We’re on the Verge of War With Venezuela (and Maybe Colombia)
What could possibly go wrong?
NYT (“U.S. Deploys Aircraft Carrier to Latin America, a Major Escalation“):
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the deployment of the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford as well as its accompanying warships and attack planes to waters off Latin America, the Pentagon said on Friday, in a dramatic escalation of military might in the region.
The enhanced American presence “will bolster U.S. capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States homeland and our security in the Western Hemisphere,” Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, said on social media.
[…]
Since late August, the U.S. military has deployed about 10,000 troops to the Caribbean, about half of them on eight warships and half in Puerto Rico, for what the administration says is a counterterrorism and counternarcotics mission. The Ford carries about 5,000 sailors and has more than 75 attack, surveillance and support aircraft, including F/A-18 fighters.
Aircraft carriers have toured the waters in the Caribbean and off Latin America before on what the Navy calls “good will” tours. But cutting short the Ford’s scheduled deployment by several months and redirecting it to Latin America for a possible combat mission amid the intensifying U.S. strikes on boats the administration says are carrying drugs is highly unusual, current and former Navy officials said.
[…]
Since returning to office in January, Mr. Trump has designated a series of Latin American drug cartels and criminal gangs, including Tren de Aragua, as terrorist organizations. Mr. Hegseth has repeatedly compared them to Al Qaeda.
Congress authorized an armed conflict with Al Qaeda after it attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001; lawmakers have not authorized a war on unrelated other terrorist groups. The designations are also disputed since by definition, terrorists are motivated by ideological or religious goals, while cartels seek illicit profits.
[…]
In the buildup to the boat strikes operation as well as in its opening phase, the Trump administration largely focused on Venezuela and its authoritarian leader, President Nicolás Maduro, who has been indicted in the United States on drug trafficking charges. The administration has called him illegitimate and portrayed him as the head of a drug cartel.
The Trump administration is also considering options for land strikes in Venezuela and trying to use force to remove Mr. Maduro. Proponents of a regime-change operation include Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe.
The U.S. military has prepared a list of drug facilities in Venezuela that it could strike, and presented the package to Mr. Trump, according to U.S. officials briefed on the deliberations.
Atlantic correspondents Nancy A. Youssef, Gisela Salim-Peyer, and Jonathan Lemire declare, “The U.S. Is Preparing for War in Venezuela.” After some preliminary paragraphs, they observe,
The U.S. hasn’t sent this many ships to the Caribbean since the Cuban missile crisis. There are already roughly 6,500 Marines and sailors in the region, operating from eight Navy vessels, as well as 3,500 troops nearby. Once the Ford arrives, the U.S. will have roughly as many ships in the Caribbean as it used to defend Israel from Iranian missile strikes this summer. The carrier strike group also provides far more firepower than is necessary for the occasional attack on narco-trafficking targets. But the ships could be ideal for launching a steady stream of air strikes inside Venezuela.
“The only thing you could use the carrier for is attacking targets ashore, because they are not going to be as effective at targeting small boats at sea,” Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and retired Navy officer, told us. “If you are striking inside Venezuela, the carrier is an efficient way to do it due to the lack of basing in the region.”
As U.S.-military assets in the region have accumulated, the administration’s language about deposing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has grown more threatening. A person close to the White House told Semafor this week that the administration would cooperate with Congress on its plans for military action only when “Maduro’s corpse is in U.S. custody.”
For about two months, the flotilla of American warships in the Caribbean has kept Venezuelans in suspense. The White House calls it a “counter-narcotic” mission, but Latin American analysts see it as a regime-change operation. Some Trump-administration officials hope that the threat of attacks on Venezuelan soil, coupled with the drumbeat of strikes at sea, will be sufficient to force Maduro to flee, making a direct campaign to remove him unnecessary. “Sending a message may be enough,” a senior administration official told us. “The pressure that is going to be applied will be immense.”
The antidrug mission has been “a pressure campaign to see if the regime will crack,” Elliott Abrams, who served as special representative for Venezuela during the first Trump administration, told us. Among the aims of the strikes is to prompt military defections within the regime, which could in turn lead to its demise. “The idea is that officials will say to themselves, Maduro will fall, but I don’t have to fall with him,” Abrams said. During other Venezuelan political crises—including in 2014 and 2019—there have been prominent defections. But this time, the regime has held together—so far, at least.
