President Donald Trump has amassed the largest U.S. naval armada in South American waters since the 1989 invasion of Panama that deposed military dictator Manuel Noriega.
The similarities between Operation Just Cause 36 years ago and Trump’s show of force around Venezuela that he alleges to be a war on drug-smuggling has inspired widespread speculation that his real objective is the killing or capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro.
While the intimidating U.S. naval force includes the world’s largest aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford with 4,500 sailors on board, and 2,200 Marines on the amphibious landing ship USS Iwo Jima, those potential invaders coupled with the crews of another dozen warships for a total of about 15,000 are not seen as sufficient to carry out a successful ground invasion.
Without boots on the ground to hunt down and detain Maduro, if that is the true objective of the president and his Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, a mission to execute regime change in Venezuela is widely considered unlikely to succeed.
An invasion of Venezuela is also unlikely to be applauded by American voters who were swayed by Trump’s campaign promises to keep the United States out of wars where the country has little at stake for its national or economic security.
The looming threat to Venezuela may be Trump’s attempt to flex his military muscle in the Americas after failing miserably to influence Russian President Vladimir Putin to end or at least ease his savaging of Ukraine. The headline-grabbing naval deployments may just be Trump vicariously playing war with toy boats in a bathtub.
Trump and his happy-warrior defense chief have cast the Operation Southern Spear strike force around Venezuela as an escalation of his determination to eradicate drug-smuggling and the crises of addiction the opioids perpetuate in the United States. Their declared war—neither debated nor authorized by Congress—accuses Maduro of heading a “narco-terrorist” regime posing an existential threat to U.S. security. The Pentagon’s rogue air strikes on suspected drug-smuggling in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific have already destroyed 21 small vessels and killed at least 80 alleged traffickers.
The U.S. naval strike force amassed in international waters is more appropriate for a land invasion than intercepting and destroying the small boats carrying cocaine and fentanyl, which largely get smuggled to U.S. collaborators from Mexico or Colombia, military strategists say.
The naval air-power buildup in the Caribbean is also disrupting political relations among Latin American nations and unsettling traditionally friendly U.S. allies. The Dominican Republic was set to host the triennial Summit of the Americas in Santo Domingo early next month but announced last week that it was being postponed indefinitely. Trump has been intervening unilaterally to aid his favored South American neighbors and signaled that he would skip the gathering aimed at resolving common economic and security challenges. The Dominican Foreign Ministry attributed the cancellation to deep divisions in the Western Hemisphere nations that “currently hinder productive dialogue.”
Trump’s intentions toward Venezuela remain unclear, despite, or perhaps especially, after he told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday that he had “sort of” made a decision about what he would do with his flotilla in the Caribbean.
Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan Caine briefed the president on Wednesday, and a larger security and diplomacy forum met with the president in the Situation Room on Thursday to lay out options for how he could respond to the claimed foreign invasion by Venezuelan “narco-terrorists.”
Those options reportedly include air strikes on Venezuelan military bases, government facilities and more suspected drug-trafficking routes of the type the Pentagon has hit so far. There was also reportedly discussion of operations to oust Maduro from office and the cordon of military security that surrounds him.
“I sort of have made up my mind — yeah. I mean, I can’t tell you what it would be, but I sort of have” decided, Trump told journalists enroute to his weekend escape to Mar-a-Lago.
Operation Southern Spear was established under II Marine Expeditionary Force, providing swift delivery of ground forces into a war theater, according to a recent analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. The analysts argued that at least 50,000 troops would be necessary to achieve the overwhelming force invasion commanders would require.
Venezuela has a paltry air force, with CSIS analysts estimating operable aircraft at fewer than 50 warplanes. But it has an advantage in ground forces that overwhelms the number of troops casualty-averse U.S. war planners would conjure for a serious invasion. Venezuela has a standing military of more than 120,000, an additional 8,000 reservists and at least a million “citizen militia” members, though the latter have mostly been used by the Maduro regime to police opposition activists throughout the country.
