Would Trump Actually Invade Venezuela?
After months of saber-rattling and harsh rhetoric, U.S. President Donald Trump dispatched military assets to Latin America to combat the narcotics trade. Three Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers were sent to Caribbean waters off Venezuela, with Washington planning to send 4,000 marines to the region. The White House also issued a $50 million bounty for President Nicolas Maduro’s arrest as part of the crackdown on Venezuela. The autocratic president, who was charged with cocaine trafficking and narco-terrorism in 2020, is accused of leading the Cartel of the Suns, a drug trafficking organization tied to Venezuela’s military leadership. Fears are growing that the U.S. is building up to a military confrontation with Venezuela, especially since sanctions failed.
Countries across Latin America are growing worried that Washington’s actions presage unilateral U.S. military action against Caracas and further intervention in the region. President Trump appears determined to use whatever means available to oust President Maduro after his policy of maximum pressure, including strict sanctions, failed to spark regime change. The motivation to remove the despotic regime in Caracas is rooted in its profound illegitimacy. Not only did President Maduro renege on earlier promises to reintroduce democracy, but he also stole the July 2024 presidential election. Venezuela’s incumbent leader declared victory after the country’s regime-controlled electoral authority announced he won 51% of the vote despite evidence of a landslide win for the opposition.
Well before the July 2024 election, the Maduro regime had long been seen as illegitimate. During 2019, the National Assembly, then led by Juan Guaidó, invoked Venezuela’s Constitution to declare that President Maduro had usurped power and was not the legitimate leader of Venezuela. Afterward, Guaidó was internationally recognised as Venezuela’s lawful president, provoking a lengthy struggle with the despotic Maduro regime, which refused to cede power. By April 2023, this failed after the death of dozens of pro-opposition supporters and Guaidó losing office, which forced him to flee Venezuela fearing for his safety.
The events of July 2024 were followed by a brutal crackdown on political criticism and dissent ,exacerbating Caracas’ existing exclusion from the international community. This appears to have little impact on Venezuela’s despotic leader nor his grip on power. Indeed, U.S. sanctions targeting government officials and related entities have been in place since 2005. The Obama White House ramped up sanctions declaring a national emergency in 2015 because of the extraordinary threat posed to U.S. national security by the Maduro regime. In his first term, President Trump implemented even harsher sanctions, which crippled Venezuela’s economically vital oil industry. After July 2024, Washington, Brussels and their allies, including 10 Latin American countries, refused to recognize President Maduro’s victory.
President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are hawkish about invading Venezuela. Between 2016 and 2020, various plans were discussed by the Trump White House about how to use the U.S. military to topple Maduro’s autocratic regime. In 2018, then Senator Rubio proposed that a U.S. military intervention in Venezuela would provide a solution to the long-time threat posed by Caracas to the stability of the Americas. The failure of diplomatic negotiations and economic sanctions to oust Maduro and restore democracy in Venezuela points to military intervention as the only remaining option. Venezuela’s increasing international isolation, along with traditional allies Russia and Iran being preoccupied with their own serious conflict,s makes now an ideal time to strike against the profoundly unlawful regime in Caracas.
In response to Washington’s deployment of warships capable of conducting surgical strikes with Tomahawk missiles off Venezuela’s coast and the bounty for President Maduro’s arrest, Caracas activated the 4.5-million-strong Bolivarian militia. This branch of Venezuela’s military, composed of poorly trained and lightly armed volunteers, is the least combat-ready component of the National Bolivarian Armed Forces. The military’s main branches, the army, navy and air force, with 123,000 active personnel, are on high alert. Caracas sent 15,000 military personnel to the border with Colombia, ostensibly to fight drug trafficking and bolster security.
