Peace President Trump’s war threats against Venezuela and his illegal drone strikes (aka, murders) on Venezuelan fishermen

The Telegraph recently posted this audio podcast in which Brian Finucane of the International Crisis Group talks about the recent history of US-Venezuela relations and the Trump Administration drone murders against Venezuela and the increasing US threats of war and subversion against the current government. (1)

When American policymakers look at Venezuela, it’s a very safe assumption that the main background for their thinking is that Venezuela has the largest known crude oil reserves of any country in the world.

But foreign policy can come from a mixed set of elements: greed; geopolitical power-balancing; ideology; war lust; misguided good intentions; delusions; blundering stupidity. With Venezuela, oil is always a big part of the mix in the heads of US policymakers.

Democracy Now! recently addressed the question of how much of a role Marco Rubio’s far-right, old-fashioned anti-Communist ideology may be playing in the current situation. Although how to reasonably categorize Venezuela on a left-to-right political spectrum is a messy question. For Peace President Trump’s cult, the Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is some kind of commie. And he is holding lots of oil. (2)

For what it’s worth alongside Venezuela’s massive oil reserves, the V-Dem democracy ratings for 2024 classify Venezuela as an “electoral autocracy,” a category that also includes El Salvador (one of Trump’s favorite allies), Egypt, India, Pakistan, Russia, and Ukraine, among others.  (3) So Rubio and the neocons would have at least a figleaf of a pro-democracy claim in attempting a regime-change war.

Given the regime-change talk, it’s worth remembering that even angry opposition politicians and activists can have patriotic restraints about calling for the US to invade and forcibly overthrow their country’s government:

Trump’s belligerence toward Venezuela - military actions off its coast, demonization of Venezuelan immigrants and their mass deportation, and the stiffening of sanctions - has deepened polarization in an unexpected quarter: the Venezuelan opposition. Until the July 2024 presidential election, the opposition’s leading parties had rallied behind María Corina Machado and her chosen candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia. Today, that unity has fractured, and much of the division can be traced to Trump’s Venezuela policy.

The situation mirrors the Trump-provoked polarization in the United States, which is not just left versus right but pits Democrats and Republicans against one another with unprecedented fervor. In Venezuela, one bloc of the opposition consists of leaders who, from the outset, have been vehemently anti-Hugo Chávez and anti-Nicolás Maduro, but are now distancing themselves from Washington. They find themselves at odds with the pro-Washington bloc, aligned with Trump on everything from immigration to regime change by any means possible.

Machado’s recent Nobel Peace Prize win sharpens the rift. The intensity of the opposition’s division starkly contradicts the Nobel Committee’s claim that Machado is a “key, unifying figure in a political opposition that was once deeply divided.” [my emphasis] (4)

Plus, the US record on regime-change operations is remarkably messy and ugly. But neocons like Rubio don’t let that worry them much, because they seem to stay perpetually high on their own ideological stash.

The nominal justification of the war, that the Venezuelan President is the head of a drug cartel, is preposterously phony: “U.S. intelligence has assessed that little to none of the fentanyl trafficked to the United States is being produced in Venezuela, despite recent claims from the Trump administration, a senior U.S. official directly familiar with the matter tells Drop Site.” (5)

Kyle Kulinski (whose style may be a bit raw for some) reports on the Drop Site report and adds useful background on Trump’s hostility to Venezuela and his fondness for Veneuelan oil. (6)

The Trump regime’s justification for murdering people in fishing boats and for regime-change operations against the Maduro government is painfully preposterous:

The official narrative is a fabrication. The existence of a Venezuelan government-run “Cartel de los Soles”, let alone its control of the transnational cocaine trade from Venezuela, has been largely debunked. And while “Tren de Aragua” is a real criminal organization with a transnational presence, it lacks the capacity to operate in the ways suggested by the United States; it certainly pales in comparison to the power of cartels in Colombia, Mexico, or Ecuador.