Oh, and for good measure:
Maduro is not the only target of Trump’s ire in the region. The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, started complaining this month about the Caribbean strikes, claiming that they had taken the life of an innocent fisherman. Trump accused Petro on Sunday of being a “drug leader”—the same accusation he’s made against Maduro. On Tuesday, the American military struck a boat close to Colombia’s Pacific Coast. Petro, far from seeking a de-escalation, went on Univision to invoke Freud and ruminate about genitalia and machismo. At the end of the interview, he called for Trump to be ousted.
I must admit, while I study defense policy for a living, I did not have starting wars with Venezuela and Colombia on my BINGO card. But there is some small comfort in this:
All of the military experts we consulted agree that the United States doesn’t appear to be preparing for a boots-on-the-ground invasion like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. More likely, they said, the administration is gearing up for a “push the button, watch things explode” operation, like the strikes against nuclear facilities in Iran in June. Among the potential targets being considered is infrastructure used by suspected narcotics traffickers, officials familiar with the administration’s thinking told us.
Naturally, however,
But such a campaign would not be without peril for the troops carrying it out. Since the strikes began, Venezuela also has already flown F-16s over American destroyers operating in the region. During any attack in Venezuelan air space, U.S. pilots would likely come up against Maduro’s air defenses. Analysts differ over how much of Venezuela’s air defense is fully functional and maintained, but they are in consensus that its military has a network of anti-aircraft batteries, multiple air-defense units armed with cannons, and numerous portable air-defense systems. The military also has a sophisticated long-range-missile system capable of shooting down aircraft and ballistic missiles, according to Geoff Ramsey, a Venezuela expert at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank.
Ramsey warned that even if the strikes lead to defections and eventually the fall of the regime, multiple pro-government armed groups in the country could challenge a new government and contribute to a bloody outcome that would look something like Libya after the 2011 fall of Muammar Qaddafi.
It’s worth noting that, even though Trump (and I), opposed that operation and it turned out to be a much bigger disaster than just about anyone predicted, there was next to zero political fallout from it. Obama was easily re-elected the following year, and the only reason Libya was even mentioned in the campaign was because four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were killed in an attack on our consulate in Benghazi unrelated to the intervention.
Trump is trying to add another power the Constitution assigned to Congress to the Executive Branch’s arsenal, declaring war. And, of course, the spineless leadership in Congress is fine with it, so long as the President has an R after his name.
Oh yeah. I just remembered. I saw Eddie Harris at the Cypress Lounge here in Sleepytown sometime in the ’80s. It was my regular hang out in my drinking days. (25¢ draft beer all the time) Small place. Basement bar. No stage. He sat about ten feet from us. Good times!
We can all take comfort in the fact that escalation is practically unknown in warfare.
We knock off the government, Venezuela loses whatever governmental cohesion it had, civil war, disease and famine to follow. And then what? Are we going to sink the refugee boats, too? Because there’s going to be a whole new Mariel boat crisis.
This is not about drugs. Venezuela is irrelevant to the drug flow. And cutting off drug-suppression funds to Colombia is obviously not about fighting cartels. Trump is an out-of-control, power-mad old man who wets himself and can’t get a hard-on, and so is desperate to prove he’s still vital and alive and just the bestest and most macho stable genius ever.
Oh, and there’s oil. And after the war there will have to be reparations paid by Venezuela. I wonder where they’ll find the means? Maybe by leasing their oil fields to American firms at huge discounts? And there’s the side benefit of corrupting the US military and training them to obey, not the constitution, but the will of the dictator.
And per James other post this morning, the swabbies on the Ford may not get paid Friday. Maybe Trump will again steal funds from elsewhere, or maybe Trump will direct the 130 mil private donation to the Ford group. Does a privately financed war need Congressional approval? IIRC in the early 1800s American citizens launched private invasions into Central America and Mexico. Ironically, the practice was called “filibustering”.
Libya is now a failed state, at war with itself, while a generation of young Libyans are restrained in education and career by the fallout from ongoing, society wide threats of violence limiting economic opportunity and normalcy. The Libyan people are in an indefinite holding pattern.
