Regime change. Mission creep. U.S. military intervention overseas.
For years, many of President Trump’s ardent supporters rallied around his pledge to avoid another “forever war” after the long U.S. conflicts in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Now, several prominent conservative policy advisers and commentators are raising concerns about the administration’s expanding military actions against Venezuela and in the Caribbean.
They say the hawkish views that led Democratic and Republican administrations to perpetuate wasteful wars are coming to the fore again, as Mr. Trump’s top aides move to try to depose Nicolás Maduro, the autocrat who leads Venezuela.
Since early September, the United States has launched a series of lethal strikes against civilian boats that American officials say are involved in drug smuggling and built up a force of more than 10,000 U.S. troops, warships and aircraft in the region.
“There’s supposed to be incentives for ending wars and conflicts around the world,” Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and influential outside adviser to Mr. Trump, said in an interview. “Yet, here we have this conflict with Venezuela that is only going to escalate.”
On a recent episode of his podcast, Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, posed the question: “Is this just a breeding ground for neocon 3.0?”
His guest on the show, Curt Mills, a conservative policy analyst, said the United States should avoid bloodshed and later wrote online that “avoidable catastrophe continues to loom.” In another post, he said, “We’re getting down to the Real Business of murdering people randomly with no plan.”
Mr. Mills, the executive director of The American Conservative, Mr. Bannon and some other restraint-oriented analysts view Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser, with skepticism.
Mr. Rubio was labeled a “neocon” for years by conservative and liberal analysts. Neoconservatives are policymakers and advisers who promote aggressive U.S. intervention overseas to make other societies more pro-America and pro-democracy, including through toppling governments. They pushed for the Iraq war, and the disastrous consequences made the movement unpopular.
As a Republican senator representing Florida and as the son of anti-Communist Cuban immigrants, Mr. Rubio advocated the use of U.S. military power around the globe. He has since tempered some of his Cold War-style public rhetoric.
But on Latin America, he has stuck to his traditional policy views, which are focused on weakening and possibly toppling the leftist governments of Cuba and Venezuela.
Mr. Rubio is now creating a strategy to use military pressure and other means to try to oust Mr. Maduro, American officials say. He is casting it as an “America First” effort that could help stop the flow of drugs and migrants into the United States, even though armed conflicts often lead to refugee crises.
John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, and Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s chief domestic policy adviser, have supported Mr. Rubio’s aggressive strategy.
Mr. Trump has authorized the C.I.A. to take covert action inside Venezuela. And the U.S. military has been drawing up plans for operations in the country, though those have not been approved by the White House.
“The regime-change stuff is what I’m most skeptical of,” Mr. Mills said. “I think that is just so politically hypocritical. Trump ran against the deep state, and now we’re going to cooperate with the C.I.A. to overthrow a government? It doesn’t pass the laugh test.”
“Trump has been very clear — he has a phobia of regime-change wars,” he added. The American Conservative, where Mr. Mills works, was founded in 2002 by Patrick J. Buchanan, a conservative isolationist, and argued against the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Mr. Mills said the U.S. military’s killings of civilians in the Caribbean without due process “has implications for the way the government will treat its own citizens.”
Mr. Trump, Mr. Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have overseen the campaign of airstrikes against civilian boats, which has killed nearly 40 people. Most of the strikes have been in the Caribbean Sea, but the administration expanded its campaign this week, hitting vessels in the Pacific.
Mr. Trump and his aides insist the boats were smuggling drugs but have not presented evidence or stated a clear legal basis for the strikes.
However, legal experts and foreign policy analysts say there are strong indications that the administration is not killing important drug traffickers. They point to news interviews with some of the victims’ families. And they say it is telling that the administration sent two survivors of a deadly U.S. strike on a boat last week back to their home countries of Colombia and Ecuador instead of detaining and prosecuting them.
Officials in the region have also said that some of the civilians killed were fishermen.
The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, accused the United States of murdering a Colombian fisherman, Alejandro Carranza, in a Sept. 15 attack. Colombian civilians were also among those killed in a boat attack on Oct. 3, Mr. Petro said. Mr. Trump has responded by calling Mr. Petro an “illegal drug dealer” governing a nation producing cocaine.
Mr. Trump also said the United States would halt aid payments to Colombia and raise tariffs on imports from the country, a tax paid by U.S. companies.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Rubio argue that the United States has a right to take lethal measures against drug cartels. Mr. Trump points to Venezuela as a major source of fentanyl entering the United States, though that is false.
Mr. Rubio supported the first Trump administration’s attempt to depose Mr. Maduro, and he has stressed that the Venezuelan leader is a fugitive from a 2020 Justice Department indictment on drug trafficking charges. The State Department increased a reward to $50 million for information leading to Mr. Maduro’s arrest and conviction.
When asked to comment for this article, Tommy Pigott, the State Department’s deputy spokesman, said: “President Trump promised to secure our border, combat narcoterrorists and stop the flow of deadly drugs into our country. He is doing just that. Maduro is not the legitimate leader of Venezuela; he’s a fugitive of American justice who undermines regional security and poisons Americans.”
To placate Mr. Trump, Mr. Maduro has offered the United States dominant stakes in Venezuela’s oil and mineral wealth and has continued to accept U.S. deportation flights of Venezuelan migrants. But on Oct. 2, Mr. Trump called off efforts to reach a diplomatic agreement with Venezuela, according to U.S. officials.
Ms. Loomer has questioned why the Trump White House is backing away from diplomacy with Mr. Maduro. She said she supported Mr. Trump’s stated policies of achieving energy dominance and limiting China’s influence in the Western Hemisphere. The easiest path to reaching those goals, she said, is to engage with Mr. Maduro and get him to give the United States more access than China to Venezuelan oil.
“I don’t know if President Trump has been fully briefed on the level of control that China currently has there,” she said.
Ms. Loomer has also publicly criticized María Corina Machado, the main opposition leader in Venezuela, saying that she is “actively stoking and promoting violent regime change.”
Scholars at Defense Priorities, a bipartisan research center that advocates military restraint, are also increasingly critical of the Trump administration’s actions in Latin America. Several fellows from the group are political appointees in the administration, notably in the Defense Department.
“It does seem like a replay, especially of the global war on terror,” said Jennifer Kavanagh, the center’s director of military analysis. “You see people like Secretary Hegseth saying this is the new Al Qaeda. No. 1, the use of Al Qaeda, more generally, as this boogeyman out there to justify all sorts of adventures in the Middle East is something that restrainers would push back on. But also, the cartels are nothing like Al Qaeda.”
Daniel DePetris, a fellow at the center who researches Latin America, said Mr. Trump is a “primacist” when it comes to the Western Hemisphere — meaning the president is intent on maintaining American dominance across the region, largely through military force.
“This is another instance of Trump using the military hammer and elevating military solutions to problems that don’t have military solutions,” he said.
Although Mr. Trump appears reluctant to publicly discuss regime change, Mr. DePetris added, Mr. Rubio is clearly driving policy in that direction: “Marco Rubio is using the drugs as a way station to convince Trump to go into Caracas and get Maduro out of there.”
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department for The Times.
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