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THE US WARSHIPS OFF VENEZUELA AREN’T THERE TO FIGHT DRUGS  
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Guillaume Long
October 24, 2025
Center for Economic and Policy Research
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_ The military build-up off Venezuela’s coast is a slippery slope
towards an armed conflagration, far greater suffering for the
Venezuelan people, regional destabilization and a potential political
quagmire for the United States _

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Ten thousand soldiers on board 10 US warships, including a nuclear
submarine, several destroyers and a missile cruiser, patrol the
southern Caribbean in what is the largest US military build-up in the
region in decades. At least seven boats allegedly transporting drugs
have been bombed, resulting in the extrajudicial killing of more than
32 people. And now the US administration is threatening Venezuela with
direct military action. The Pentagon has reportedly drawn up plans for
military strikes inside Venezuela, and President Trump has authorized
the CIA to conduct lethal covert operations there.

All of this is ostensibly aimed at getting rid of Maduro, who Trump
claims is leading a vast criminal organization. “Maduro is the
leader of the designated narco-terrorist organization Cartel de los
Soles, and he is responsible for trafficking drugs into the United
States,” Secretary of State — and longtime Venezuela hawk —
Marco Rubio has said to justify the US military posture in the region.
The United States has also placed a $50m bounty on the Venezuelan
president’s head.

The official narrative is a fabrication. The existence of a Venezuelan
government-run “Cartel de los Soles”, let alone its control of the
transnational cocaine trade from Venezuela, has been largely debunked.
And while “Tren de Aragua” is a real criminal organization with a
transnational presence, it lacks the capacity to operate in the ways
suggested by the United States; it certainly pales in comparison to
the power of cartels in Colombia, Mexico, or Ecuador.

Tellingly, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration’s
National Drug Threat Assessment of 2024 does not even mention
Venezuela. And a classified National Intelligence Council report
established that Maduro did not control any drug trafficking
organisation. There is no denying that there is some transiting of
drugs through Venezuela, but the volume is marginal compared with the
cocaine currently passing through South America’s Pacific Coast
routes. And Venezuela plays no role in the production and export of
synthetic drugs such as fentanyl, or with the US’s broader opioid
crisis. Put simply, if the Trump administration was actually intent on
combating drug trafficking, Venezuela makes little sense as a target.

So what is US policy really about? And where might this dramatic
escalation lead?

At first, the US display of force off the coast of Venezuela appeared
to be an exercise in political theatre: an attempt by President Trump
to project his “tough on crime” approach to domestic — including
eager MAGA — audiences. “If you traffic in drugs toward our
shores, we will stop you cold,” US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth
said last week. Recent polls show that crime remains one of
Americans’ primary concerns.

Another reading was that Trump’s build-up was a political stunt
designed to appease the neo-cons in his administration, sectors of
Washington’s foreign policy establishment, and radical elements of
the Venezuelan opposition, including Maria Corina Machado, the new
Nobel Laureate and hardline opposition leader who has called for
foreign intervention in her own country. Unlike more moderate
Venezuelan opposition leaders, these actors are all hostile to any
perceived normalization with Venezuela and oppose Trump’s recent
granting of an operating license to Chevron. The build-up appeared, in
this light, as a typical Trumpian bluff: projecting toughness towards
Maduro while simultaneously securing Venezuela’s oil.

One potential scenario is that the rhetorical escalation of the last
few weeks will not be matched by direct attacks on Venezuela, and that
the United States’s extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean will
simply continue as they have over the last month and a half. In the
absence of any serious US drug policy — especially on the vital
issues of consumption or money laundering — the satellite imagery of
small boats being blown up in the Caribbean serves Trump’s agenda
well, albeit with tragic consequences for the boats’ unidentified
occupants and their families.

But today, the sheer scale of the US military build-up does not align
with the idea of a cynical political stunt, nor does Trump’s
decision to cut off all diplomatic backchannels with the Venezuelan
government and deauthorise special envoy Rick Grenell’s outreach to
Maduro. The more we look at the military deployment and the
increasingly belligerent rhetoric from Trump officials, the more the
pursuit of regime change through military means appears to be the most
plausible explanation.

Rubio and his fellow Florida Republicans have, of course, been
ardently advocating for a more aggressive approach towards Venezuela
for years. For Rubio, toppling the Venezuelan president — and
perhaps, if he can ride the momentum, even overthrowing the Communist
Party in Cuba — is a generational objective, more symbolic than
strategic, and rooted in political passions and fantasies of return
and revenge.

Given that US sanctions, coup attempts and the support of a parallel
Venezuelan government in 2019, all measures strongly backed by Rubio,
failed to overthrow Maduro, it appears that the Secretary of State has
concluded that direct military intervention is the only way to achieve
this end, and that he is weighing heavily in favor of this outcome
inside the administration.

