Trump’s Bold Venezuelan Escalation

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rump announced the sweeping action in a statement accusing the Maduro Regime of financing crime and terrorism with what he described as stolen U.S. assets. Trump said the United States has assembled the “largest Armada ever” in South American history to encircle Venezuela; warning the pressure campaign will intensify until the regime returns oil fields, land, and other assets he claimed were taken from the U.S. Trump wrote:

“Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”

Trump’s intense pressure campaign on Venezuela isn’t just about drugs, or oil and natural resources; or even a long-term plan to reinvigorate the U.S. dominance of its own hemisphere and strangle the growing regional influence of China and Russia.

Instead, analysts and foreign policy insiders say, Mr. Trump’s interest in Venezuela reflects a unique combination of factors; including geopolitical, economic and personal, which has led the White House to pursue a multi-pronged push to squeeze what many see as the illegitimate government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. That strategy could include direct U.S. military strikes on Venezuela itself in addition to the continued targeting of boats allegedly transporting drugs or more seizures of Venezuelan tankers moving illicit, sanctioned oil.

Trump said Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro uses revenue from those oil fields to bankroll drug trafficking, human trafficking, murder, and kidnapping.

“The illegitimate Maduro Regime is using Oil from these stolen Oil Fields to finance themselves, Drug Terrorism, Human Trafficking, Murder, and Kidnapping. For the theft of our Assets, and many other reasons, including Terrorism, Drug Smuggling, and Human Trafficking, the Venezuelan Regime has been designated a FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION. Therefore, today, I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela.”

Nearly a year into his second term, President Trump views Venezuela as one of the most important pieces on a high-stakes, global chessboard. The administration appears to be operating on the theory that Venezuela, through a series of military and geopolitical moves, and perhaps a bit of good luck, could be transformed from a hostile narco-state into a friendly democracy with significant reserves of gold, minerals and heavy crude oil.

At the same time, specialists say, Mr. Trump wants to fulfill a personal goal he failed to achieve in his first term: overthrowing the Maduro Regime.

“There’s a sense of unfinished business,” said Christopher Sabatini, senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House, a leading think tank based in London.

Mr. Sabatini said key figures inside the Trump Administration, led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, seem to have convinced Trump the Maduro Regime is now as weak as it has ever been. They’re pushing the idea things in Venezuela have changed since Mr. Trump’s first term; when a failed attempt to formally recognize Venezuelan opposition figure Juan Guaido as the country’s rightful leader became something of a foreign policy embarrassment for the president.

Mr. Maduro has hung on to power despite virtually all credible international observers saying he lost last year’s presidential election to former Venezuelan diplomat Edmundo Gonzalez. That controversial election has left the Maduro Government in an especially weak position and highly vulnerable to U.S. pressure.

That reality, along with Mr. Trump’s deep desire to crack down on illegal immigration and the flow of drugs from Latin America into the U.S., has thrust Venezuela into the center of the administration’s foreign policy.

“They converge on this policy that originally went from justifying this as an anti-narcotics strategy … to clearly an anti-Maduro strategy, to seizing the oil tanker and probably more to come, and the threat of U.S. military action,” Mr. Sabatini said in an interview. “That may have a potential downside for the president,” he added.

Mr. Sabatini said, “He could have, if he had stuck to the narcotics narrative, proclaimed that we took out a whole bunch of boats … and mission accomplished. But now he’s leaned in on the whole ‘Maduro has to go’ thing. And that’s problematic. Because if he doesn’t deliver regime change, it will make him look weak. It really has come down to Trump versus Maduro.”

After a debriefing on Venezuela by Mr. Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Senator Lindsey Graham warned leaving Mr. Maduro in power would be a “fatal mistake to our standing in the world because that’s the worst possible signal you can send to Russia, China, Iran,” he told reporters.

On the Democrat side of the aisle, the President’s Venezuela initiative — whatever its motivations — has been almost universally panned.