American voters have no idea the longterm impact of our country’s foreign policy on the lives of people in these “far flung” places. The US national security braintrust had the removal of Gaddafi and al-Assad of Syria were high on their wish list. When opportunities arose, we were willing to provide the nudge, ignoring the risks to those who live with the consequences. Because, “not our problem.”
Yes, there was “no political fallout” for U.S. politicians because American awareness largely remains turned inward.
But Gaddafi is gone, amirite!!!
Recommended reading: The Return by Hisham Matar. A Libyan expat chronicles his return to Libya and agonizing search for his missing father, a political prisoner of the Gaddafi regime. Deeply moving and insightful writing that illuminates a gulf of ignorance hindering the West in its ability to navigate foreign affairs in places like Libya, much to our own deficit.
Watch out for what we wish for.
As the Ukrainians have shown, traditional naval power can be very susceptible to drone weaponry. The felon and his minions are at a FAFO moment, which will create a second Haiti.
Regarding the fallout from the Libya fiasco, Libya is far away, in a region that has been chaos for all of living memory, while Venezuela is effectively on our doorstep, with thousands of Venezuelan nationals already in our country, not to forget the thousands of Caribbean people that reside here and are paying attention.
Anybody want to bet that any Venezuelan consulate deaths will be actually blamed on Trump? No? Shocking.
Fun fact: Despite the best misinformation attempts from FoxNews, Hillary was not in any way responsible for Stevens’ death.
@Sleeping Dog: Nothing is “far away” any more. We’re just very bad at seeing beyond the immediacy of one or two moments.
It’s getting really hard to believe Admiral Holsey’s retirement last week wasn’t over policy and illegal orders.
@Michael Reynolds:
The bulk of Venezuela’s oil reserves are nasty, sour, extra-heavy crudes. It already trades at a discount to higher quality petroleum. There is limited global refining capacity that can deal with it. And if it does introduce more cheap oil into the market, one of the groups that will be hurt are the marginal US fracking firms.
When I was a kid, my mom kept a Hazel cartoon up on the refrigerator, just for me. The boy in the household was involved in a questionable activity, and Hazel was leaning over him, arms crossed and toe tapping, asking, “Have you thought this through?” Trump and his economic advisors should have a copy.
@Michael Cain:
Yep, it’s shitty oil, but there are huge reserves of same, and Trump will still be able to sell leases. There’s also gas, off-shore. I don’t think that’s his main motivation, but a profitable side hustle to demonstrating his machismo.
And of course Trump loves hurting people and increasingly, killing them. I think in his mind he’s competing now not just with Biden and Barack ‘Peace Prize’ Obama, but with both Roosevelts, Lincoln and Washington.
I suspect he’s become much more focused on his own approaching death and is desperate to leave a permanent monument to his glory: the ballroom, the Arc de Fail, and of course the Nobel Peace Prize which is typically awarded to American imperialists who overthrow South/Central American governments. He’ll push for his face on currency and no doubt Mount Rushmore.
My name is Trump, King of Kings; Look on my tacky works, ye mighty, and despair!
@Michael Reynolds:
The sooner he meets his maker, the better.
@Gregory Lawrence Brown:
Les McCann and Eddie Harris, Swiss Movement.
A truly great album. Such a soulful groove.
It propelled the Montreux Jazz Festival into a place of permanent prominence.
There are other songs on that album that are very good too:
Kathleen’s Theme, and You’ve Got It In Your Soulness come to mind.
@Sleeping Dog:..his maker…
What kind of maker would create such a schmuck?
@Gregory Lawrence Brown:
One with a rather perverse sense of humour?
Someone in Washington might do well to read some history re Napoleon Bonaparte.
“Let’s invade Spain. What could possibly go wrong?”
@Michael Cain:
iirc a lot of US refineries, for historic reasons, are set up to process heavy/sour.
Which is why the US exports light/sweet crude to Europe, and imports heavy/sour.
@Michael Reynolds:
I doubt that, in reality, such an invasion would yield much reward in terms of oil or gas profits.
Given the setup costs, and massive sabotage risks.
But that such thoughts occur to Trump is unlikely; nor do there seem many in this administration, unlike 2017-21, willing to tell him outright that he’s being an idiot.
@Rob1:
Well, few in Syria, outside the Alawites, seem to mourn the fall of Assad.
The US failure in that case seems to have been “willing to wound, but afraid to strike”.
