By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, October 16, 2025
I guess the CIA’s ongoing work in Venezuela isn’t so
covert anymore. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported, “The Trump administration
has secretly authorized the CIA to conduct covert action in Venezuela,
according to U.S. officials, stepping up a campaign against Nicolás Maduro, the
country’s authoritarian leader.” The Times report said that the agency
was now authorized to “take covert action against Mr. Maduro or his government
either unilaterally or in conjunction with a larger military operation.”
President Trump, holding a press availability in the Oval
Office, Wednesday, after the Times scoop:
Q: Mr. President, thank you. I’m
curious, why did you authorize the CIA to go into Venezuela? And is there more
information you can share about these strikes on the alleged [Inaudible]
Caribbean?
Trump: Well, I can’t do
that, but I authorize for two reasons, really. Number one, they have emptied
their prisons into the United States of America. They came in through the —
well, they came in through the border. They came in because we had an open
border policy. And as soon as I heard that, I said, a lot of these countries —
they’re not the only country, but they’re the worst abuser.
And they’ve entered there. They’ve
allowed thousands and thousands of prisoners, mental institution — people from
mental institutions, insane asylums, emptied out into the United States. We’re
bringing them back, but that’s a really bad — and they did it at a level that
probably — many, many countries have done it, but not like Venezuela.
They were down and dirty. And the
other thing are drugs. We have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela. And a
lot of the Venezuelan drugs come in through the sea. So, you get to see that,
but we’re going to stop them by land also. [Emphasis added.]
Q: Does the CIA have authority
to take out Maduro?
Trump: Oh, I don’t want to
answer a question like that. That’s a ridiculous question for me to be given,
not really a ridiculous killer’s question, but wouldn’t it be a ridiculous
question for me to answer. But I think Venezuela is feeling heat, but I think a
lot of other countries are feeling heat too. We’re not going to let this
country, our country, be ruined because other people want to drop, as you say,
their worst.
This looks an awful lot like an effort to change the
regime in Venezuela, doesn’t it? And you thought I was
joking when I said Trump was the greatest neoconservative president we’ve had
in ages.
At the end of September, the Times reported that Secretary of State (and Acting
National Security Adviser, and Acting National Archivist of the U.S., and
former Acting Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development,
and . . .) Marco Rubio, along with CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and chief
domestic policy adviser Stephen Miller were all insisting on a sustained U.S.
effort to push Maduro out of power. It appears they have persuaded the
president; in late October, Trump instructed special presidential envoy Richard Grenell to
stop diplomatic discussions with the regime in Venezuela.
If the policy of the U.S. government is that we want to
see the regime of Maduro toppled and replaced, it seems like the sort of
consequential policy decision that Congress ought to weigh in on. And while the
specifics of the work of the CIA, the military, and the National Security
Agency must remain classified to protect sources and methods, a major and
far-reaching foreign policy choice like this one really ought to be openly
discussed with the American people.
Our Andy McCarthy pointed out that the Trump
administration’s legal justification for the strikes simultaneously asserts
that the individuals on the boat are nonstate actors and that they’re
acting on behalf of Maduro’s regime, and that the U.S. is in a state of war
against the cartels, but refused to specify which cartels. Andy points out,
“Drug smuggling, even in the aggregate, is not an armed attack if that term is
to have any meaning.”
Also, the American people just aren’t being told much
about these strikes. (Would you really need eleven people on a boat to smuggle
drugs, or is that a sign that the boat was involved in human trafficking? Was
it a good idea to blow up the boat if, as national security officials told Congress, it had turned
around and was heading back to shore?)
As I noted at the beginning of September, after the first
military strike on a boat the administration accused of holding Venezuelan drug
smugglers, the Pentagon never held an on the record briefing about that
operation, what it intended to achieve, and what was accomplished. Compare that
to, say, the extensive and detailed briefing from Air Force General Dan
Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after the strike on the Iranian
nuclear program.
