In early November, something outlandish happened: a U.S. carrier group steamed out of the vicinity of the Middle East and headed to a deployment in the Caribbean. The USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s most advanced aircraft carrier, would no longer stand guard over the dusty hills of the Levant—instead, it joined a flotilla of other surface warships stationed at the edge of Venezuelan territorial waters, adding the firepower of its 90 combat aircraft to the Trump administration’s growing pressure on the government of Nicolás Maduro.

The men and materiel currently deployed around Venezuela mark the largest military buildup the region has seen in 30 years, since the U.S. intervened to restore the government of Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1994. Its purpose is clear: to push Maduro out—by intimidation if possible, by force if necessary—and bring an end to a regime that has impoverished and oppressed its people, fostered a regional refugee crisis, and facilitated the trafficking of Colombian cocaine abroad.

The second Trump administration’s foreign policy has placed Venezuela—long peripheral in Washington’s strategic thinking—back in the spotlight. But although the rhetoric is dramatic, the strategic justification for the operation is far more tenuous than past eras of U.S.–Venezuelan engagement.

Venezuela has played little role in the American political imagination in recent years, but during the mid-20th century the U.S. was deeply concerned with the country of Bolivar. Venezuela had only recently become a democracy in 1958, leaving behind a decade-long military dictatorship and the oppressive but economically productive policies of Marcos Pérez Jiménez. Its fragile institutions, poverty, and economic inequality left it vulnerable to communist agitators, both within the country and imported from abroad. (The influence of Cuban communism has always been particularly strong in Venezuela.)

Preventing the fall of Venezuela to communism was a major objective of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America during the early Cold War. Vast amounts of American capital had poured into the country, some $3 billion in 1964. Nearly all of this capital went into developing the country’s massive oil reserves, an investment that soon made Venezuela one of the United States’ most important trading partners. Oil imports from Venezuela fed rapidly expanding American industry, ravenous for additional energy sources. By 1964, President Lyndon Johnson could tell Venezuela’s President Raúl Leoni that his government “[has] done such a good job in this area that the United States buys more oil from Venezuela than from any other country. The percentage involved here is 60 percent of our imports, and Venezuela has at least 30 percent more of our oil import market than any other country.”

Venezuela’s importance to the American economy in this period would be difficult to overstate. In 1973, the year of the Arab oil embargo and Nixon’s oil crisis, the U.S. imported more than 1.1 million barrels of oil a day from Venezuela, more than any other country except Canada and more than the U.S. imported from every country on the Persian Gulf combined. Venezuela was a top oil exporter to the U.S. at a time when America was highly dependent on foreign energy, and so its importance to U.S. foreign policy was obvious as well. A communist revolution in Venezuela, or a left-wing military coup, would lead to the loss of not only the billions of dollars of American capital invested in the country, but also had the potential to cripple the American economy, which needed Venezuelan oil to power its factories and to provide fuel for the nation’s cars and trucks.

The U.S. responded to its evident economic interests by working to foster Venezuelan democracy and strengthen its military and political institutions. The U.S. sent millions of dollars in military aid to help Venezuela combat the communist insurgents of the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), who were being financed, trained, and supplied by Fidel Castro’s Cuban government. 

The U.S. also sent millions to Venezuela in loans, aid, and technical assistance in an attempt to increase Venezuelan state capacity. Much of this was carried out under the banner of John F. Kennedy’s master plan for Latin American development, the Alliance for Progress. The 10-year program was intended to boost economic growth and competitiveness, increase literacy and education among the populace, augment Latin American countries’ weak state capacity, reduce economic inequality and integrate the region with markets in the United States. Other assistance came in the form of infrastructure loans from entities like the Inter-American Development Bank and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (now a part of the World Bank), organizations largely financed by the U.S. government and used as part of the West’s Cold War–era outreach to developing nations.

These efforts eventually paid off. The FALN ceased to be a major threat after the Venezuelan government and key guerrilla leaders came to a settlement that legalized the Communist Party of Venezuela in return for disarmament. Small cells and splinter groups remained active, but communist insurgency no longer posed a material threat to the government by the 1970s. Though still troubled by significant inequality and heavily reliant on oil revenues, Venezuela prospered economically during the ’60s and ’70s, and settled into a tradition of orderly democratic transition that lasted through the 20th century. 

Even when the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez decided to nationalize the oil industry in 1976, the U.S. maintained good relations with the country and pushed for more comprehensive compensation for American oil companies. The oil taps remained open for American industry, and the U.S. and Venezuela maintained a strong bilateral relationship until the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998.

But with the end of the Cold War after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Venezuela lost priority as a foreign policy objective, along with Latin America broadly. The U.S. government under Clinton entered a drawdown phase, and a contraction in the developmental and diplomatic establishments occurred in parallel with the famous “Last Supper” that led to the consolidation of the American defense industry. USAID began rolling up many of its Latin America programs, and the focus for the region shifted to anti-narcotics programs in Colombia and Mexico, leaving Venezuela far less of a priority than it had been in the past.

