Trump eyes regime change in Venezuela

What happened

Evidence mounted last week that the Trump administration was seeking regime change in Venezuela, as a U.S. counter-narcotics campaign that began with military strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats shifted toward the ouster of President Nicolás Maduro. Some 10,000 U.S. troops have been deployed to the Caribbean as part of a buildup involving at least eight Navy warships, 10 F-35 fighter jets, missile-loaded drones, a nuclear-powered attack submarine, and a floating base for special operations forces. While the administration’s official stance is that the buildup is part of a “war against narco-terrorism,” unnamed officials have told multiple news outlets that the real goal is the removal of leftist strongman Maduro. President Trump said he had cleared the CIA to pursue covert activities inside Venezuela, and said the U.S. is “looking at” ground strikes. In response, a defiant Maduro mobilized troops along the coast as state media rallied citizens to repel a “gringo” incursion. “The people are ready for combat,” Maduro said.

The administration expanded its ship-bombing campaign, previously limited to the Caribbean, with a strike on a speedboat off Colombia’s Pacific coast, killing two people. It was at least the eighth vessel to be destroyed since Sept. 2, bringing the death toll to at least 34. The president has declared the U.S. to be in “armed conflict” with drug traffickers—including a cartel he claims is headed by Maduro—and says the attacks are thus legally justified. But he has offered no evidence the targeted boats were carrying drugs, and legal experts say that in any case, the strikes on suspected criminals amount to extrajudicial executions under international law. Colombian President Gustavo Petro accused the U.S. of “murder” in a September strike he said killed a Colombian fisherman whose boat was damaged and adrift. In response, Trump called Petro a “drug leader” with “a fresh mouth” and said the U.S. would cut aid payments to Colombia and impose new tariffs on its exports.

As tensions rose, the admiral overseeing operations in the Caribbean stepped down just a year into his command. Neither Adm. Alvin Holsey nor the Pentagon offered an explanation for his departure. But Tom Shannon, a former senior official at the State Department, said it’s likely Holsey thought, “This is going to be my legacy? War crimes?”

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What the columnists said

The administration has offered a steadfast rationale for blowing up boats off Venezuela, said Terrence McCoy in The Washington Post: They’re operated by “narco-terrorists” whose drugs are killing Americans. But numerous experts say those claims don’t add up. They note that most of the boats were en route to Trinidad and Tobago, a transit point for cocaine and marijuana headed to Europe and Africa, not America. And the vast majority of U.S. overdoses are caused by fentanyl, which is typically made in Mexico with Chinese ingredients and smuggled north by land, “most often by U.S. citizens.”

The administration hasn’t provided “the slightest evidence” that these boats were carrying drugs, said Fred Kaplan in Slate. And even if they were, there’s no legal or even practical justification for blowing them up instead of seizing them. For evidence that the administration is fudging the facts, consider the fate of a Colombian and an Ecuadorian who survived a U.S. boat strike last week. Instead of holding them at Guantánamo or some other military prison, the U.S. returned these supposed terrorists to their home countries, where the Ecuadorian was released for lack of evidence of any wrongdoing.

This may have started as a fight against drug trafficking, but “the focus has shifted,” said Michael Stott in the Financial Times. Insiders and analysts say the administration’s priority is now to depose Maduro and his inner circle by convincing them that “staying in power will be more costly than leaving.” The military buildup delivers “the clear threat” that if they “cling to power,” the U.S. may use force to capture or kill them. That shift marks a victory for Secretary of State Marco Rubio, said Jonathan Blitzer in The New Yorker. A longtime regime-change advocate, he’d spent months in “open conflict” with the “more conciliatory” Trump special envoy Richard Grenell. The balance of power shifted when top Trump aide Stephen Miller sided with Rubio, seeing the strikes as a means to expand Trump’s power and reinforce the idea of Venezuelan immigrants in the U.S. as “alien enemies.” Trump also had an itch “to see more dramatic military action” against cartels—and Venezuela presented a safer target than next-door neighbor Mexico.

The administration’s hope is to spark a military coup against Maduro, said Juan Forero and José de Córdoba in The Wall Street Journal, but the socialist autocrat has made himself “virtually coup-proof.” He has jailed or exiled military officers accused of conspiring against him and seeded the officer corps and rank and file with domestic spies and counterintelligence officers from his ally Cuba. Maduro foes within the military “know that torture, jail, and even death await should they rise up.”

“Trump is courting catastrophe,” said Ross Barkan in New York, and “Americans should be deeply alarmed.” If he topples Maduro, it will create a power vacuum that will be filled with warlords, transnational gangs, and paramilitaries “awash in advanced weaponry.” It seems fair to ask what the administration’s plan is, said Jim Geraghty in National Review, but it’s shared nothing with Congress or voters. Let’s be clear: Maduro is a miserable despot, and his demise would make the world a better place. But our post-9/11 adventures in nation building have delivered the hard lesson “that toppling a dictator is the easy part; what comes after is much tougher.”

What next?

Republican Sen. Rand Paul is pairing with two Democrats to introduce a bill that would prevent the U.S. from attacking Venezuela without congressional approval, said James P. Sutton in The Dispatch. But other Republican lawmakers have shown “little appetite for asserting the legislature’s authority over war powers.” Some analysts are skeptical that ground action is forthcoming, but others believe it’s just a matter of time. To pressure military leaders to oust Maduro, the U.S. “is totally going to strike land” targets in Venezuela in the relatively near future, said Will Freeman, a Latin American expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. Administration sources say any land attack would likely be “a targeted operation on alleged trafficker encampments or clandestine airstrips,” and not a direct effort to oust Maduro, said Karen DeYoung in The Washington Post. But Trump “has said nothing to dispel concerns that the United States could launch a full-scale military operation.”