The last on the record press briefing at the Pentagon was on
August 14. The last one before that was August 7, and the last one before
that was July 2. As you may have noticed, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth
enacted sweeping restrictions on the Pentagon press corps, which every news organization with a full-time Pentagon
correspondent refuses to accept, other than One America News.
About a week ago, Ryan Berg and Henry Ziemer of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies looked at what kind of military power the U.S. could
project into Venezuelan territory:
Unlike the Middle East or
Indo-Pacific, the United States has limited basing infrastructure in [Latin
America and the Caribbean]. U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) counts just two facilities,
Naval Station Guantánamo, in Cuba, and Soto Cano Air Base, in Honduras, as
year-round overseas bases. While U.S. deployments in LAC generally benefit from
geographic proximity to bases on U.S. territory, for prolonged operations, more
forward-positioned logistics are needed. For this reason, the U.S.
unincorporated overseas territory of Puerto Rico has emerged as a strategic
node and enabler of the continued presence in the region.
The force in the Caribbean is in
need of airfields to fly its planes and ports to dock and resupply its ships.
Puerto Rico has thus far been providing the lion’s share of such
infrastructure, with the Port of Ponce hosting several warships when they are not
on patrol (the U.S. Virgin Islands have also served as an important stopover
for U.S. vessels). Meanwhile, navy reconnaissance planes like the P8-A Poseidon
are flying out of the National Guard facilities at the otherwise civilian Luis
Muñoz Marín International Airport. Indeed, the pressure to find usable basing
have led the United States to reopen the former Roosevelt Roads Naval Station
in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, which had been shuttered for more than two decades.
The need to reopen old facilities,
acclimate forces to a new theater, and requisition support from civilian
logistics may limit the United States’ ability to sustain intense combat
operations. To be sure, the U.S. military already has significant power projection
from Puerto Rico alone, to say nothing of the ability of platforms like the USS
Iwo Jima to provide additional in-theater support. However, as previous CSIS analysis has suggested, the U.S. presence remains well
below the level needed for full-scale combat operations in a territory the size
of Venezuela, with all its attendant complexities.
Evan Cooper and Alessandro Perri of the Stimson Center argue
that an open fight with the United States is exactly what Maduro wants, giving
him a chance to pose as the hero standing up to “Yanqui Imperialism”:
President Maduro has used the
strikes as evidence of U.S. imperialism and overreach, and additional strikes
could perversely bolster his hold on power. He has activated
Venezuela’s citizen militia in response to U.S. threats, giving him a more
prominent image as resisting American aggression. Internationally, the sharp
condemnations by other Latin American nations — even ones that did not
recognize his election as legitimate — also allow Maduro to present himself as
part of a united front against imperialism, complicating efforts to
internationally isolate his regime. . . .
The United States has a long
history of military intervention in Latin America, which still resonates
throughout the region. Maduro has regularly invoked these acts, and Petro,
Lula, and others have likewise spoken of the tendency of the United States to
tread on Latin American sovereignty. Attacks on Venezuelan territory would give
additional salience to these claims and threaten to fuel anti-American
sentiment at a time in which the United States sees Latin America as a critical ground for its competition with China.
Remember, one of the reasons the U.S. is spending $20 billion to purchase Argentinian pesos, and
organizing the arrival of another $20 billion from non-government sources, is because
we don’t want Argentina to fall under China’s sway. So, if it’s worth tens of
billions of dollars to prevent Latin American countries from becoming more
influenced by China . . . do we want to voluntarily step into the aggressive
villain role that the likes of Maduro want to cast us in?
Make no mistake, Maduro ranks among the worst of the
world’s dictators and if we could remove him from power, either in a cushy
exile somewhere or in a pine box, Venezuela would be a better place. Eric
Farnsworth of the Journal of Democracy summarizes the recent chapters in Maduro’s reign of terror and
reign of error:
On 28 July 2024, Venezuelans voted
overwhelmingly to elect opposition candidate Edmundo González as their next
president. After years of economic failure, spiking crime, and political
oppression that caused a quarter of the population to flee, exhausted voters
turned out in droves to reject the brutal dictator Nicolás Maduro, despite his
crude efforts to intimidate them and discredit the opposition. The result
wasn’t even close: González received twice as many votes as Maduro according to
more than 80 percent of the printed tally sheets — or actas — collected,
posted online, and manually tabulated by the opposition. Their strategic
verification efforts exposed the true magnitude of González’s win and put paid
to regime claims of popular legitimacy. But Maduro’s government actively tried
to suppress the results, hiding acta and releasing its own improbable
totals that claimed Maduro had won with 51.2 percent of the vote.
