The Trump administration’s escalating confrontation with Venezuela is the most consequential U.S. military posture in the Caribbean in decades. What began in early September with a lethal strike on a boat departing Venezuela has grown into a sustained campaign of more than twenty attacks on vessels Washington labels “narco-terrorist” threats—leaving over eighty people dead and drawing the United States into a political and legal crisis. This crisis escalated further last week when U.S. forces seized an oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast, which could be considered an attack on the country’s most essential economic lifeline.
As the administration moves naval, air, and special operations forces closer to Venezuelan territory, critical questions remain unanswered: What is the mission? What are its legal foundations? And where does this strategy lead?
These questions are critical to the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS), which was publicly released last week. The administration’s new strategy for the nation reframes hemispheric security through the lens of a “homeland defense” doctrine and a renewed assertion of a U.S. sphere of influence based on immediate geography. The NSS appears to envision great-power rivalry as a contest over proximity, supply chains, and territorial control—a national strategy that helps explain why Venezuela, despite posing limited direct security threats to the United States, has moved so rapidly to the center of U.S. policy.
At the same time, the administration has not communicated a coherent end state for these strikes. Instead, Washington’s actions reflect overlapping, and at times contradictory, efforts: counter-narcotics, regime change, coercive diplomacy, and the symbolic reassertion of U.S. dominance over the region.
What Is the Mission?
The administration frames the current campaign as a counter-narcotics effort targeting vessels allegedly used by “narco-terrorists” to smuggle illegal narcotics to the U.S. It has argued that Venezuelan criminal networks—particularly the Tren de Aragua cartel—pose a transnational threat warranting U.S. military action.
However, this Venezuela campaign appears to be nominally about narcotics and more about regional power. The facts undercut the drug-enforcement justification. Only a small share of narcotics entering the United States originate in Venezuela— Colombia remains the primary cocaine source, and Mexico is the center of fentanyl trafficking. The administration has presented no verifiable evidence that any of the destroyed vessels were transporting narcotics. Finally, the decision to pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, convicted of drug-related corruption and linked to over 400 hundred tons of cocaine shipments, deeply weakens the credibility of a counter-drug strategy.
Meanwhile, the size of the U.S. force in the Caribbean—a carrier strike group, F-35s deployed from Puerto Rico, long-range bombers flown near Venezuelan airspace, and over 15,000 personnel—far exceeds what is required for maritime interdiction. Instead, its composition suggests strategic coercion aimed at regime change, or at least at forcing Nicolás Maduro to negotiate his exit from the presidency.
The U.S. deployment is the largest Caribbean force concentration in decades— unmatched since the Cuban Missile Crisis. It dwarfs Venezuela’s military capabilities but remains insufficient for a full-scale invasion. Instead, it suggests possible preparation for surgical air strikes, coercive diplomacy, or a limited Panama-style intervention, all while signaling to geopolitical rivals that Washington intends to restore its traditional primacy in the hemisphere.
This interpretation aligns with the new Trump administration’s NSS, which calls for greater regional engagement in the Western Hemisphere, with Venezuela framed as a test case of U.S. resolve in the region. The administration’s rhetoric reinforces this: a $50 million reward for Maduro’s arrest, the labeling of his associates as well as his relatives as foreign terrorist entities, a declaration that the United States is “at war” with the cartels, and a pronouncement that Venezuelan airspace is “closed in its entirety.”
The Legal Foundations—Or Lack Thereof
The administration’s legal rationale has designated Venezuelan and Colombian groups—most notably Tren de Aragua and the National Liberation Army, a Colombian guerilla group that has supported Maduro—as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and “unlawful combatants” at war with the United States. The claim is that this analysis allows the U.S. military to conduct attacks absent congressional authorization. But the legal analysis prepared by the Department of Justice has not been presented to the American public or Congress.
The logic of this analysis falters for several reasons. For one, the intelligence community has not substantiated these groups’ direct command-and-control ties to Maduro. Terrorism and narcotics trafficking are also legally distinct categories. As several legal experts have noted, calling a drug smuggler a terrorist does not make it so. The law says a “terrorist” group has the intent to achieve political objectives—not profit. In addition, the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that allowed the United States to intervene against al-Qaeda does not apply. Rhetorical comparisons cannot substitute for statutory authority.
Legally, the U.S. military cannot lawfully target civilians or noncombatants on suspicion of criminal activity. U.N. human rights experts have explicitly stated that even if the U.S. allegations were proven, lethal force in international waters “amounts to extrajudicial executions.”
Compounding legal concerns, the handling of captured individuals—releasing them without interrogation or charges (which the administration did following a subsequent attack)—undercuts the argument further. The confirmed “two-tap” strike, in which survivors of an initial attack were killed by a second U.S. strike, will likely face continued congressional scrutiny and could constitute a war crime.
