Over the past month, the world has watched as the United States flexed its military muscle across the Caribbean Sea. It has blown up three boats, killing at least 17 people in what U.N. officials have called extrajudicial executions. It has deployed amphibious vessels, ships loaded with guided missile systems and a nuclear-powered submarine to the region. It has sent 10 F-35 stealth fighter jets to Puerto Rico. And it has done so, the White House claims, to counter a huge drug-trafficking effort headed by none other than President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.
To be clear: Venezuela is not one of America’s main illicit drug suppliers. Venezuela accounts for very little of the cocaine that enters the United States, and it plays almost no role in the fentanyl trade, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. That hasn’t prevented the Trump administration from slapping a $50 million bounty on Mr. Maduro’s head or Attorney General Pam Bondi from calling him “one of the largest narcotraffickers in the world and a threat to our national security.”
The regime in Caracas is certainly not without its sins. Mr. Maduro is a dictator who has facilitated illicit commerce in gold, money laundering, arms and drugs. He has brutally repressed his opponents, crushed civil rights and democratic institutions and presided over one of the world’s worst economic catastrophes. Roughly eight million people have fled the country since he came to power in 2013. But the threat that Venezuela’s drug trafficking networks are said to pose does not justify an American military mobilization this large — at least not convincingly. The real reason for the armed legion, analysts and many Venezuelans believe, is to send a message to Mr. Maduro and his supporters: Your days are numbered.
What some powerful members of the Trump administration want is regime change, and they want it as cheaply as possible. The thousands of U.S. troops floating off Venezuelan shores are unlikely to invade the country, though there are now reportedly plans to deploy drones to attack drug-related targets in Venezuelan territory. The White House may be hoping that this show of force will convince top Venezuelan brass that they are next and that they had best defect and overthrow Mr. Maduro.
Speedy regime change in Venezuela has always been President Trump’s plan. It just didn’t work the last time.
In his first term Mr. Trump mounted a pressure campaign just short of military intervention to try to unseat the Venezuelan dictator. In 2019, after Mr. Maduro claimed victory in disputed elections, the White House imposed broad economic sanctions on Venezuela. Mr. Trump publicly backed Juan Guaidó, the leader of Venezuela’s legislature, as the country’s legitimate leader. With Mr. Trump’s blessing, Mr. Guaidó called on his supporters to rise up against the regime and asked the military to defect.
Mr. Maduro, of course, didn’t budge. A few years later, the opposition dissolved its shadow government, and Mr. Guaidó moved to Florida, where he remained in relative obscurity.
Today’s strategy appears to be born out of Mr. Trump’s desire for vindication — and revenge. The president, it seems, took Mr. Guaidó’s failure as a personal humiliation. Now Mr. Trump and the hard-liners in his administration, led by the secretary of state Marco Rubio, are doubling down. They’ve mostly done away with the democracy-promotion rhetoric that characterized the first round. This time, they say they’re taking down a narcostate. Presumably fueling them are rumors that the Venezuelan military is on the brink of turning on Mr. Maduro — a perennial story among the country’s opposition. One major champion of this account has been Maria Corina Machado, the current Venezuelan opposition leader. Her team, along with other opposition figures, has reportedly been in contact with U.S. officials.
Ms. Machado has close ties with Mr. Rubio, who seems to view her as a freedom fighter in the style of Eastern European anti-Communist dissidents like Vaclav Havel. A longtime civil society leader, she was blocked from running as the opposition candidate in Venezuela’s 2024 elections, but she nonetheless worked to mobilize voters, filling streets and plazas with enthusiastic supporters for her surrogate, Edmundo González. When Mr. Maduro claimed to have won the vote, international observers and the opposition demonstrated that the regime had committed. She has since gone into hiding, but has continued to call for military intervention against the dictatorship.
Even if Mr. Trump’s show of force sparks the defection that finally topples the Maduro regime, Venezuela won’t magically turn into a democracy. It’s unlikely that the hypothetical Maduro putschists would cede power to Ms. Machado or another opposition figure. Even if they did, the new leader would still face resistance from a deeply corrupt, insubordinate and unprofessional security apparatus. Ms. Machado’s silence in the face of the U.S. boat strikes, which might have killed Venezuelan civilians, has also damaged the opposition’s credibility, both at home and abroad.
And if Mr. Trump’s gunboat diplomacy fails to trigger the mutiny that’s supposedly been years in the making? The legion of warships could just sit off Venezuela, picking off small boats or striking drug-trafficking suspects on land, and eventually declare it a victory against narcoterrorism. But the deployment represents a significant and risky allocation of U.S. assets that are badly needed elsewhere. The cost of the mobilization is also coming out of the pockets of Americans, more than half of whom, according to a YouGov survey, oppose using military intervention to invade Venezuela. If the U.S. military continues to take out targets without due process, it risks killing innocent bystanders, which could prompt other countries in the region to speak out more forcefully.
The Trump administration seems to believe that, after trying everything else, Mr. Maduro can be replaced only by the threat of force. That is the wrong lesson to take away from the policy failures of Mr. Trump’s first term. Neighboring democratic governments have hesitated to come out in defense of Mr. Maduro, a reviled authoritarian who has stoked Venezuela’s economic and social collapse. But they would surely condemn a categorical breach of territorial and political sovereignty by the hegemon to the north. Leaders in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and elsewhere would almost certainly go to great lengths to prevent the U.S. military from starting a war on Venezuelan soil, including pushing strongly for a negotiated political solution.
The Trump administration should take advantage of the diplomatic anxiety it has created. If the president truly seeks a stable and peaceful Venezuela, he should leverage the threat he has sent to the Caribbean Sea to encourage regional allies and European governments to throw their weight behind a democratic transition away from Mr. Maduro. Venezuela in 2025 is not Eastern Europe in 1989, and guided missiles tend to deliver chaos, not democracy.
Christopher Sabatini is a senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House and a lecturer at the London School of Economics. He has written extensively about Venezuela.
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