The ascension of Hugo Chávez to power on an explicitly anti-American platform in 1999 briefly brought Venezuela back into the consciousness of American policymakers, but events quickly drove Latin America even farther out of mind than it had been in 1997. After 9/11 and the subsequent American invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, there was precious little bandwidth in the federal government for the Western Hemisphere in general. The U.S. vaguely supported a coup attempt in 2002, but offered no aid or assistance to the plotters; the operation fizzled out miserably. Chavista Venezuela was essentially ignored entirely by the U.S. amid adventures elsewhere.

Compared to terrorism in the Middle East, there seemed to be little of interest in Latin America for the U.S. The threat of communism, Soviet or Cuban, vanished with the collapse of the USSR. Chavismo’s Bolivarian socialism presented no material threat to the U.S. Nor was there any major interruption to the American energy supply; Chávez still needed American dollars to fund his social redistribution programs. And even as the U.S. continued to import Venezuelan oil in the 2000s, the fracking revolution produced a massive boom in domestic American energy production that made the U.S. less dependent on oil from abroad than at any time during its history.

The revival of Venezuela as an issue in American foreign policy did not take place until after Chávez’s death, and was not, as in the midcentury, a response to American economic interests or questions of national security. The Obama administration began placing sanctions on the then-new government of Nicolás Maduro in response to human rights violations committed by the government against demonstrators participating in the protests that swept the country in 2014. 

The first Trump administration drastically escalated the scale of U.S. involvement with Venezuela on lines that would have been familiar to anyone who had listened to the speeches of George W. Bush. President Donald Trump lumped the Maduro regime in with Iran, Cuba and North Korea in his 2018 State of the Union address, calling the countries out as “communist and socialist dictatorships” that had to be confronted for the good of the nation. John Bolton, Trump’s national security advisor, placed it in a constellation with Cuba and Nicaragua as the “troika of tyranny.”

But while the rhetoric and intensity of American action in the region changed, the method still largely followed the path laid down for it by the Obama administration. While Trump made some noises about more serious interventions (including potentially the use of military force), ultimately the administration simply continued placing major sanctions on government figures and organizations for human rights abuses and undermining democracy after Venezuela’s brutal response to protests in 2017. 

Many thought that time had come in 2019, when the Venezuelan National Assembly invalidated the disputed presidential election of 2018 and declared Juan Guaidó, the assembly’s president, rightful leader of the country. The U.S. quickly recognized Guaidó as the president of Venezuela and made moves to support his attempted toppling of the regime, pressing for international recognition of his shadow government and funnelling funds to his opposition movement—a response which ended in embarrassment for everyone except Maduro.

Guaidó’s movement fizzled out almost as soon as it began. He had insufficient popular backing or legitimacy, and no chance of winning over a material portion of the Venezuelan military. Maduro turned out the Army to disperse protestors, cracked down on the opposition, and purged the military of anyone who showed signs of supporting Guaidó. The U.S. retaliated with still more sanctions, but by that point the writing was on the wall. Trump’s “maximum pressure campaign” on Maduro had completely failed to push him out of power, and Guaidó fled the country for exile in the U.S.

The second Trump administration began with what appeared to be a marked divergence from Bolton-era Venezuela policy. Special Envoy Ric Grenell met with Maduro several times; in late January, he negotiated the release of six American citizens imprisoned in Venezuelan jails. Grenell also managed to convince Maduro to accept American deportation flights—deportations being a high priority for the administration. In July, the administration made another deal with the Venezuelan government to release 10 more American prisoners in exchange for the release of Venezuelan citizens being held on behalf of the U.S. in El Salvador’s maximum-security CECOT prison system. Later that same month, the U.S. renewed Chevron’s license to drill in Venezuelan waters in partnership with state oil company PDVSA—a partnership that necessarily provided a certain profit for the Venezuelan government. For a time, it seemed that Trump had decided to adopt a less confrontational, more transactional approach to dealing with Maduro.

That illusion quickly disappeared. August touched off a blitz of aggressively anti-Maduro actions aimed at toppling the regime. The Department of Justice doubled the bounty on Maduro’s head from $25 million to a staggering $50 million. The president also took the dramatic step of ordering American warships to deploy off the coast of Venezuela, initiating the current, militarized phase of U.S.–Venezuela relations.

That grouping has now reached a considerable size: over a dozen surface warships, including an aircraft carrier; a marine expeditionary unit; at least one attack submarine; a special forces mothership; in total, some 15,000 sailors and Marines are idling off the coast. The administration has been eager to make their firepower evident to any spectators to the south: Their mission, ostensibly an antinarcotics operation but also a transparent attempt to intimidate the Maduro regime into compliance, has included the detection and obliteration of small vessels ferrying drugs along the maritime trade routes of the Caribbean Sea.