The prospect of US boots on the ground, however, still feels
incongruous, especially given Washington’s many more pressing
geopolitical interests and Trump’s repeated promise, to the applause
of his MAGA base, that he will not drag the country into new
“forever wars”. But this is the Western Hemisphere, not the
distant Middle East. And in this new multipolar reality, which even
Rubio now acknowledges, the return to traditional spheres of influence
means the US is once again wielding a big stick in its hemisphere,
openly reverting to the gunboat diplomacy that so often rocked the
Caribbean in the early 20th century before the US was a global power.

There is no understating the extent of the asymmetry of a potential
war between the United States and Venezuela, nor the US capacity to
easily overwhelm Venezuela’s conventional forces. But it would be
mistaken to think an invasion of Venezuela would be a replay of Panama
in 1989–1990 or Haiti in 1994, the last occasions the US occupied
countries in its hemisphere. The 20th and 21st centuries were, of
course, marred by constant overt and covert US meddling in the
national politics of South American states. But unlike Central America
and the Caribbean, where smaller and less powerful states became the
testing ground for the rise of the US Marine Corps, Washington has
never carried out an outright military intervention on the South
American landmass. Venezuela, with about 28 million inhabitants, has
roughly the same population as Iraq had in 2003 and more than 10 times
that of Panama in 1990.

It’s also important to bear in mind that even a weakened chavismo
still commands a sizable and ardent base of support. Opposition to any
US military intervention would likely be fierce, regardless of how the
pro-government militias that have been mobilized over the last few
weeks ultimately perform. Violent, US-supported regime change would
almost certainly result in a long, protracted resistance and
insurgency.

Given the high risks of a land invasion, another scenario — one
involving air strikes but without the amphibious landing of US
soldiers on Venezuelan shores — appears more likely. Trump would
surely prefer a one-off air strike along the lines of the June attack
on Iran. But there is no reason to believe that such an attack would
result in the mass uprising and military putsch that Rubio and his
allies have been hoping for.

The Venezuelan military has so far proven remarkably loyal to the
Maduro government. It has weathered two decades of regime change
attempts, including a brief coup in 2002, the 2019–2023 Guaido
fiasco, which included an overt coup attempt in April 2019, and an
ill-conceived mercenary incursion in 2020, each with fewer defections
from its ranks than the last. In institutional terms, years of
draconian US sanctions and destabilization have hardened the
Venezuelan security state and fostered a resilience that has taken
many by surprise.

We also shouldn’t be surprised if, when the first attack fails to
produce the promised uprising, regime-change advocates demand another
strike, then another. Convinced the government is on its last legs and
needs just one more push, they would likely pressure Trump to keep
bombing, and perhaps even support the formation of some form of armed
opposition, currently nonexistent in Venezuela.

Such a Libya-style proxy war would flood an already volatile region
with more weapons and money. Criminal organizations and irregular
armed groups already operating on Venezuela’s western border — and
beyond, in neighboring Colombia — would thrive in the chaos,
swelling their ranks and profiting from arms and human trafficking: a
nightmare scenario for Latin America.

During the last few years of draconian US sanctions on Venezuela —
which have significantly contributed to shortages of food, medicine
and fuel — more than seven million Venezuelans have fled their
country. This unprecedented wave of migration has had profound
repercussions across the region and beyond, including in the US, where
it has influenced the 2024 elections in Trump’s favor. If US
sanctions produced such an exodus, we can only imagine the scale of
the refugee crisis that would result from an actual war. It is no
surprise that Brazil and Colombia, Venezuela’s most strategic
neighbors from the point of view of any potential conflict, have
strongly opposed a US military intervention.

The bitter irony is inescapable: an operation justified by
anti-narcotics rhetoric would create ideal conditions for
drug-trafficking organizations to expand their power. The military
build-up off Venezuela’s coast is a slippery slope towards an armed
conflagration that could lead to far greater suffering for the
Venezuelan people, a potential political quagmire for the United
States, US troop casualties and the catastrophic destabilization of
much of the region.

_Guillaume Long [[link removed]] is a senior
research fellow at CEPR. He has held several cabinet positions in the
government of Ecuador, including Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister
of Culture, and Minister of Knowledge and Human Talent. Most recently,
he served as Ecuador’s Permanent Representative to the United
Nations in Geneva. Guillaume has trained as a historian and holds a
PhD in international politics from the University of
London. [email protected]
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_The Center for Economic and Policy Research [[link removed]]
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the Luxembourg Income Study; and Richard B. Freeman, Professor of
Economics at Harvard University._

* Human Rights
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* Venezuela
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* marco rubio
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* Nicolas Maduro
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