Trump’s Doomed Venezuela Militarism

Foreign Affairs

Trump’s Doomed Venezuela Militarism

The president should pursue realism and restraint in Latin America.

The Trump administration’s deployment of more than 4,000 sailors and Marines to the southern Caribbean—reportedly to combat drug cartels—marks a dangerous escalation in its policy toward Venezuela. While President Donald Trump is right to identify transnational criminal networks as a threat to the health and safety of the American people, this militarized approach ignores strategic realities, contradicts intelligence assessments, and risks repeating the errors of past interventionist failures. 

As the Ron Paul Institute has warned, the saber-rattling over Venezuela is proving that this administration’s foreign policy is just as militaristic and interventionist as its predecessors. 

Andrew Day, senior editor at The American Conservative, also cautioned against bombing Mexico and Venezuela. “Sometimes these high-pressure campaigns, these sanctions and military actions, they can have counter-productive effects,” Day told Lindell TV. “They can make the local population more angry at the United States. They can make them rally around the flag, and in this case, around [Venezuelan President Nicolas] Maduro.”

The White House takes a different view. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the administration’s shows of force against the South American country, declaring, “The Maduro regime is not the legitimate government of Venezuela. It is a narco-terror cartel, and Maduro… is not a legitimate president. He is a fugitive head of this cartel.” 

This narrative has been amplified by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who declared: “Maduro is the head of the vicious Cartel de Los Soles, a narco-terror organization which has taken over Venezuela. Maduro MUST be brought to justice.” This rhetoric—echoed in the State and Justice Departments’ move to increase the bounty on Maduro to $50 million—frames the crisis in starkly escalatory terms. Yet it remains unsubstantiated by key evidence.

InSight Crime, a State Department-funded think tank, deems the Cartel de Los Soles a non-hierarchical organization and says the depiction of Maduro as its leader is an “oversimplification.” Evidence of Maduro’s operational involvement in other Venezuelan gangs is also lacking. A recently declassified memo from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (dated April 7, 2025) states: “The Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with [Tren de Aragua], a criminal gang, and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.” Similarly, Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum has dismissed claims that Maduro has ties to the Mexico-based Sinaloa Cartel, noting, “On Mexico’s part, there is no investigation that has to do with that… We do not have any proof.”

The administration’s increasingly bellicose actions and rhetoric reveal a baffling lack of consistency. It recently extended the American oil giant Chevron’s license to operate in Venezuela, allowing Venezuelan crude to flow to the U.S. and signaling a cautious opening for calibrated diplomatic engagement. This was a characteristically transactional but nonetheless realist approach: leveraging American economic power to secure energy resources and potentially influence Caracas’ policies in ways that would benefit Washington. 

And yet, now the same administration floats military intervention—a dramatic escalation that would torpedo any diplomatic progress, endanger U.S. corporate operations, and undermine regional trust. This whipsawing between deal-making and threats of force projects confusion, not strength. It suggests an absence of strategic prioritization. A realist foreign policy requires clarity—and discipline.

The administration’s objective remains dangerously vague. Would the goal of a military operation be to eliminate cartels? To overthrow the Maduro regime and replace it with a pro-U.S. government? To permanently stem the flow of drugs? Not one of these is likely achievable through military means alone.

Criminal organizations are hydras: cut off one head, and others grow. They thrive in power vacuums and operate through corruption, not conquest. U.S. special forces can certainly take down criminal kingpins or destroy labs—but they cannot eliminate the economic incentives, institutional decay, and social despair that fuel these networks. Military action without a coherent political and economic strategy is mere performance—power projected for its own sake, draining resources and political capital with no lasting gain.

Whatever the symbolic gains of labeling Venezuelan cartels as “terrorist organizations”, it sets the stage for mission creep. Once U.S. forces are engaged, even in limited strikes, the logic of escalation takes over. What begins as targeted operations could easily morph into a full-scale intervention aimed at regime change.

And then what?

Maduro’s response to the U.S. threats—activating 4.5 million militia members—signals the possibility of protracted conflict. That would pose risks of potential Russian involvement. If U.S. efforts to ease tensions with Moscow fail, hardliners in Moscow might push to intensify a conflict in America’s backyard as payback for the Ukraine proxy war. Kremlin-aligned Russian military bloggers, such as Rybar, speculate that Moscow, already Caracas’ key security partner, could supply Venezuela with advanced weapons like Geran 2 drones (with a range of around 1,600 miles). That would be a threat to critical U.S. assets in the region, such as Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba, Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras, Fort Buchanan in Puerto Rico, or the U.S. personnel in neighbouring Colombia.

The U.S. would certainly prevail in any conflict with Venezuela, but the costs of escalation would be steep, and Trump has amply demonstrated his lack of interest in protracted military campaigns. Furthermore, toppling Maduro would appear to be the easy part compared with the nightmare that governing Venezuela afterward would be. The country is fractured and impoverished, with many heavily armed criminal groups. A power vacuum could unleash widespread violence and warlordism. The resulting instability would exacerbate—not alleviate—the very drug trafficking the intervention claims to address.

Military operations in Latin American countries, without the consent of their governments, would trigger profound regional backlash. Mexico has already flatly rejected the possibility of U.S. troops on its soil to fight the cartels. Other nations would see such interventions as a return to gunboat diplomacy—undermining efforts to secure a U.S.-friendly Western Hemisphere, a strategic task of the highest magnitude.

Worse still, instability in Venezuela would accelerate migration flows at a time when border security is already a defining issue. As the new study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research suggests—contrary to some flawed analyses—economic distress, including that exacerbated by sanctions, is a key driver of migration. Adding military intervention to the mix would only deepen the humanitarian disaster and intensify the push factors driving people north.

A smarter approach would prioritize strengthening sanctions enforcement against corrupt Maduro regime officials who facilitate cartel operations, while making sanctions targeted rather than broadly immiserating. Open-ended military interventions should be avoided at all costs. This effort should be complemented by enhancing regional cooperation in Latin America on intelligence-sharing and by boosting local law enforcement and judicial capacity at home. Domestically, the strategy should focus on reducing the demand for narcotics through treatment and prevention. Finally, the U.S. should keep diplomatic channels open to the Maduro regime to explore negotiated outcomes—however imperfect—focused on securing core U.S. interests on drugs and migration.

The administration’s current path—saber-rattling divorced from intelligence and strategic coherence—is not consistent with its rhetorical appeals to realism and restraint in foreign policy. It is not “America First” to risk U.S. soldiers and materiel in pursuit of regime change abroad. Rather, it is a reckless embrace of the same interventionist playbook that has repeatedly failed to secure U.S. interests. 

This is a moment for prudence in defense of the American people. True strength lies in applying power judiciously, not performatively.

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