Venezuela, unlike Washington’s last regional interventions in Grenada and Panama, possesses a strong military. There is a blue-water navy operating seven frigates and one submarine, a 63,000-strong army equipped with main battle tanks, and an air force flying modern jet fighters. Indeed, Venezuela’s military is ranked as the seventh most powerful in Latin America, ahead of Ecuador but behind Peru. Despite those credible numbers, if Washington commits U.S. forces to combat operations in Venezuela it will win an overwhelming tactical victory against a military ill-prepared to fight a medium to high intensity war.
A decade-long crippling economic meltdown is impacting the quality as well as the quantity of training, logistics, and equipment, severely degrading the armed forces’ combat capability. This is further exacerbated by a heightened focus on maintaining domestic security and internal order, particularly for the army, which distracts the military from its core war-fighting role. Events from 2021 support this hypothesis. A handful of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) dissidents, leftist guerrillas who rejected Bogota’s 2016 peace deal, resoundingly defeated Venezuela’s military in a series of clashes over a year-long conflict in the state of Apure.
A U.S. invasion of Venezuela, despite leading to an unqualified military victory, is fraught with extreme risk. The greatest threat is that U.S. troops will not be welcomed in Venezuela or Latin America. There is a long history of distrust borne of Washington’s brutal regional military interventions and coups, which destabilized many countries, leading to cruel military dictatorships that persecuted civil society. In many instances, where U.S. ground forces were deployed in Latin America, the troops behaved poorly, breeding considerable hostility among local communities. These feelings are aggravated by Washington’s lack of positive regional engagement since 2016 and President Trump’s decision to slash aid.
Despotic President Maduro will use that sentiment, along with Chavist Venezuela’s anti-imperialist credentials, to whip up hate and anti-American resistance in Latin America. There is already a resounding response to Maduro’s call for citizens to respond to U.S. threats; thousands of Venezuelans are volunteering for the Bolivarian Militia. For these reasons, after invading Venezuela, Washington could find itself fighting a grueling, long-term asymmetric war. The difficulties associated with that conflict will be magnified by Venezuela’s shattered infrastructure and broken institutions, which were decimated by the country’s profound economic collapse. Another further concern is the potential for multiple centers of resistance because of Venezuela’s highly fragmented civil society and the existence of various non-state armed groups operating in the country.
In a country that is double the size of Iraq, any invasion and subsequent occupation to rebuild a devastated Venezuela will require a massive number of troops. Estimates vary, but reliable sources point to the deployment of more than 100,000 U.S. troops with supporting naval, air and logistical elements, with double or more of that number required if Washington’s experience in Iraq is any indication. At its peak the U.S. deployed 170,300 personnel who struggled to control Iraq’s territory and defeat an ideologically driven anti-American multiparty insurgency.
Opposition to a U.S. invasion is considerable and growing. Mexico, Cuba and Colombia have rejected the deployment of U.S. military assets near Venezuela. President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico stated she was opposed to any sort of military intervention in Latin America. Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro warned a U.S. invasion risks turning Venezuela into another Syria, where a savage 14-year multiparty civil war spawned terrorist movements and displaced over 13 million refugees. President Petro was quoted by major Colombian newspaper El Tiempo as saying:
"The gringos are in the pot, they think that by invading Venezuela they solve their problem, they put Venezuela in the case of Syria, only with the problem that they are dragging the same thing into Colombia,"
The Andean country’s leader further cautioned that such a conflict could spill over into Colombia, dragging the long-standing U.S. ally into the war. Various leftist guerrillas still fighting in Colombia, including FARC dissidents and the National Liberation Army (ELN), potentially will join the conflict to boost their flagging popularity, territory and influence. Even if those insurgents do not become directly involved, they will emerge as important conduits for arms, training and logistical support to Venezuela’s resistance. Consequently, they strengthened their power base in Colombia and Venezuela, while bolstering recruitment and income. This will further destabilize a fragile Colombia a country recovering from a lengthy multi-party civil war. These possible outcomes highlight the considerable risk of regional contagion and destabilization that U.S. military intervention in Venezuela will cause.
By Matthew Smith for Oilprice.com