The Venezuela Endgame
The U.S. seizure of a Cuba-bound Venezuelan oil tanker this week indicates that the Trump administration is moving ahead with operations against the regime of Nicolas Maduro. Sorties from the Gerald Ford aircraft carrier strike group have been flying ever closer to Venezuela’s coasts and thousands more Marines are disembarking at bases in Puerto Rico to reinforce the 22nd MEU readily deployed on the USS Iwo Jima and other amphibious warfare ships stationed in the Caribbean.
There is a high probability of at least some American casualties, even in the limited standoff warfare contemplated.
The day before Navy Seals roped onto the sanctioned tanker Adisa that previously shipped Iranian oil under a Hezbollah-linked company, F-18 Hornets flew into the Gulf of Venezuela. skirting the port of Maracaibo in the closest open approach yet to Venezuelan territory staged by the U.S. naval task force. Hours earlier Trump was threatening to hit “land targets” as he realized that the only way to remove Maduro and his drug Cartel de los Soles will be by force.
“Maduro’s days are numbered” Trump said. But the Venezuelan dictator gave no sign of budging in one or more telephone exchanges with the U.S. president last week. He insisted on keeping his narco billions, on guaranteed protection against arrest or extradition and on virtual control over a successor government.
“His conditions for stepping down don’t seem to have changed much since negotiations for a transfer of power began during Trump’s first term more than five years ago,” says a former U.S. diplomat involved in the previous discussions.
In an apparent show of force, Venezuelan F-16s displayed aggressive maneuvers within six miles of the Gerald Ford , even challenging an F-18 CAP flying out to intercept them. “It was clearly provocative, exceeding anything we experienced during the cold war with the Soviet Union,” says ex-Navy combat pilot and former NSC official Luis Quinones.
Tuesday’s U.S. air incursion into the Gulf of Venezuela could have been a response to the attempt to buzz the Ford. Military analysts also say that the Navy fighters were “probing” Venezuelan air defenses to check for responses such as radio traffic and encrypted signals in ongoing efforts to map out regime air defenses.
The sortie may have also been for purposes of deflecting Venezuelan attention away from the sea extraction of opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, which was underway around the time that the F-18s supported by a Growler electronic warfare aircraft circled the coastal region.
Machado says that the U.S. government was kept closely informed of her exit by boat to Aruba, where she caught a private jet to Norway to collect the Nobel peace prize. Delays in her arrival were due to difficulties encountered in what has been revealed as an elaborate escape plan involving the use of disguises and diversionary operations, supported by U.S. intelligence agencies.
“Maria Corina’s problem now is returning to Venezuela,” one of her U.S. based supporters told The American Spectator. Maduro’s attorney general Tarek William Saab has declared her a “fugitive,” threatening instant arrest if she returns. The Nobel prize enhances her heroic standing as leader of Venezuela’s persecuted opposition, but remaining in exile could mean that hopes for an internal uprising to depose Maduro and replace him with the legitimate winners of last year’s elections, are dashed — in what is now a familiar pattern.
While her running mate and official presidential candidate Edmundo Gonzales fled Venezuela to Spain last year, Machado remained in hiding, using at times the shut-down U.S. embassy building in Caracas which has been under Swiss diplomatic protection since the State Department pulled out in 2019. Her calls for the army to mutiny recorded in videos released on social media became less regular as regime repression grew and the apparent Plan A for her to emerge before adoring crowds as Maduro was arrested by soldiers heeding her call, melted away.
“We are approaching a phase in which Trump may try to do limited land strikes,” says Dr. Evan Ellis, senior research professor of Latin American studies at U.S. Army War College who served on the State Department policy planning staff in the previous Trump administration. By remaining in Venezuela Machado could complicate the types of initial standoff operations being planned by the Pentagon.
Protecting her from falling hostage to Maduro would require a direct U.S. airborne landing around Caracas with the strong likelihood of significant American casualties which the Trump administration wouldn’t risk in an election year. Maduro’s ruling circle, closely advised by the Cubans, believes that the administration can be dissuaded from invading Venezuela by raising the specter of another “Vietnam.”
While current-day Venezuela bears no resemblance to the Republic of South Vietnam of the 1960s, it’s not an idle threat. Cuban special forces and intelligence agents embedded throughout Venezuela’s armed forces provide Maduro’s inner security ring and have refined the communist military doctrine of “Peoples’War” over decades. Maduro claims to be organizing 280 “points of resistance” throughout the country with highly trained urban guerrilla cells in Caracas that is also defended by heavily armed regular troops.
Even assuming that Venezuela’s armed forces largely collapse following waves of U.S. precision air strikes and electronic jamming of their radar and communications, die-hard regime supporters currently organized as “Collectivos” recruited from Tren de Aragua and other prison gangs could emerge as a guerrilla force coordinating with Colombian terrorist groups and Hezbollah, whose strength in Venezuela is similarly estimated to be in the thousands.
They have plenty of arms: over 100,000 AK-103 assault rifles and Dragunov sniper rifles acquired from Russia which has set up factories producing compatible 7.62 ammunition in Venezuela. Maduro boasts having 5,000 Russian shoulder-fired Igla SAMs distributed among his armed forces and Collectivo militias which could be lethal against helicopters. Easy to conceal Pantsir mobile SAM batteries delivered by Russia are also highly effective against low-flying aircraft.
The CIA is presumably working on penetrating what would in essence be a manufactured guerrilla movement. But experience shows that clandestine military structures tend to remain “known unknowns” until intelligence gaps get discovered the hard way, particularly in Venezuela’s treacherous environment teeming with double agents.
Dismantling the vast criminal organization running Venezuela and its external support system may require months of surgical raids and bombings to destroy its supply chains, scatter its resources, and kill its main heads. Marines and airborne units may at some point be sent in to occupy certain key locations.
The presidential compound and main army headquarters at Fort Tiuna in Caracas may be off limits to U.S. ground troops initially, due to the high losses which urban warfare in Venezuela’s sprawling capital would entail. But limited landings to take oil ports around the Gulf of Venezuela and the main airport of Maiquetia on the coast might be less costly.
Controlling Venezuela’s oil flow while diminishing its narco traffic would be the surest way to strangle the regime and starve out its armed supporters. It’s then that surviving factions of the army disconnected from the regular chain of command might turn on Maduro — unless a Tomahawk missile, Reaper drone, or Seal Team Six gets him first.
There is a high probability of at least some American casualties, even in the limited standoff warfare contemplated. Even a few bodybags could damage Trump and the Republicans in the upcoming midterms . Maduro and his allies know that’s their main Trump card, as does the American Left.
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