Within hours, the regime declared victory and vowed to reinaugurate Maduro for
a third presidential term.
González has since fled the
country, opposition leader María Corina Machado is in hiding, and numerous
other opposition figures and supporters have been exiled, jailed, or killed. Maduro remains firmly
entrenched, sustained by his regime’s stranglehold on state-security forces and
Venezuela’s vast oil and mineral wealth, plus an illegal drug trade. . . .
The country, which sits atop the
world’s largest proven oil reserves and other natural resources, was once the
wealthiest in Latin America. But today, having lost more than 75 percent of its
GDP, Venezuela is home to the worst man-made economic disaster in the region’s
modern history. . . .
No matter the president’s hurt feelings, Machado was a
deserving pick for the Nobel Peace Prize. (Unsurprisingly, the nincompoops over
at National Public Radio — now without your tax dollars! — referred to her as a
“right-wing leader.”)
But Farnsworth concludes that U.S. military action
against Maduro and his regime would probably not get us where we want to go:
Some observers have raised the
possibility of military actions — including regime-decapitating drone strikes,
targeted assassinations, mercenary actions, and outright invasion to overthrow
Maduro. But these would be impractical, politically unpopular, largely
ineffective in achieving long-term peace and stability, and contrary to the
values and interests of a democratically governed country, at least without a
clear international mandate from the UN Security Council (where China and
Russia would certainly exercise their veto power). This calculus could change
if Maduro himself establishes a casus belli by, for example, foolishly
invading neighboring Guyana to enforce claims on the Essequibo region, as he has periodically threatened. But Maduro knows the red
lines; such self-defeating actions are unlikely.
Maduro deserves all the grief the U.S. can muster to send
his way. But as Stephen Covey advises, “begin with the end in mind.” What is it that the Trump
administration wants to do in Venezuela? Presumably, our vision of a better,
freer, safer, and more stable Venezuela involves someone besides Maduro and his
thugs running that long-suffering country. But who do we want running it
instead, and how? And what are we willing to do to get there?
ADDENDUM: When it comes to the Middle East, the
Democratic nominee to be mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, has a lot to
say about the actions of Israel and its future — including his confident
assertion that Israel’s actions constitute a U.S.-funded “genocide.”
But when it comes to Hamas . . . eh, he just doesn’t
have much to say. The topic really doesn’t interest him, apparently:
Fox News’ Martha MacCallum: Do
you believe that Hamas should lay down their weapons and leave the leadership
in Gaza?
Mamdani: I believe any
future here New York City is one that is affordable for all, and as it pertains
to Israel and Palestine, we have to ensure that there is peace, and that is the
future we have to fight for.
MacCallum: But you won’t say
that Hamas should lay down their arms and give up leadership in Gaza?
Mamdani: I don’t have the
opinions about the future of Hamas and Israel beyond the question of justice
and safety, and that anything has to abide by international law. And that
applies to Hamas, that applies to the Israeli military, plus anyone you could
ask me about.
MacCallum: Okay, one last
thought on that. You have said that you would arrest Netanyahu if he came to
the United States. You’ve been outspoken in your criticism of him. Do you stand
by that? You would arrest him if he came here to America?
Mamdani: I’ve said that this
is a city that believes in international law and this is a city that wants to
uplift and uphold those beliefs.
So he’s got no particular thoughts on the future of
Hamas, but he’s definitely arresting Netanyahu if he ever sets foot
within the five boroughs.
I keep hearing from Democrats about what a charming and
charismatic guy Mamdani is, but if you ask him one tough question, he starts
spouting nonsense like a malfunctioning robot from Westworld.
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