There is little surprise that the contours of US President Donald Trump’s foreign policy are wavering. And moments of apparent success against Iran’s nuclear program (however brief) are uneasily linked to fleeting moments of fantasy, such as the occupation of Greenland (remember those?).
But the possibility of military action against Venezuela is imminent, using a variety of violent means, and the White House is being dragged into the realm of foreign involvement that it has always said it abhors. And it goes directly against the lessons of the U.S. Republican military effort of the past two decades, as well as decades of previous experience in the region.
What exactly does the Trump administration want to do here, and how long does it think it will take to accomplish it?These are two questions that the administration has traditionally tried to answer publicly and at pains to clarify before military action. But it remains in turmoil. And the variables don’t look good either.
The most sensitive goal of military action is to stop drug trafficking. However, this is something that is very difficult to achieve with a targeted attack. First, Venezuela is not a center of drug trafficking. It is a route that begins in neighboring Colombia and ends at the US border in Mexico. Venezuela is a facilitator, even allowing its territory to be used for flights carrying Colombian cocaine north, and hosting warehouses and processing plants that operate in conditions with less punishment than Colombia. But that’s only a tenth of the problem at worst, not the core of the problem.
Second, the drug trade is indescribably profitable and no amount of campaigning can really stop it. The incentives are too great. Consider a flight heading north from Venezuela, Colombian officials said. Colombian officials say it grew rapidly during President Trump’s first term, using 50 secret airstrips in Venezuela’s Zulia region to ferry cargo to Central America and beyond.
Each plane makes one flight, and then the planes are abandoned in the bushes, as we saw them cross the Mosquitia coastline of Honduras in 2019. Revenue from the cargo is in the tens of millions of dollars, but the plane is only worth about $150,000, so the logical answer is to scrap it rather than reuse it, reducing the risk of seizure. This is the concept of human trafficking. There are very few couriers who wouldn’t pay millions of dollars to do weeks of dangerous work. And there are too many products to worry about too much. One official told me at the time how, when fearing interception at sea, these small planes would dump their cargo overboard and pay local fishermen $150,000 to have their cocaine returned.
Since then, traffickers have turned to boats and even unmanned submersibles guided by Starlink satellite internet antennas to evade capture. At best, a joint U.S. bombing campaign can hope to deter this type of outrageous profiteering. But you can’t kill business without killing the demand that supports business in the United States itself.
And then there’s the question of affordability for the United States. Ten years ago, the Pentagon became concerned about putting expensive warheads in the foreheads of jihadists. It would be highly inefficient to send $1 million missiles to incinerate raw cocaine, which is so close to its source that it still doesn’t earn anything close to its final distribution price in the United States. According to the United Nations, Colombia is currently nearing record levels of cocaine production and has no shortage of powder to move.
The Trump administration could set back, inconvenience, slow, or even impede drug trafficking in the region. But Venezuela is not the main source, and there will always be poor and underprivileged young people in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia willing to step into the hole left by US drone strikes.
So what if regime change is the goal? Is it to “shock and awe” Venezuela’s fragile and economically beleaguered dictator Nicolas Maduro into flight? A series of pinpoint airstrikes could destroy key Venezuelan military assets, including runways, air defense facilities, Su-30 attack aircraft, and Russian T-72 tanks. But military action is already being discussed in public, and President Maduro has been given plenty of warning to move his most valuable equipment, including the political class, and even himself.
The most technologically advanced military force in history still has its limits. A missile with a rotating blade could have been used to kill al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri on a balcony in Kabul in 2022. But it failed to stop a humiliating expulsion from the city by far outnumbered Taliban forces a year ago.
U.S. policy requires public support from the people it is imposed on, and that is rarely achieved with a 30,000-foot missile launch. In Iraq, even the torture and false arguments accumulated to eliminate the despicable butcher Saddam Hussein were met with an Iraqi population that broadly rejected the occupation at the muzzle of an M4 assault rifle. Many Serbs were outraged by the 1999 NATO bombing, even though embattled Slobodan Milosevic was released a year later.
The United States’ impending action against Venezuela bears so many historical parallels that the United States has attempted so many times before. Indeed, one thing the United States may be trying to instigate is a popular uprising to establish a more friendly government, something that President Trump has tried to do before.
In 2019, there was a brief uprising in what appeared to be a military coup-like attempt to succeed Maduro. The weather became completely flat and I remember the overwhelming calm when we arrived in Caracas. The plot did little to upset Maduro. And it comes after months of intense U.S. and Colombian pressure, with Juan Guaidó, a relatively popular reformist leader who won recent elections. In doing so, it presented the country with an internationally recognized and ready alternative government.
Trump had previously tried to shake up Caracas to overthrow Maduro, but failed. Whatever Mr. Maduro’s fate, any attempt at regime change again will require ensuring that what happens next is actually in U.S. interests and not replaced by a more aggressive subordinate.
And what about land invasions, a favorite canard of American military policy? Throwing thousands of young Americans into an angry coastal nation twice the size of California, with a population of 30 million people, is the antithesis of Trump’s obsession with Nobel Prizes to end wars and reduce America’s global influence.
Currently, only 15,000 U.S. troops are concentrated in the area, making it logistically suicidal. And it will stir echoes of the acid reflux of the Bay of Pigs, when the United States tried to oust a similar leftist dictator in Cuba, a failed operation that has become synonymous with CIA overreach in the Americas.
The Trump administration’s goals are difficult to assess because they are intentionally opaque. But across the spectrum, we will find enemies with far greater incentives to adapt and continue, or regime change options that have failed over the past 25 years, or even in the first term.
Perhaps Trump’s hope is that the sound and fury — if not the goal of the operation in itself — will be significant enough to force Maduro to make a deal to get out alive.
But Trump administration officials run into a contradiction in their own policies here. If they say that Maduro is a kingpin of traffickers and a narco-terrorist, surely his decisions about flight will be complicated rather than simplified by this role? There will certainly be powerful and violent people who need him to stay in office.
Wherever President Trump secretly lands on his policy decisions, he may soon learn that it’s hard to get a gun home without using it, and perhaps even harder to know what to do with it once it’s fired.
