The Trump administration has developed a range of options for military action in Venezuela, including direct attacks on military units that protect President Nicolás Maduro and moves to seize control of the country’s oil fields, according to multiple U.S. officials.
President Trump has yet to make a decision about how or even whether to proceed. Officials said he was reluctant to approve operations that may place American troops at risk or could turn into an embarrassing failure. But many of his senior advisers are pressing for one of the most aggressive options: ousting Mr. Maduro from power.
Mr. Trump’s aides have asked the Justice Department for additional guidance that could provide a legal basis for any military action beyond the current campaign of striking boats that the administration says are trafficking narcotics, without providing evidence. Such guidance could include a legal rationale for targeting Mr. Maduro without creating the need for congressional authorization for the use of military force, much less a declaration of war.
While the guidance is still being drafted, some administration officials expect it will argue that Mr. Maduro and his top security officials are central figures in the Cartel de los Soles, which the administration has designated as a narcoterrorist group. The Justice Department is expected to contend that designation makes Mr. Maduro a legitimate target despite longstanding American legal prohibitions on assassinating national leaders.
The Justice Department declined to comment. But the move to justify targeting Mr. Maduro would constitute another effort by the administration to stretch its legal authorities. It has already engaged in targeted killings of suspected drug smugglers who, until September, were pursued and arrested at sea rather than killed in drone strikes. Any effort to remove Mr. Maduro would place the administration under further scrutiny over whatever legal rationale it does offer, given the hazy mix of reasons it has presented so far for confronting Mr. Maduro. Among them are drug trafficking, the need for American access to oil and Mr. Trump’s claims that the Venezuelan government released prisoners into the United States.
Mr. Trump has issued a series of contradictory public messages about his intentions, and the goals and justification for any future military action. He has said in recent weeks that the attacks on speedboats in the Caribbean Sea and the Eastern Pacific that have killed at least 65 people would be expanded to land attacks. But that has not happened yet.
When asked by CBS News whether the United States is headed to war with Venezuela, Mr. Trump said on Sunday: “I doubt it. I don’t think so, but they’ve been treating us very badly, not only on drugs.” He repeated his unsupported allegation that Mr. Maduro opened his prisons and mental institutions, and sent Tren de Aragua gang members to the United States, a charge Mr. Trump has made since his campaign for the presidency last year.
Asked whether Mr. Maduro’s days as president of Venezuela were numbered, he added, “I think so, yeah.”
The support for the more aggressive options is coming from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also the acting national security adviser, and Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser. According to several U.S. officials, they have privately said they believe Mr. Maduro should be forced out.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly expressed reservations, aides say, in part because of a fear that the operation could fail. Mr. Trump is in no rush to make a decision, and has repeatedly asked about what the United States could get in return, with a specific focus on extracting some of the value of Venezuela’s oil for the United States.
“President Trump has been clear in his message to Maduro: Stop sending drugs and criminals to our country,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. “The president has made clear that he will continue to strike narcoterrorists trafficking illicit narcotics — anything else is speculation and should be treated as such.”
Mr. Trump will most likely not be forced to decide at least until the Gerald R. Ford, the United States’ largest and newest aircraft carrier, arrives in the Caribbean sometime in the middle of this month. The Ford carries about 5,000 sailors and has more than 75 attack, surveillance and support aircraft, including F/A-18 fighters.
There has been a steady buildup of U.S. troops in the region since late August. Even before the carrier arrives, there are about 10,000 American military personnel in the Caribbean, roughly half on warships and half on bases in Puerto Rico.
The Pentagon has in recent weeks also dispatched B-52 and B-1 bombers from bases in Louisiana and Texas to fly missions off the coast of Venezuela in what military officials call a show of force. B-52s can carry dozens of precision-guided bombs, and B-1s can carry up to 75,000 pounds of guided and unguided munitions, the largest nonnuclear payload of any aircraft in the Air Force arsenal.
And the Army’s elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, which conducted extensive counterterrorism helicopter operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, recently carried out what the Pentagon said were training exercises off the Venezuelan coast.
The military buildup has been so rapid, and so public, that it appears to be part of a psychological pressure campaign on Mr. Maduro. In fact, Mr. Trump has talked openly about his decision to issue a “finding” that permits the C.IA. to conduct covert operations inside Venezuela — the kind of operation presidents almost never discuss in advance.
Should Mr. Trump elect to order the action inside Venezuela, it would amount to a considerable military, legal and political risk. For all the risks Mr. Trump took in authorizing the American bombing of three nuclear-related sites in Iran in June, it did not involve an effort to overthrow or replace the Iranian government.
If Mr. Trump goes that route, there is no assurance that he would succeed or that he could guarantee that a new government would arise friendlier to the United States. Aides say that far more planning has gone into striking at the Maduro government than on what it would take to govern Venezuela should the operation succeed.
And some of Mr. Trump’s most loyal political backers have been warning against striking at Mr. Maduro, reminding the president he was elected to end “forever wars,” not incite new ones.
A Military Plan in Three Parts
Mr. Trump’s authorization for the C.I.A. to operate inside Venezuela’s borders could enable the agency to conduct a variety of activities, from information operations to building opposition to Mr. Maduro to actively sabotaging his government — and even seizing the leader himself. But national security officials say that if such operations could really pry Mr. Maduro from power, he would have been gone years ago. That is why the White House is considering military action, and the proposals on the table come in three broad varieties.