The 2025 NSS justifies U.S. assertiveness as necessary for homeland defense, including expanded military policing of the Western Hemisphere. But strategic priorities cannot supersede domestic and international law or the U.N. Charter. The NSS’s emphasis on “sovereign security corridors” places the United States at odds with established international norms. This raises concerns that Washington is tacitly abandoning a norms-based international order in favor of a 19th-century sphere-of-influence model and “gun boat diplomacy.”
Strategic Pathways: Three Options, All Risky
The administration has three broad choices. Each is fraught with potentially strategic, political, and humanitarian consequences.
Leave Maduro in power. This is the least likely path politically. If Maduro remains, especially after withstanding U.S. military coercion, he could emerge domestically strengthened as an “anti-imperialist” figure who defied Washington. This outcome risks heroizing Maduro, undermining his opposition, and showcasing U.S. limits.
Convince Maduro to step down. This would rely on the show of force to extract concessions. Maduro has reportedly explored negotiations, including a call with President Trump on December 1, during which Trump signaled the options were “the easy way or the hard way.” The danger is that public U.S. ultimatums have hardened Maduro’s stance, while private diplomacy may be undermined by hardliners in both capitals. Backchannel diplomacy could be successful, but Maduro will likely seek guarantees—amnesty, safety, and respect—that only Washington can provide.
A U.S. invasion modeled loosely on Panama. This is the most dangerous option. The 1989 Panama intervention required over 26,000 troops in a significantly smaller and less geographically complex country. Venezuela’s size, population, dense urban areas, jungles, and fractured security forces could create conditions for a protracted conflict. Such a conflict could echo Iraq: swift battlefield success followed by years of destabilizing insurgency, vast numbers of refugees, and regional destabilization.
What Comes After Maduro? The Myth of a Simple Transition
Opposition leader Edmundo González Urrutia, widely seen as the rightful winner of the 2024 election, and María Corina Machado, now a Nobel laureate, argue that a U.S. intervention would be welcomed by Venezuelans. But the political math is more complicated and could present severe consequences. These include:
A fractured military and security vacuum: Some parts of Venezuela’s security forces may align with a transitional government, others could resist, and yet others splinter into autonomous armed groups.
Collapse of an already devastated economy: Venezuela’s hyperinflation, shattered infrastructure, and widespread shortages would demand a vast international aid and reconstruction effort, dominated or heavily influenced by the United States.
Legitimacy and governance deficits: A U.S.-led stabilization mission could face deep legitimacy issues unless backed by broad regional support. A fragile successor government could struggle to deliver services or maintain order, and result in economic instability.
Humanitarian emergency and mass displacement: Renewed violence or prolonged instability could trigger another wave of population displacement and migration, possibly sending millions of people fleeing across borders and overwhelming neighboring countries and causing region-wide instability. The U.S. may not be ready to address this. Prior U.S. funding for Venezuelan humanitarian relief has been slashed (from roughly $94.5 million in 2024 to $2.2 million in 2025), and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have already withdrawn due to security risks.
The Broader Strategic Implications
This crisis has implications for the future of the international order and the trajectory of U.S. national security strategy. An intervention would signal the effective end of the postwar system in which sovereignty and territorial integrity are a baseline. If the United States can unilaterally intervene in Venezuela, then Russia may intensify claims to a “sphere of influence” in Eastern Europe, including over Ukraine, Moldova, and elsewhere. China could cite this precedent to justify actions against Taiwan or in the South China Sea; and global norms that borders cannot be changed by force would be weakened dramatically.
The NSS’s framing of geopolitical competition as a contest of “fortified homelands” only hastens this shift. It places operations against Venezuela alongside border militarization, domestic troop deployments, and the Golden Dome missile defense system as components of a broader national security strategy: defending the homeland through military force. By this logic, Venezuela becomes a test of whether Washington can reestablish control over the Western Hemisphere.
Trump’s early-term comments about the Panama Canal and even Greenland reflect this same logic. The administration appears to view U.S. security as geographically expansive and increasingly militarized, with Latin America reframed not as a partner region but as a critical security corridor.
The clock is now ticking. This current level of military deployment cannot be sustained indefinitely. The operation has already cost over $1 billion, and stasis is not a viable strategy. Washington now faces a narrowing set of choices: escalate, negotiate, or withdraw. Sustained, strategically calibrated diplomacy could yield progress in Venezuela. The military buildup gives Washington leverage—but also responsibility. If used recklessly, it could plunge the region into crisis. If used strategically, it could create the pressure needed to restart a diplomatic process capable of producing a peaceful transition and opening new opportunities in Venezuela.