard” under the guise of fighting drugs and migration. I’m less sure — I think Trump’s ego, Marco Rubio’s neocon ambitions, and a struggling domestic economy are colliding in a way that could lead to another foreign policy disaster…or just another episode of the reality TV show the White House has become. Either way, as Elo put it, “we still can’t find a good reason for why the U.S. has an aircraft carrier off Venezuela’s coast” — and that’s exactly why we should be paying attention.
Check out the rest of The Jacob Shapiro Podcast here → https://jacobshapiro.com/podcast
Trump isn’t doing anything novel here. From Truman’s “police action” in Korea to Obama’s liberal use of drones to attack jihadists in the Arabian Peninsula, Trump is doing what several U.S. presidents have done — conducting wars that legally speaking can only be carried out with Congress’s assent.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/15/us/politics/trump-covert-cia-action-venezuela.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/10/venezuelan-politician-maria-corina-machado-wins-nobel-peace-prize
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/10/30/trump-marco-rubio-maduro-venezuela-war/86930242007/
Like all great quotes, it seems FDR didn’t say this, but it’s been attributed to him so many times that it’s basically as if he said it. https://digitalcommons.du.edu/hrhw/vol11/iss3/4/
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/imposing-tariffs-on-countries-importing-venezuelan-oil/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/world/americas/maduro-venezuela-us-oil.html
https://co.usembassy.gov/marco-rubio-an-americas-first-foreign-policy/#:~:text=Some%20countries%20are%20cooperating%20with,safeguard%20Americans’%20own%20economic%20security.
https://www.npr.org/2011/10/24/141663197/rubio-tries-to-clarify-how-his-family-left-cuba
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/16/us/politics/southern-command-head-stepping-down.html
https://apnews.com/article/brazil-favela-deaths-f2e7366d98790c5c90e7996ec8b3282f
My guess is that it is all a counter to the russkies trying to poke the soft underbelly of the US.