There seems post-Bush2 a widespread US desire to somehow magically detach from the toils of the Middle East by ignoring it and hoping it will go away.
Unfortunately, to adapt Trotsky:
“You may not be interested in the Middle East. But the Middle East is interested in you.”
Some might think it sensible, if considering a war on Venezuela, to have Colombia onside.
But what do I know?
@JohnSF:
It’s like the old Middle East saying: The enemy of my enemy is my enemy too!!!11!!!!11
Perhaps naively, I tend to think Occam’s Razor best explains Trump’s behavior with regard to Latin America. He likes Bukele and Miele because they fawn on him and do what he wants, so he showers favors on them. He likes Bolsonaro so Brazil cops a 50% tariff for being insolent enough to indict him despite being told not to. Apparently he’s inclined to like Sheinbaum, so Mexico is being spared the worst of his wrath over trade and drug issues, despite Mexican cartels being responsible for most of the drug trade.
He’s never liked Maduro. He told him to resign. Maduro was rude in response, so Trump is going to show him who’s boss. Now Petro’s had the impertinence to call him a liar, so he is also going to go through some things.
Trump is an exceptionally immature narcissist who follows a crude New York mob code: take everything personally, look after loyalists who know their place, hit back as hard as you can against anyone who crosses you. If someone doesn’t love you, make them fear you. I believe that pretty much explains Trump’s whole approach to ruling. If there are deeper, more strategic plans being developed and implemented, I suggest they are the work of officials seeking to manipulate and use Trump for their own ambitions, not of Trump himself.
I’m guessing the Kingdom of the Netherlands (as in the ABC Islands, complicated, external territory that is just off VZ, the source of their fresh vegetables – islands are deserts) has told the USA to pack sand regarding using their islands. Navy P-3s and P-8s have operated for decades out of Curacao for drug surveillance, vectoring in USCG ships (I’m sure they are still allowing the accustomed operations, but little more). I expect Trinidad & Tobago has done likewise. It is about 550 miles from Puerto Rico to Caracas (SFO-LAX is 340) = not close. I’ve worked with Dutch and Americans who have done operations out of Curacao, and have visited there (tourist), why I thought of this connection.
Related is how much of Venezuela’s population has fled? Columbia, Peru and Ecuador have taken in most. This is by far the largest refugee crisis in the Americas. Ever. More than Cuba. These other countries have answered this humanitarian issue way more than the USA.
Imagine being a government lawyer at DHS (ICE) trying to figure out the mess of sending letters to Venezuelan Refugees suggesting they self deport (many here 20 + year) to a place the USA is sending a Carrier Battle Group. You can’t send refugees to a war zone. Can I be disbarred? Can I get a job after this? [An acquaintance’s wife got one of these letters.]
As for the VZ oil, USA refineries would take a long time (likely a year plus) to adjust to it. Years back it was mostly handled at the now shuttered HESS refinery in the USVI, plus one in Texas. Michael Cain has covered this I see. [Cynic – Burlington Northern Rail hauling oil is more important domestically).
gVOR10 – you are off by many decades – those attempts were after 1850 as I recall, not early 1800s when Spain was in control. I totally agree on ADM Holsey (but no time in grade, likely retired as VADM – and I bet Hegseth will still try to screw him over – but he’ll make more in retirement than on Active Duty since he can’t make more than a Congress-critter on Active Duty).
FYI – Bryan Clark in the article quoted was at CBSA and involved with the Office of Net Assessment. That got my attention (I was checking it wasn’t RADM Brian Clark, Ret, who I couldn’t see being at The Hudson Inst). (Looks like a Nuke LDO at the 7-year point by the career pattern of prototypes).
@Sleeping Dog: “The felon and his minions are at a FAFO moment, which will create a second Haiti.”
In Venezuela or the USA?
@Ken_L:
In a nut shell.
@Ken_L:
There are likely other, financially motivated reasons. It has been pointed out that Scott Bessent’s billionaire hedge fund friend, Bob Citrone, is heavily invested in Argentinian debt and equities.
Bessent steps in to protect profits of friendly investors in Argentina
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent comes to the rescue of hedge funds including BlackRock, Fidelity, Pimco and Discovery Capital Management, all of which bought Argentine bonds
Socialism for billionaires, not the starving.