The indignant queries from GOP legislators over doable U.S. navy warfare crimes within the Caribbean are welcome. But, too many Republicans keep away from the pressing query that hangs over the killing of greater than 80 individuals allegedly smuggling medicine in small boats: Why is a large American armada hovering off Venezuela within the first place?
The official response that this can be a warfare to destroy prison drug cartels who’re poisoning People and thus undermining U.S. safety is a clear lie and a slipshod cover-up.
So, if medicine are solely an excuse, is President Donald Trump actually looking for regime change in Caracas (and has age dimmed his reminiscence of his rants towards regime change in Iraq and Libya)? Is he hoping for a domino impact on Cuba? Or is he fulfilling his self-appointed function as grasp of the Western Hemisphere (and maybe of Venezuelan oil)?
As the US faces home strife and severe conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and Asia, People have to know why Trump is obsessive about warfare on Caracas. Congress should demand solutions, now.
First, allow us to dispense with the fable {that a} mighty U.S. fleet is required to fight Venezuelan drug cartels.
The vicious drug that claims 1000’s of U.S. victims and is on the middle of U.S. drug interdiction efforts is fentanyl. However Venezuela neither makes nor exports fentanyl. Fentanyl comes almost totally from Mexico, the place it’s manufactured from precursors procured from China.
Venezuela is a pass-through nation for cocaine exports by criminals — not main cartels. However cocaine is especially manufactured in Colombia and reaches the U.S. primarily by way of the Pacific Ocean. Solely about 8% of the cocaine that enters our nation comes by way of the Caribbean; the U.S. Coast Guard had been doing a superb job interdicting small boats and arresting smugglers earlier than Trump’s present warfare.
Why pardon trafficker?
But the obvious purpose Trump’s “drug war” is phony is his pardon final week of the previous president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted in 2024 in a U.S. courtroom of conspiring to import greater than 400 tons of cocaine into the US. (His brother was convicted in 2019 of serving to import one other 200 tons of cocaine.)
Trump claimed Hernández obtained an unfair shake underneath President Joe Biden as a result of “he was the president of the country,” making clear he noticed the Honduran as a fellow sufferer of the Democratic administration. But, it was Trump’s personal former prison protection lawyer, Emil Bove III, who, as a prime U.S. Division of Justice official, pursued the conviction of Hernández and his Honduran drug ring, for which the trafficker obtained a sentence of 45 years.
“If there was any belief in Venezuela that [Trump] was threatening Venezuela on account of drugs, the pardon of Hernández makes clear that is not true,” I used to be advised by Venezuelan-born Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, president of the human rights assume tank WOLA (Washington Workplace on Latin America), and likewise a distinguished fellow on the College of Pennsylvania’s Perry World Home, a worldwide affairs middle.
WOLA opposes the U.S. killings of greater than 80 principally Venezuelan civilians with none judicial course of, in addition to the present, merciless U.S. remedy of Venezuelan refugees.
Jiménez Sandoval, who left Caracas in 2010 however nonetheless visits, is raring to see the tip of the repressive regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who refused to acknowledge a large electoral victory by the Venezuelan opposition in 2024.
She hopes Maduro may be satisfied to depart workplace by means of negotiations. Up to now, Trump has had no luck.
Nevertheless, the Venezuelan activist is deeply anxious that Trump might oust Maduro by power, which she fears would solely result in extra catastrophe in Venezuela and the area. “Our concern is it would set a terrible example for the rest of Latin America,” she says.
Furthermore, though Venezuelan opposition teams declare they’re able to take over, Jiménez Sandoval factors out that “Venezuela is a complex country, whose institutions have been greatly weakened under Maduro. And many armed groups are operating in the country.”
There isn’t any assure Maduro’s giant military would soften away. Furthermore, sizeable numbers of paramilitary teams, generally known as colectivos, in addition to Colombian guerrilla fighters. are current in Venezuela. They’ve a powerful curiosity in defending their corrupt management of pure sources. As Jiménez Sandoval put it, “There are too many questions about the day after.”
I can’t assist recalling how sure George W. Bush was that the exiled Iraqi opposition would rapidly take over the operating of Iraq as soon as Saddam Hussein was ousted. As an alternative, the returning exiles, together with U.S. troops, acquired mired in an Iraqi civil warfare between competing factions.
You break, you personal
Regardless of the societal variations between Iraq and Venezuela, Trump ought to thoughts the well-known Pottery Barn rule former Secretary of State Colin Powell derived from America’s disastrous involvement in Iraq: In the event you break it, you personal it.
GOP leaders — indignant at being stiffed by Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth and at his careless dealing with of vital data — ought to stand robust and demand the small print on this pretend warfare he’s refusing to supply.
Most significantly, Democrats and Republicans alike ought to warn Trump that they are going to oppose efforts to increase a warfare on Venezuela that has no authorized or congressional justification and is predicated on the specter of a fictional drug warfare with Caracas.
Trump has enormous leverage to exert on Maduro past a harmful recreation of navy rooster. The Venezuelan chief is unpopular in Latin America, and the U.S. must be allying with Venezuela’s neighbors in pushing Maduro towards recognition of the 2024 election outcomes and exile.
GOP members shall be severely punished on the polls in the event that they let Trump blunder into an unlawful navy regime change based mostly on ignorance of Venezuela and a tangle of lies about medicine.
Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the The Philadelphia Inquirer. ©2025 The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Tribune Content material Company.
