On September 2, 2025, President Trump announced that the United States had carried out a military strike in the southern Caribbean against – he claimed – a drug-carrying vessel that had just left Venezuela and was operated by the Tren de Aragua gang.

​

Eleven people, the U.S. president reported, had been killed… including, it turns out, Alejandro Carranza, a Colombian fisherman who had long fished the Caribbean for marlin and tuna (we learned of this from his 14-year-old daughter, who told The New York Times, “I never thought I would lose my father in this way.”)

​

Since then, the U.S. has conducted at least 21 strikes on boats in the region, killing dozens of people. Even though people are being killed – – and 15,000 service members are stationed in the region, plus the fact that the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, has arrived on the scene, carrying over 4,000 American sailors and dozens of tactical aircraft – – the Trump/Vance administration is using military force against a target that poses no direct threat to the United States and is doing so without congressional authorization.

​

President Trump also announced that he had authorized covert CIA action on the ground in Venezuela – which kind of defeats the purpose of something being “covert,” does it not? – evidently authorizing everything from clandestine information operations to training guerrilla opposition forces to conducting lethal strikes – again without congressional approval… all of which is STRAIGHT UP UNCONSTITUTIONAL.

​

Even though the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) is grossly outdated and is being used outside its original mandate, it still at least exists – meaning it’s one thing to use lethal force against terror groups in the Middle East, where the military has relied on congressionally approved authorizations for using force, but it’s a different situation entirely when dealing with Latin American-based “cartels,” where no semblance of such authorization exists whatsoever.

​

Of all this, President Trump said: “I authorized for two reasons, really. Number one, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America. And the other thing, the drugs, we have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela, and a lot of the Venezuelan drugs come in through the sea.”

​

First of all, there is zero evidence that Venezuela has “emptied their prisons into the United States of America.” Second, bombing random motorboats leaving from Venezuela seems like the wrong target because Venezuela is not a leading source of illegal drugs coming into the United States. Most cocaine is produced and smuggled from Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, and Venezuela plays essentially no role in the production and/or smuggling of fentanyl.

​

But that’s that even the point. The point is that, despite Vice President JD Vance’s claims that “killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military” – which is an absurd thing to say – our armed forces are not law enforcement agencies.

​

Our soldiers are not empowered to hunt down suspected criminals and kill them without trial (and remember, the U.S. military is attacking civilian vessels, not military ones). Because this is essentially what the Trump/Vance administration has our soldiers doing, there are legal questions not only about the strikes themselves but also concerning the U.S. military personnel involved in the operations, who could possibly be held personally liable.

​

The Trump/Vance administration using self-defense as a legal justification for the military strikes, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio did when he said the drug cartels “pose an immediate threat” to the nation, is also absurd. In one instance, for example, U.S. national security officials told Congress that the first boat “had turned around and was heading back to shore” and “was fired on multiple times by the U.S. military after it had changed course.” Fleeing boats don’t exactly seem like an “immediate threat” to the United States.

​

Obviously, the Trump/Vance administration is inventing reasons to go to war, so what is this really about?

​

Regime change, plain and simple. The Trump/Vance administration – – especially Secretary of State Marco Rubio who, as a former senator from Florida, is faithful to the Venezuelan and Cuban exiles in Miami, and who also has a well-established loathing of leftist Latin American dictators – – wants Nicolás Maduro out.

​

This is not the first time Donald Trump has been down this road. The first Trump administration tried other tactics to remove Maduro. For example, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted him and 14 other senior officials on charges of narco-terrorism, corruption, drug trafficking and other criminal charges, saying that “Maduro and other high ranking Venezuelan officials allegedly partnered with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) to use cocaine as a weapon to ‘flood’ the United States.”

​

Although Cuba, China, Russia and Turkey remain hard-core Maduro defenders, the United States and over fifty other governments tried hard in 2019 to elect Maduro out of office by recognizing a young opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, as the legitimate interim president of Venezuela – an effort that included a surprise appearance by Guaidó at President Trump’s 2020 State of the Union address. But the Venezuelan police, military, and courts all continued to recognize Maduro as the country’s rightful leader, which undermined the opposition effort.

​

Then, in July 2024, Maduro – who happens to control the election board – declared he had won a third six-year term, which seemed unlikely since the exit polls showed just the opposite and he had polled behind his opponent Edmundo González by more than 25 percentage points for weeks. < González was running mainly because María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader and recent Nobel Peace Prize recipient, had been barred from running in the presidential election. >

​

Listen, there is no question that Nicolás Maduro is a bad guy who has wrecked Venezuela.

​

Once Latin America’s richest country and longest-running democracy – plus, the owner of the world’s largest proven oil reserves – Venezuela is now in deep, deep trouble. Thanks to hyperinflation, corruption, cronyism, severely inadequate government investment, and significant economic mismanagement by Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez, Venezuela is now a failed state.

​

Falling oil production, decrepit infrastructure (think sporadic water, electricity, and cellphone coverage), failing banking systems, and U.S. sanctions have intensified the crisis, causing 7.7 million Venezuelans to flee their country.

​

The Maduro regime has violated human rights on a colossal scale, leaving hundreds of anti-Maduro peaceful protestors dead.