The administration’s justification for the new, more forceful approach to Venezuela is principally that of stopping the drug trade, with the novel admixture of the language and legal justifications developed to conduct the War on Terror. Trump has branded Maduro a “narcoterrorist” and accused him of presiding over the organized crime networks of the Cartel de los Soles and Tren de Aragua, both of which have now been officially designated foreign terrorist organizations. The administration argues that Maduro has been sending cartel members to sell drugs and commit crime in the United States, in essence conducting a campaign of state-sponsored terrorism against American citizens. The thrust of the administration’s contention is that the U.S. is already in a quasi-war with Maduro—a proposition it explicitly endorsed in a memo sent to Congress in early October informing legislators that the president has “determined” that the U.S. is in an “armed conflict” against drug cartels whose actions “constitute an armed attack against the United States.”

The implications of such a “designation” are expansive indeed, and Trump has done nothing to indicate that U.S. actions will be particularly constrained. The president has repeatedly expressed his opinion that “Maduro’s days are numbered” and indicated that the U.S. is likely to begin striking “narcoterrorists” in Venezuelan territory soon. He has even declined to rule out American boots on the ground.

The justifications offered for this supposed state of war being conducted by avowed narcoterrorists often don’t hold water upon even cursory examination. For example, Trump has made repeated references to Venezuelan traffickers bringing fentanyl, an exceedingly deadly drug responsible for most U.S. drug overdose deaths, to U.S. markets. But there is no evidence that Venezuela traffics any meaningful quantity of fentanyl. Fentanyl in the U.S. comes almost exclusively from laboratories in Mexico, which synthesize it from chemical precursors imported from China. Even the basic accusation of drug trafficking looks rather flimsy: While Venezuela is not an insignificant transit point for cocaine, grown and refined in the jungles of neighboring Colombia, it’s a relatively minor supplier for the American market. Most U.S.-bound cocaine is shipped via the Pacific, not the Caribbean, landing on the beaches of Mexico. In contrast, of the 200–300 tons of cocaine that pass through Venezuela each year, much of it is bound for Europe or islands in the Caribbean. The remainder is dwarfed by the thousands of tons of cocaine that flows northwards through Mexico.

Nor is there any material reason to believe that Maduro is the mastermind behind two drug cartels working in concert to destabilize the U.S. and harm its citizens. Tren de Aragua, though a real prison gang, is not a hierarchical organization with cells doing the bidding of top leadership. It functions more as a loose network of affiliated gangsters, facilitating connections and crime on a relatively low level. The Cartel de los Soles, on the other hand, may not exist as an organization at all; it is a term of American coinage referring to the web of corrupt Venezuelan government officials that collaborate with Colombian gangs to facilitate drug trafficking through Venezuelan territory. There’s no public evidence that it has any leadership whatsoever, let alone that it functions as Maduro’s shadow organization within the Venezuelan government.

The ultimate goal of the Trump administration’s recent actions is clear: it wants Maduro out of power, and it wants him out of power now. In secret talks, Maduro offered to grant massive concessions to the U.S. in Venezuelan oil and minerals, along with a gradual process in which he would relinquish the presidency to a lieutenant before holding new elections. The U.S. rejected his terms. The message was reiterated in a recent call between the two heads of state: Trump informed Maduro that the U.S. would grant him and his family safe passage only if he resigned the presidency and fled the country immediately. (Unsurprisingly, he declined.)

The pivot towards regime change in Venezuela is principally the product not of new information about narcoterrorist activities in Venezuela, but the increased power of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Rubio has been one of the sterling performers of the second Trump administration, winning the president’s trust and esteem along with the position of national security advisor—the first man to head both the National Security Council and the State Department since Henry Kissinger.

Rubio has a personal interest in Venezuela; his Cuban heritage has given him an acute distaste for the wreckage wrought by communist and socialist governments in Latin America. He has been a consistent Latin America hawk for his whole political career, and particularly opposed to the left-wing governments of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. He’s far from alone in this perspective: His home state of Florida, from which the second Trump administration’s talent is disproportionately drawn, contains any number of Latin American refugee communities who would love to see American power topple the governments that drove them and their families abroad, Venezuelans included.

Rubio’s influence in the administration has expanded significantly since the beginning of Trump’s second term, and Venezuela is where he has chosen to spend it, a source close to the administration told The American Conservative. Rubio may handle issues in Europe and the Middle East, but his main interests do not lie in dealing with Ukraine or Iran. There were real tensions between Rubio and Grenell over how to handle Venezuela—a contest Rubio appears to have won decisively.