The first option would involve airstrikes against military facilities, some of which might be involved in facilitating drug trafficking, with the aim of collapsing Venezuelan military support for Mr. Maduro. If Mr. Maduro believed he was no longer protected, he might seek to flee — or, in moving around the country, make himself more vulnerable to capture, officials say. Critics of such an approach warn that it could have the opposite effect, of rallying support around the embattled leader.
A second approach envisions the United States sending Special Operations forces, such as the Army’s Delta Force or the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, to try to capture or kill Mr. Maduro. Under this option, the Trump administration would seek to sidestep prohibitions against assassinating foreign leaders by arguing that Mr. Maduro is, first and foremost, the head of a narcoterrorist gang, an extension of the arguments used to justify the U.S. airstrikes on boats the administration says are smuggling drugs.
The State Department has a $50 million reward for Mr. Maduro’s arrest or conviction — up from the $25 million offered in the last days of the Biden administration. The Trump administration may also argue that because Mr. Maduro suppressed opposition and worked to rig elections, he is not the legitimate leader of the country. The Biden administration refused to recognize him as Venezuela’s president after he declared victory last year.
A third option involves a much more complicated plan to send U.S. counterterrorism forces to seize control of airfields and at least some of Venezuela’s oil fields and infrastructure.
These last two options carry much greater risks to American commandos on the ground — not to mention civilians — especially if they were targeting Mr. Maduro in an urban setting like Caracas, the country’s capital.
Mr. Trump has been reluctant to consider attacks that could put American troops at risk. As a result, many of the plans under development employ naval drones and long-range weapons, options that may prove more viable once the Ford and other ships are in place.
For Trump, an Oil Conundrum
Mr. Trump is deeply focused on Venezuela’s enormous oil reserves, the largest in the world. But how to deal with them — whether to cut off exports to the United States or keep them going in hopes of retaining a foothold should Mr. Maduro be ousted — is a problem that has vexed administration officials for the past 10 months.
Even as Mr. Trump doubled the bounty on Mr. Maduro and called him a narcoterrorist, he canceled, then renewed, a license for Chevron, an American oil company that is a pillar of Venezuela’s economy, to keep operating there.
Chevron’s existing license was killed in March under pressure from Mr. Rubio, and over the summer Venezuelan exports to the United States plummeted. But a new license — the details of which have been kept confidential — apparently prevents the company from sending hard currency into Venezuela’s banking system. Still, Chevron’s oil exports are providing Mr. Maduro’s economy with real support.
Chevron is a rare survivor; most American oil companies operating in the country had their assets seized or transferred to state-owned firms years ago. The company is one of the few that have figured out how to deal with both Mr. Trump and Mr. Maduro, who declared that “I want Chevron here for another 100 years.” It has hired as its lobbyist in Washington a top fund-raiser for Mr. Trump.
Mr. Maduro made a last-ditch effort over the past few months to offer Mr. Trump oil concessions, including a dominant stake in Venezuela’s oil and other mineral wealth. He dangled the possibility of opening up existing and future oil and gold projects to American companies, which would receive preferential contracts. And he said he would redirect exports that are now headed to China, and limit mining contracts with Chinese, Iranian and Russian firms.
But Mr. Trump rejected the offer in early October, and the U.S. military buildup accelerated.
Should Mr. Maduro’s government fall and be replaced by a stable leadership open to improved relations with the United States, Chevron would be best positioned for what the Trump administration believes would be a boom in investment in the country’s huge oil reserves. It is a topic that fascinates Mr. Trump, much as it did when he urged the seizing of oil fields in Syria, whose reserves are a tiny fraction of Venezuela’s.
The company is keeping its head down.
“We believe our presence continues to be a stabilizing force for the local economy, the region and U.S. energy security,” said Bill Turenne, a Chevron spokesman.
Seeking a Legal Rationale
As Mr. Trump’s aides push for the most aggressive military option, lawyers at the Justice Department are working to develop a legal analysis to justify the full range of military options that are being developed.
White House officials have said they want an updated legal analysis before taking any additional steps, and administration lawyers told Congress last week that the president did not need congressional approval for his lethal military strikes on boats.
T. Elliot Gaiser, who leads the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, told Congress that the administration did not think the boat-strike operation rose to the kind of “hostilities” covered by a 1973 law called the War Powers Resolution, which limits the president from conducting military operations for longer than 60 days without congressional approval. But lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have raised concerns about the strikes and have demanded more information from the administration.
Perhaps the closest recent parallel to a legal justification for killing a head of state would be a legal opinion produced by the Office of Legal Counsel during Mr. Trump’s first term. It concluded that the president had authority to conduct a missile strike to kill Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani.
General Suleimani was Iran’s top intelligence and security commander when he was killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2020, and Mr. Trump has long viewed that killing as one of the signature successes of his first term.
In that instance, the Office of Legal Counsel concluded that the drone strike could be carried out because General Suleimani was “actively developing plans for further attacks against U.S. military personnel and diplomats,” according to a heavily redacted memo released after the strike.
“Military leaders who organize and oversee attacks against U.S. persons and interests may be legitimate military targets,” the memo said, adding that the strike was intended “to avoid civilian casualties or substantial collateral damage” and was not aimed “at imposing through military means a change in the character of a political regime.”
The memo concluded that “given the targeted scope of the mission, the available intelligence and the efforts to avoid escalation,” a drone strike against him “would not rise to the level of a war for constitutional purposes.”
Julian E. Barnes and Charlie Savage contributed reporting.
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent for The Times. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent.
Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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