Living standards and the health care system have collapsed, medicine is scarce, infant mortality is high, malnutrition is rampant, and diseases like measles, diphtheria, malaria and tuberculosis are resurgent. Over 7.6 million people still in Venezuela are in dire need of humanitarian assistance.

​

Plus, without question, Maduro is most definitely in the drug trade and wants desperately to grow his business. A 2022 report by the think tank InSight Crime reports that the “principal role” of Maduro & Co. is “to ensure the drug trafficking system functions to the benefit of the regime by placing corrupt and loyal personnel in strategic political and military positions.”

​

In November 2025, the U.S. government designated the Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization, identifying Nicolás Maduro as the group’s leader (labeling an organization as a terrorist group gives American law enforcement and military agencies broader powers to target it). Already, the U.S. had indicted Maduro on narco-terrorism charges and put a $50 million bounty on his head.​ < Sidebar: There is confusion as to exactly what Cartel de los Soles is and is not. It is not, for example, a traditional Latin American family-run drug cartel and some analysts say, because there are no members and no hierarchy, it’s not even a unified organization. >

​

Then there is the gang Tren de Aragua, which isn’t under Maduro’s control but is definitely in cahoots with him. The gang, which started in a prison in the Venezuelan state of Aragua, trades in drugs, extortion and human trafficking. Its influence has moved beyond Venezuelan borders, and the group is trying hard to corrupt and destabilize neighboring democracies.

​

Nicolás Maduro is bad. Tren de Aragua is bad. Drugs are bad. We get all of that. However, the United States of America should have learned by now that trying to achieve regime change through military force and CIA-sponsored coups d’état usually results in total disaster.

​

America’s history of regime-change wars is grim. American military interventions in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua all led to the rise of ruthless tyrants; the 1954 ousting of Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz  led to the country’s deadly 36-year civil war; and the 1961 Bay of Pigs CIA campaign meant to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro was not only humiliating for the United States, but it led to Castro allowing the Soviet Union to put its nuclear missiles in Cuba – which led to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

​

The involvement of the United States in these operations also leads to chronic anti-Americanism and radicalizes many of the young people (like Che Guevara, who was in Guatemala in 1954).​ The asymmetrical political and economic dominance of the United States in Latin America – and its history of often unwanted interventions – is already so acute it even has a name: the Colossus of the North.

​

Our relationships in Latin America are already in serious trouble, which is a colossal mistake made by the Trump/Vance administration. They have alienated Colombia and Brazil by 1) imposing 50 percent tariffs on Brazil because officials there refused to stop the trial of President Trump’s buddy, former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, and 2) threatened to cut all U.S. aid to Colombia after Colombian president Gustavo Petro blasted the U.S. strikes in the Caribbean. Typically, it quickly got worse. President Trump then called President Petro a “lunatic who has many mental problems” and “an illegal drug leader” before the U.S. Treasury Department hit him with sanctions.

​

This is a major problem because it’s critical that the United States remain fully committed to helping Colombia fight cartels and cocaine trafficking, as we have done for decades.​ This is not the time to back off, because progress is being made. In the first six months of 2025 alone, authorities in Colombia seized over 500 tons of cocaine; destroyed 2,486 laboratories; seized over $125 million worth of assets from mafia networks; captured 183 people for extradition; and delivered 177 more to American and international courts.

​

The Trump/Vance administration needs to BACK OFF. LIKE, RIGHT NOW. Military force equals death… there’s just no two ways about it. Even if the operation is relatively small and ends quickly – like the overthrow of Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1989 – it still results in people losing their lives. In Panama, a country less than one-tenth the size of Venezuela, 27,000 U.S. forces were involved, with 26 Americans and hundreds of Panamanians killed.​ When America dispatched our military to stop the military junta and restore the democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti in 1994, we were forced to send over 25,000 personnel – and Venezuela is roughly a third larger than Haiti.

​

And, make no mistake, although far from a match for the U.S. military, Maduro’s forces are way better armed and much better prepared to put up a more serious and deadly fight than Norieaga’s. Plus, Maduro has gone a long-way to making himself “coup-proof,” purging and jailing military officers that he detected were against him and planting loyal intelligence officers in every unit of the military.

​

In fact, in President Trump’s first term, American officials ran a war game to assess what the fall of President Nicolás Maduro’s regime might look like. The results were scary. The war game scenario resulted in chaos and violence igniting throughout Venezuela, as military units, competing political factions, and guerrilla groups fought each other for control.

​

The military strikes the Trump/Vance administration has conducted against Venezuela are illegal under domestic and international law. The administration has ordered the execution of people who are not at war with the United States and who have not been afforded due process. Essentially, the administration is acting as judge, jury and executioner – and that is not allowed by the international community or in the United States of America.

​

This not what stable, healthy democracies do. This is what dictators like former President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines do – who now, incidentally, is facing charges in the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity because, in part, he directed the execution of over 6,000 people suspected of using and/or selling drugs.

​

To make a significant, long-term difference in Venezuela, the United States should publicly – and diplomatically – support the Venezuelan opposition led by María Corina Machado.

​

It’s also critical that the United States and the global community come together and help the Venezuelan people. Obviously, we can’t give money directly to the highly corrupt Venezuelan government, but we can continue our financial support of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and, of course, continue to demand we get USAID back.