In the vacillating contours of US President Donald Trump’s foreign policy, little should surprise. And outlying moments of apparent success against Iran’s nuclear program (even if short-lived), are uneasily partnered with moments of fleeting fancy, like seizing Greenland (remember that?)
But the looming possibility of military action against Venezuela – across a wide spectrum of violent options – drags the White House into realms of foreign involvement it has always said it loathed. And it puts it squarely in opposition to the lessons of the past two decades of US Republican military endeavors, and plenty of decades of regional experience before that.
Just what exactly does the Trump administration want to do here, and how long does it think it will take to achieve? These are two questions an administration conventionally seeks to publicly and painstakingly lay out the answers to before military action. But it remains mired in confusion. And the variables do not look good.
The most slender goal of military action is to stop drug trafficking. Yet this is something exceptionally hard to achieve with targeted strikes. Firstly, Venezuela is not the hub of narco-trafficking: that is a route which begins in neighboring Colombia, and ends on the US border in Mexico. Venezuela has been a facilitator, even permitting its territory to be used to launch the planes that carry Colombian cocaine north, and harboring depots and processing plants which operate in a climate of greater impunity than in Colombia. But it is at worst a tenth of the problem, not its heart.
Secondly, the drug trade is so unspeakably profitable, no kinetic activity can really stop it. The incentives are simply too great. Consider the planes that fly north from Venezuela – booming during the first Trump term, using 50 covert runways in Venezuela’s Zulia region to move their packages to central America for onward transportation, according to Colombian officials.
Each plane makes the trip once, and as we saw across Honduras’ Moskitia coastline in 2019, is abandoned in the bush. The money to be made from its cargo is in the tens of millions, while the plane is worth only about $150,000, so it is logically dumped rather than used again, decreasing the risk of capture. This is the mindset of trafficking: there is truly little couriers would not do for their part of millions of dollars, for a few weeks’ risky work. And there is too much product to get too anxious: one official told me then of how these tiny planes, when they feared interception at sea, would simply throw their cargo overboard and pay local fisherman $150,000 to return the cocaine to them.
Traffickers have since turned to boats – and even unmanned submersibles guided by Starlink satellite internet dishes – to evade capture. A concerted US bombing campaign can at best hope to disrupt this sort of extraordinary profiteering. But you cannot kill the business unless you kill the demand feeding it in the United States itself.
And then there is the question of affordability for the United States. The Pentagon used to be concerned about putting an expensive “warhead on the forehead” of jihadist militants a decade ago. It is wildly inefficient to send a million-dollar missile to incinerate raw cocaine, so close to source that it has yet to earn anywhere near its eventual US street value. Colombia is currently close to record cocaine production, according to the UN, so there is no shortage of powder to try to move.
The Trump administration can set back, inconvenience, delay or even hamper, drug trafficking in the region. But Venezuela is not its main source, and there will always be poor, disadvantaged young men there, or in Colombia, Ecuador or Bolivia, willing to step into any vacancy left by US drone strikes.
So what if regime change is the goal? To “shock and awe” Venezuela’s fragile and economically beleaguered authoritarian, Nicolas Maduro, into fleeing? A series of pinpoint airstrikes could destroy key assets in Venezuela’s military – its runways, air defenses, Su-30 attack jets, and Russian T-72 tanks. But military action is already being discussed publicly, giving Maduro plenty of warning to move his most prized equipment, including his political hierarchy, and even himself.
The most technologically advanced military power in history still has limitations. It may have been able to kill al Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, using a missile equipped with spinning blades on a balcony in Kabul in 2022. But it was unable to stop its humiliating ousting from the same city a year earlier, by a far inferior Taliban force.
US policy needs popular support from the people it is being imposed upon, and that is rarely achieved from a missile launch at 30,000 feet. In Iraq, even the tortured and false arguments amassed to remove the vile butcher Saddam Hussein ran into an Iraqi people who widely rejected occupation at the barrel of an M4 assault rifle. Many Serbians were angered by NATO bombing in 1999, even though the source of their woes, Slobodan Milosevic, was defenestrated a year later.
Looming US action in Venezuela is beset with so many historical comparables because the US has tried this so many times before. Indeed, the one thing the US might try to foment – a popular revolt to install a more friendly government – Trump has tried before too.
In 2019, a brief insurrection tried to start a military coup of sorts that seemed to aim to replace Maduro. It fell utterly flat, and I recall arriving in Caracas to scenes of underwhelming calm. The plot had barely rattled Maduro. And that was after months of intense US and Colombian pressure, in which Juan Guaido – a relatively popular reformist leader who had won recent elections – presented the country with an alternative, internationally recognized government-in-waiting, ready to go.
Trump has tried before to shake Caracas so hard that Maduro would topple, but he failed. Whatever the fate of Maduro, any repeat bid at regime change needs to be sure what follows is actually in US interests, and not a more aggressive subordinate in Maduro’s place.
And what of the favorite canard of US military policy: the land invasion? Dropping thousands of young Americans into an angry coastal nation of 30 million, twice the size of California, is the polar opposite of Trump’s obsession with Nobel Prizes for ending wars, and lessening the US global footprint.
It is logistically suicidal with the mere 15,000 US troops currently amassed in the region. And it would stir the acid-reflux echo of the Bay of Pigs, where the US tried to oust a similarly leftist dictator in Cuba, in a botched operation that has become a by-word for damaging CIA overreach in the Americas.
It is hard to evaluate the Trump administration’s goals as it has been purposefully opaque with them. But across their spectrum, it will find an adversary wildly more incentivized to adapt and continue, or options for regime change that have failed in the past 25 years, or even in their first term.
Trump’s hope is perhaps that the sound and fury – if this is not itself the goal of the operation – will signify enough that Maduro makes a deal to flee alive.
Yet Trump’s officials run into a contradiction of their own policy here. If Maduro is the kingpin trafficker and narco-terrorist they say he is, then surely his decisions about fleeing are complicated by this role, rather than simplified? There will surely be powerful and violent people who need him to stay on.
Wherever Trump has secretly landed in his policy decisions, he may soon learn it is hard to send the guns home without using them, and perhaps harder still to know what to do with them once they have fired.