Tellingly, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration’s National Drug Threat Assessment of 2024 does not even mention Venezuela. And a classified National Intelligence Council report established that Maduro did not control any drug trafficking organisation. (7)

Guillame Long continues with a description of the challenge of the US invading and taking over Venezuela, Iraq-style:

There is no understating the extent of the asymmetry of a potential war between the United States and Venezuela, nor the US capacity to easily overwhelm Venezuela’s conventional forces. But it would be mistaken to think an invasion of Venezuela would be a replay of Panama in 1989–1990 or Haiti in 1994, the last occasions the US occupied countries in its hemisphere. The 20th and 21st centuries were, of course, marred by constant overt and covert US meddling in the national politics of South American states. But unlike Central America and the Caribbean, where smaller and less powerful states became the testing ground for the rise of the US Marine Corps, Washington has never carried out an outright military intervention on the South American landmass. Venezuela, with about 28 million inhabitants, has roughly the same population as Iraq had in 2003 and more than 10 times that of Panama in 1990.

Trump 2.0 is deliberately blurring of the lines between counter-terrorism and anti-narcotics operations. But that process has also been in progress for a while. The Intercept describes a 2015 report from “the federally funded Institute for Defense Analyses” that shows antecdents for the murdering-fishermen policy of Trump 2.0 :

The report, which was obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request and has  never previously been made public, provides a window into the inner workings of major drug-trafficking networks. The report also shows the central role the Pentagon sees for itself in countering those networks at a time when the Trump administration is claiming broad war-making authorities and beginning to openly use the military to assassinate alleged smugglers.
An attorney whose client was interviewed by researchers working for the Pentagon told The Intercept that the report proves that the recent sidelining of counternarcotics police in favor of bloodshed at sea is what military insiders have wanted for years.

“There’s a huge difference between the Coast Guard or the Navy boarding what they suspect to be a boat with drugs coming into the United States, and prosecuting those people, and those people having lawyers and facing charges and appearing in court, and potentially going to prison if they’re convicted — and the summary execution of suspected drug dealers,” the lawyer said. “And now we’ve crossed that line.” ...

The report shows glimmers of the mentality that Trump has made into policy with his tropical drone strikes, but the president has done little of what the Pentagon-funded researchers ultimately concluded would be the most effective means of taking on cartels: fighting corruption and arresting drug lords. [my emphasis] (8)

The Obama Administration’s usage of assassination (aka, “targeted strikes”) as a routine foreign policy tool (9) also helped legitimate the policy we know see in the snuff video’s the Trump regime releases showing their murders of people in fishing boats.

Notes:

(1) Is Trump about to invade Venezuela? The Telegraph YouTube channel10/24/2025. <https://youtu.be/TjnmOZKIEto?si=kioS9JASL-laiKEZ> (Accessed: 2025-27-10).

(4) Eisner, Steve (2025): With Trump, Polarization Among Venezuelans Reaches New Heights. NACLA 10/20/2025. <https://nacla.org/with-trump-polarization-among-venezuelans-reaches-new-heights/> (Accessed: 2025-27-10).

(5) Grim, Ryan et al (2025): Inside Marco Rubio's Push for Regime Change in Venezuela. Drop Site News 10/24/2025. <https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/marco-rubio-secretary-state-push-venezuela-maduro-regime-change-boat-strikes> (Accessed: 2025-28-10).

(6) The Dark Truth About Trump’s War On Venezuela Comes Out. Secular Talk YouTube channel 10/27/2025. <https://youtu.be/kvJcS-AtLiM?si=y1vf-Q_u2Alm9xiw> (Accessed: 2025-28-10).

(7) Long, Guillaume (2025): The US Warships Off Venezuela Aren’t there to Fight Drugs. CEPR 10/24/2025. <https://cepr.net/publications/warships-off-venezuela-arent-there-to-fight-drugs/> (Accessed: 2025-28-10).

(8) Tempey, Nathan (2025): Internal Report Shows the Military Always Wanted to Join the Drug War. The Intercept <https://theintercept.com/2025/10/26/drug-war-counternarcotics-report-trump-boat-strikes/> (Accessed: 2025-27-10).

(9) Jaffer, Jameel (2015): How the US justifies drone strikes: targeted killing, secrecy and the law. The Guardian 11/1/2018. <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/15/targeted-killing-secrecy-drone-memos-excerpt> (Accessed: 2025-27-10).