Opposition factions that could be counted on to back a U.S. attempt to oust Maduro are numerous but not monolithic. Past failures of U.S. administrations to assist democratic forces in their efforts to free the country from the impoverishing politics of Chavismo have created divisions among the anti-Maduro ranks and undermined activists’ confidence that aligning with U.S. interventions will be successful. Chavismo is the leftist ideology espoused by the late charismatic authoritarian President Hugo Chavez that Maduro inherited after Chavez’ death in 2013. Trump failed during his first administration to get Maduro struck as winner of the 2019 presidential election widely seen as rigged by the entrenched government.
Venezuela has traditionally been able to rely on military and political backing by Russia, China, Cuba and Iran. But with the exception of China, those countries are bogged down by their own struggling military operations, most notably Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nearly four-year-old war for control of territory and domination in Ukraine.
Trump agreed during his interview with CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Norah O’Donnell earlier this month that Maduro’s days in the Venezuelan leadership are “numbered.” He gave a coy answer to her question of whether he was contemplating “land strikes” in Venezuela, saying he wouldn’t tell a reporter if that was what he had in mind. He has indicated, however, that he isn’t inclined to send in U.S. troops to combat the alleged terrorism endangering the United States.
Trump also defended sending the USS Gerald R. Ford to the Caribbean on the grounds that “it’s gotta be somewhere. It’s a big one.” The world’s largest carrier costs $8.5 million a day while deployed to the world’s naval hotspots.
A full-scale land invasion and aerial bombardment of Venezuela would likely achieve victory for the United States, the No. 1 military power in the world, according to Global Firepower’s 2025 Military Strength Rankings. Venezuela places 50th worldwide out of the 160 countries assessed on military capabilities.
“The administration has said that the deployment is to stop the flow of illegal drugs to the US, and also to degrade the cartels. But over time the US goal has expanded to include anti-Maduro regime activities,’ said Mark Cancian, senior adviser in the defense and security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), in an analysis posted Friday on X.
A strike of any size on Venezuelan territory would undermine U.S. cooperation with other Latin American countries, argue some international security experts. Others, including Trump officials from his first administration like former National Security Advisor John Bolton, see an opportunity for the president to remove Maduro and help a democratic opposition faction take power. But doing so under the guise of a defensive operation is not the way to succeed, he argued.
“The Venezuelan people have every reason to overthrow Nicolás Maduro’s repressive, corrupt, failing regime. The pervasive presence and influence of Russia, Cuba, China and Iran in Venezuela add compelling national security reasons for the United States and other Western hemisphere neighbors to help. Maduro’s dictatorship has no redeeming social value,” Bolton wrote in an opinion piece published by the Washington Post last week.
“Having previously tried and failed to oust Maduro, we owe it to ourselves and Venezuela’s people not to fail again,” Bolton wrote. “If Trump had a record of coherent strategic thinking rather than personal aggrandizement, we might have grounds for optimism. But his propensity to act precipitously, to change his mind and to give inadequate attention to the consequences of his actions all augur poorly.”
Other conservatives, along with the vast majority of more liberal analysts, question whether the Trump administration is on solid legal ground if it invades Venezuela on the pretext of defending against a narco-terrorist assault on the United States.
John Yoo, a former assistant attorney general with the Office of Legal Counsel to the president during the George W. Bush administration, argued in a recent Washington Post opinion piece that Trump’s campaign against Venezuela blurs the distinction between crime and war. He also contends the White House “has yet to provide compelling evidence in court or to Congress that drug cartels have become arms of the Venezuelan government. That showing is needed to justify … the naval attacks in the South American seas.”
Trump’s Office of Legal Counsel drafted a classified opinion in July, before the Pentagon began destroying suspected drug-trafficking boats in international waters, that military personnel taking part in the strikes would not be exposed to future prosecution. The opinion was drafted after top Pentagon officials, including Adm. Alvin Holsey who heads of Southern Command overseeing Caribbean naval operations, urged caution in striking foreign vessels on grounds of national security, according to the Washington Post. Holsey announced his plans to retire at the end of this year after the OLC opinion.
“Harboring drug runners has never been considered a use of force under international law or an attack under international law,” Dan Maurer, a professor at Ohio Northern University and a former Army JAG told reporters on a conference call last week.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro has already called for Trump to be investigated for war crimes in connection with U.S. strikes that have killed or affected citizens of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Trinidad & Tobago.
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