Ten thousand soldiers on board 10 US warships, including a nuclear submarine, several destroyers and a missile cruiser, patrol the southern Caribbean in what is the largest US military build-up in the region in decades. At least seven boats allegedly transporting drugs have been bombed, resulting in the extrajudicial killing of more than 32 people. And now the US administration is threatening Venezuela with direct military action. The Pentagon has reportedly drawn up plans for military strikes inside Venezuela, and President Trump has authorised the CIA to conduct lethal covert operations there.

All of this is ostensibly aimed at getting rid of Maduro, who Trump claims is leading a vast criminal organisation. “Maduro is the leader of the designated narco-terrorist organisation Cartel de los Soles, and he is responsible for trafficking drugs into the United States,” Secretary of State — and longtime Venezuela hawk — Marco Rubio has said to justify the US military posture in the region. The United States has also placed a $50m bounty on the Venezuelan president’s head.

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 organisation 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.

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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. There is no denying that there is some transiting of drugs through Venezuela, but the volume is marginal compared with the cocaine currently passing through South America’s Pacific Coast routes. And Venezuela plays no role in the production and export of synthetic drugs such as fentanyl, or with the US’s broader opioid crisis. Put simply, if the Trump administration was actually intent on combating drug trafficking, Venezuela makes little sense as a target.

So what is US policy really about? And where might this dramatic escalation lead?

At first, the US display of force off the coast of Venezuela appeared to be an exercise in political theatre: an attempt by President Trump to project his “tough on crime” approach to domestic — including eager MAGA — audiences. “If you traffic in drugs toward our shores, we will stop you cold,” US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said last week. Recent polls show that crime remains one of Americans’ primary concerns.

Another reading was that Trump’s build-up was a political stunt designed to appease the neo-cons in his administration, sectors of Washington’s foreign policy establishment, and radical elements of the Venezuelan opposition, including Maria Corina Machado, the new Nobel Laureate and hardline opposition leader who has called for foreign intervention in her own country. Unlike more moderate Venezuelan opposition leaders, these actors are all hostile to any perceived normalisation with Venezuela and oppose Trump’s recent granting of an operating licence to Chevron. The build-up appeared, in this light, as a typical Trumpian bluff: projecting toughness towards Maduro while simultaneously securing Venezuela’s oil.

One potential scenario is that the rhetorical escalation of the last few weeks will not be matched by direct attacks on Venezuela, and that the United States’s extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean will simply continue as they have over the last month and a half. In the absence of any serious US drug policy — especially on the vital issues of consumption or money laundering — the satellite imagery of small boats being blown up in the Caribbean serves Trump’s agenda well, albeit with tragic consequences for the boats’ unidentified occupants and their families.

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But today, the sheer scale of the US military build-up does not align with the idea of a cynical political stunt, nor does Trump’s decision to cut off all diplomatic backchannels with the Venezuelan government and deauthorise special envoy Rick Grenell’s outreach to Maduro. The more we look at the military deployment and the increasingly belligerent rhetoric from Trump officials, the more the pursuit of regime change through military means appears to be the most plausible explanation.

Rubio and his fellow Florida Republicans have, of course, been ardently advocating for a more aggressive approach towards Venezuela for years. For Rubio, toppling the Venezuelan president — and perhaps, if he can ride the momentum, even overthrowing the Communist Party in Cuba — is a generational objective, more symbolic than strategic, and rooted in political passions and fantasies of return and revenge.

Given that US sanctions, coup attempts and the support of a parallel Venezuelan government in 2019, all measures strongly backed by Rubio, failed to overthrow Maduro, it appears that the secretary of state has concluded that direct military intervention is the only way to achieve this end, and that he is weighing heavily in favour of this outcome inside the administration.

The prospect of US boots on the ground, however, still feels incongruous, especially given Washington’s many more pressing geopolitical interests and Trump’s repeated promise, to the applause of his MAGA base, that he will not drag the country into new “forever wars”. But this is the Western Hemisphere, not the distant Middle East. And in this new multipolar reality, which even Rubio now acknowledges, the return to traditional spheres of influence means the US is once again wielding a big stick in its hemisphere, openly reverting to the gunboat diplomacy that so often rocked the Caribbean in the early 20th century before the US was a global power.

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.

It’s also important to bear in mind that even a weakened chavismo still commands a sizable and ardent base of support. Opposition to any US military intervention would likely be fierce, regardless of how the pro-government militias that have been mobilised over the last few weeks ultimately perform. Violent, US-supported regime change would almost certainly result in a long, protracted resistance and insurgency.

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Given the high risks of a land invasion, another scenario — one involving air strikes but without the amphibious landing of US soldiers on Venezuelan shores — appears more likely. Trump would surely prefer a one-off air strike along the lines of the June attack on Iran. But there is no reason to believe that such an attack would result in the mass uprising and military putsch that Rubio and his allies have been hoping for.

The Venezuelan military has so far proven remarkably loyal to the Maduro government. It has weathered two decades of regime change attempts, including a brief coup in 2002, the 2019–2023 Guaido fiasco, which included an overt coup attempt in April 2019, and an ill-conceived mercenary incursion in 2020, each with fewer defections from its ranks than the last. In institutional terms, years of draconian US sanctions and destabilisation have hardened the Venezuelan security state and fostered a resilience that has taken many by surprise.

We also shouldn’t be surprised if, when the first attack fails to produce the promised uprising, regime-change advocates demand another strike, then another. Convinced the government is on its last legs and needs just one more push, they would likely pressure Trump to keep bombing, and perhaps even support the formation of some form of armed opposition, currently nonexistent in Venezuela.

Such a Libya-style proxy war would flood an already volatile region with more weapons and money. Criminal organisations and irregular armed groups already operating on Venezuela’s western border — and beyond, in neighbouring Colombia — would thrive in the chaos, swelling their ranks and profiting from arms and human trafficking: a nightmare scenario for Latin America.

During the last few years of draconian US sanctions on Venezuela — which have significantly contributed to shortages of food, medicine and fuel — more than seven million Venezuelans have fled their country. This unprecedented wave of migration has had profound repercussions across the region and beyond, including in the US, where it has influenced the 2024 elections in Trump’s favour. If US sanctions produced such an exodus, we can only imagine the scale of the refugee crisis that would result from an actual war. It is no surprise that Brazil and Colombia, Venezuela’s most strategic neighbours from the point of view of any potential conflict, have strongly opposed a US military intervention.

The bitter irony is inescapable: an operation justified by anti-narcotics rhetoric would create ideal conditions for drug-trafficking organisations to expand their power. The military build-up off Venezuela’s coast is a slippery slope towards an armed conflagration that could lead to far greater suffering for the Venezuelan people, a potential political quagmire for the United States, US troop casualties and the catastrophic destabilisation of much of the region.