In a strange twist of fate, Rubio’s hawkishness against left-wing governments in Latin America has run into none of the usual constraints on Trumpian foreign policy: Many foreign policy restrainers, who would normally put up the most internal resistance against American intervention abroad, have broadly coalesced into agreeing that the U.S. should respond to emerging multipolarity by refocusing its foreign policy on securing the Western Hemisphere. The new National Security Strategy lays out this vision comprehensively:

We want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States; we want a Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations; we want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations. In other words, we will assert and enforce a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.

Venezuela is the most convenient place to plant a flag for such a strategy. A more aggressive approach against the cartels in Mexico, for example, would backfire by blowing up the extensive, behind-closed-doors cooperation being offered by President Claudia Sheinbaum; perversely, waiting for more promising projects risks squandering momentum when the administration's bandwidth is inevitably consumed by events in Europe and the Middle East.

Regardless of the motivations behind American intervention in Venezuela, the prospects for regime change are bleak. If policymakers at the White House hoped Maduro would be intimidated into resigning by the USS Gerald R. Ford menacing the waters off Caracas, they will be gravely disappointed. Maduro has shown no interest in leaving power, and for good reason: There’s no place he could go where he will be safer than he is right now, behind a National Bolivarian Armed Forces that he has thoroughly coup-proofed. Those forces may not be well-armed—the military is in no shape to fight a war against a peer Latin American country, let alone the United States—but Maduro is betting that his cards are good enough to call Trump’s bluff. He doesn’t think the U.S. has any appetite for invasion.

He’s probably right. The U.S. has little to gain from an invasion of Venezuela. Maduro may be anti-American, but Venezuela is a shell of its former self, and it has little to recommend itself as a major focus for U.S. foreign policy today. The U.S. is a net oil exporter, and no longer has any need for Venezuela’s energy production. Its economy is in such a shambles that even its foreign partners aligned against American interests want little to do with it. (China poured more than $100 billion into the country, an investment from which it will never see a dime of profit; it has not contributed a cent to Maduro for years.) There is no risk of the socialism of the Bolivarian revolution catching abroad; every other Latin American country has enough and to spare of Venezuelan refugees as an unmistakable object lesson. The other major issue, illegal immigration caused by Maduro’s socialist devastation, has already been rendered moot by the border being slammed shut under Trump’s watchful eye.

In contrast, the risks of intervention are severe. While a prosperous and democratic Venezuela would no doubt be the ideal partner for the United States in Latin America, there is reason to suspect that American intervention might not be effective at producing such an outcome. While American arms could topple the regime without much difficulty, such a step would leave the country ripe for the expansion and exploitation of cartels, criminal groups, and insurgents of all kinds. The Venezuelan military is deeply entangled with the cartels already as a result of endemic corruption, and many officers and military units will likely defect and be absorbed into real narcoterrorist outfits like the ELN rather than stick around to face justice from occupying American troops and a triumphant María Corina Machado. Still more troublesome: Any new government would face the immense task of reconstructing Venezuela’s civic and political fabric after decades of Chavismo. Who will fill out the ranks in the army, the police, the intelligence services, the electoral commission, the judiciary? 

The U.S. does not have a great track record of national reconstruction in the 21st century, even if that were something the American people had an appetite for (a dubious prospect). A few missteps, and the country collapses into anarchy or an endless guerilla war against newly-empowered cartels, hardly the recipe for reducing immigration pressures and drug trafficking in the hemisphere—and now with American troops on the front lines.

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Although both the people of Venezuela and the United States would undoubtedly benefit from Maduro’s departure, the administration’s increasingly aggressive posture bears little relationship to the strategic value at stake. Venezuela no longer occupies the crucial position it once held in the ’60s and ’70s, when American industry depended on its oil and U.S. policymakers feared it might become a beachhead for Soviet or Cuban subversion. Today, the country offers no comparable leverage—neither as an economic partner nor as a geopolitical outpost. The challenges most frequently invoked to justify confrontation, from drug trafficking to mass migration, are far more effectively addressed through cooperation with Mexico and through targeted law-enforcement efforts than through coercive power projection in the Caribbean. A military intervention, meanwhile, risks worsening many of the very problems it is meant to solve.

At bottom, the risks of regime change vastly outweigh the potential rewards. Toppling Maduro would be the easy part; what would follow is a fractured security landscape, an enfeebled state, and an urgent need for a years-long reconstruction effort that the United States has neither the will nor the institutional capacity to undertake. A miscalculation could unleash a failed state on the southern rim of the Caribbean, foster real narcoterrorist organizations, and saddle Washington with open-ended responsibilities. In such a scenario, the United States could easily find itself less secure than it is today.

The practical reality is that Venezuela no longer warrants the level of risk the administration seems eager to assume. A strategy more measured and more attentive to the limits of American power would better serve U.S. interests—and avoid turning a troubled country into a crisis of our own making.