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.
