Trump wants his war on Venezuela. Will he get it?

Posted: 5th December 2025

The drums of war continued to beat in the Americas this week, with US president Donald Trump ramping up his threats and attacks against Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro.

Since August, the US has built up its largest military deployment in the Caribbean in decades, with 15,000 troops amassed in the region alongside warships, guided missile destroyers, and F-35 fighter jets.

The Trump administration’s official rationale for this massive military escalationhas been to support counter-narcotics and drug interdiction operations in the region.

More than 80 people have been killed by US airstrikes in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea, with US lawmakers only now deliberating whether these extrajudicial assassinations might be illegal.

As ever, the corporate media has colluded in the manufacturing of liberal pretexts for regime change, even as Trump remains characteristically unsubtle about his imperial ambitions.

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal went so far as to claim that “Venezuela has become a major launchpad for huge volumes of cocaine shipped to West Africa, where jihadists are helping traffic it to Europe in record quantities”.

What next? Al Qaeda setting up a fentanyl lab in the tunnels of Caracas?

In the midst of teeing up a regime change operation under cover of the war on drugs, Trump has pardoned the former Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernández.

He was accused of accepting a $1m bribe from the notorious drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán in exchange for protecting narcotics routes through Honduras, and was due to spend the rest of his life in prison.

As president, Hernández hired lobbying firm BGR group for $660,000, which happens to be one of the largest campaign contributors to US secretary of state Marco Rubio, whose own brother was a prolific cocaine trafficker. Nothing to see here.

Trump now says he’s considering land strikes on Venezuela “very soon” after unilaterally closing Venezuela’s airspace, in another clear violation of international law.

The ultimate goal, ignored by much of the media, is the same as it was the last time Trump tried to overthrow Maduro. “We would have taken [Venezuela] over”, he said in 2023. “We would have gotten all that oil. It would have been right next door”.

While expressing no condemnation of Trump’s oil grab in Venezuela, the UK government quietly suspended some drugs intelligence sharing with the US last month over concerns about the legality of the airstrikes on small boats. (A televised genocide was apparently not enough to cease intelligence collaboration with Israel).

But despite these frictions, Britain will surely be eyeing up the opportunitiespresented by the overthrow of Maduro and the opening up of Venezuela’s oil reserves.

Why else was the Foreign Office’s secret “Venezuela Reconstruction Unit” already planning for “UK involvement in the [Venezuelan] energy sector” back in 2020?

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