War with…Venezuela?

sporkman · 2025-10-16T12:48:09+00:00

So for the past few months Trump has been ordering the military to kill speedboats going from Venezuela. He claims that they’re drug smugglers but they tended to have too many people for a drug smuggling operation and in any case he hasn’t offered any proof. If they had gone by standard procedure which is interdiction then there would be proof. This has happened about half a dozen times now. Yesterday Trump authorized the CIA to undertake clandestine operations in Venezuela. Since the USA tends to not be good at HUMINT I’m assuming that it will be lethal predator drones like what the CIA operated in Afghanistan. It turns out that in his first administration Trump was advocating for an Iraq style regime change operation in Venezuela. All of the people around him from James Mattis to Mike Pompeo to John Bolton to Mike Pence strongly opposed this course of action. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_United_States_invasion_of_Venezuela Seeing as how Trump made a huge splash by excoriating Jeb Bush in the 2016 primary over the Iraq War, this is unusual and unexpected. It seems kind of obvious that a regime change war with Venezuela would be a Vietnam/iraq style quagmire, and yet here we are.