“The administration has made clear its real interest is in starting a regime change war with Venezuela and going after its oil,” Rep. Gregory Meeks, New York Democrat and his party’s ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement.

✪ The Military Endgame

The Trump Administration has shown no signs of backing down from its hardball approach to Venezuela. On Tuesday, U.S. forces struck another alleged drug boat in the region, killing eight people. There have been at least 25 such strikes so far, killing at least 95 “narco-terrorists.”

Last week, U.S. forces seized the Venezuelan crude oil tanker Skipper, which the Justice Department said was being used as part of a covert oil shipping network supporting Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Trump has said the military campaign could soon expand to land targets in Venezuela. “We’re going to start doing those strikes on land too,” Trump said at a December 2nd meeting of his Cabinet officials. “The land is much easier, much easier, and we know the routes they take. We know everything about them. We know where they live.”

However, some lawmakers say the administration has so far has failed to make a clear and compelling case for why further military engagement in Venezuela may be necessary.

“Yes, it would be great to get rid of Maduro. But in terms of the question, Donald Trump has not come to the American people and said, ‘Here are our goals in Venezuela,’” Sen. Mark R. Warner, Virginia Democrat and Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told CBS’s “Face the Nation” program Sunday.

“We’ve got troops potentially in harm’s way,” Warner said. “I think the president needs to make the case if he’s going to try to put boots on the ground in Venezuela.”

Behind closed doors, part of that case could center on breaking Venezuela’s deepening ties with Russia, its leading arms supplier; and China, which has invested billions of dollars in Venezuela and has its eye on Venezuela’s vast deposits of resources.

✪ A Gold Mine Of Resources

In theory, toppling the Maduro Regime would make it easier to stop the flow of drugs from Venezuela to the U.S. Yet another important factor could be at play.

Maria Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, seemed to suggest that a new government in Caracas could give the U.S. greater access to the country’s gold and minerals.

“How do we restructure our debt? How do we open markets for international investment and give security to international investment in oil, in gas, in infrastructure, critical minerals?” she said in an interview Sunday on “Face the Nation. I mean, Venezuela is unique in terms of the amount of the natural endowments we have. And you know, we’re located three hours by plane from Florida.”

Maduro has claimed exploiting those resources is the true overarching goal of the American pressure campaign against his country, a claim many analysts reject.

Still, the sheer amount of resources in Venezuela is notable. A 2021 report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimated the total value of mined Venezuelan gold to be as much as $2.2 billion each year.

Maduro has publicly stated the total value of his country’s mineral reserves is $1.36 trillion, including some of the rare earth elements needed to power cellphones, fighter jets and other key pieces of 21st-century technology. China currently dominates the global market of rare earth element processing. Those figures cited by Maduro are virtually impossible to confirm independently.

It is indisputable Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves: estimated at more than 300 billion barrels, which accounts for approximately 17% of the total global supply. However, that oil is heavy crude and requires more refining than oil found in other parts of the world.

Former Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez accelerated the country’s nationalization of its oil industry, exerting direct government control over the resource.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Venezuela’s overall oil production has fallen dramatically in recent decades, from about 3.2 million barrels per day in 2000 to just 735,000 barrels per day in September 2023.

The U.S. seizure of the tanker Skipper, which authorities said was violating international sanctions on Iranian oil and transporting Iranian and Venezuelan oil to Cuba, could cut into Venezuela’s oil profits even further. It also could have much broader geopolitical implications. Specialists say that if such seizures continue, it could begin to have a direct impact on Beijing.

“Introducing tanker seizures as a tool in Washington’s toolkit will certainly raise eyebrows in China, whose imports of oil from sanctioned suppliers, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela, constitute more than a quarter of its import supply chain,” Clayton Seigle, a Senior Fellow in the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in a recent analysis. “Beijing will see growing tanker seizure risk in the context of its strategic imperative to cushion its considerable oil import dependency and look for other suppliers,” he wrote. ✪