For those who think the ultimate goal of the Trump administration in this South American country is to crush the narcotics trade are in for a rude awakening.

This week it has been reported that the White House has secretly authorized the C.I.A. to carry out subversive activities, which represents the latest step in the Trump administration’s intensifying pressure campaign against Caracas. The U.S. military has been building up its naval presence Caribbean Sea with the stated goal of targeting drug smugglers.

Is anybody really surprised?

In late August 2025, the United States deployed 4,500 sailors and multiple naval vessels, including missile destroyers, a cruiser, an amphibious assault ship, and a nuclear-powered submarine, off the coast of Venezuela. In other words, far firepower than is needed to crush a drug cartel. Indeed, officials framed the operation as part of an enhanced counter-narcotics mission; however, the buildup should not be viewed as anything less than bloodthirsty “gunboat diplomacy”, part and parcel of a regime change operation to drive President Nicolás Maduro from power.

US President Donald Trump acknowledged this week that he had authorized the clandestine action and said the United States was considering strikes on Venezuelan territory.

“We are certainly looking at land now, because we’ve got the sea very well under control,” the president told reporters.

In July, the U.S. Department of the Treasury designated the Cartel de los Soles – a Venezuelan crime and terrorist organization said to be headed by high-ranking members of the Armed Forces of Venezuela who are involved in international drug trade – as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist organization, citing Maduro’s leadership role within the cartel. This, Washington arrogantly believes, will give it the authority to take out Maduro, who was democratically elected president by the people of Venezuela in 2013.

Trump’s plans are criminally transparent: they are quite simply a brazen effort to legitimize regime change with the ultimate goal of appropriating Venezuela’s petroleum resources, which comes as a grave violation of the UN Charter.

At a UN Security Council session on October 10, Russian Ambassador to the UN Vassily Nebenzia accused the US of plotting a coup in Venezuela under the guise of an anti-drug campaign.

“We are witnessing a brazen campaign of political, military, and psychological pressure on the government of an independent state with the sole purpose of changing a regime unfavorable to the US,” Nebenzia stated, noting that the coup plot is being carried out “using the classic tools of color revolutions and hybrid wars” by “artificially fueling an atmosphere of confrontation.”

Amidst the military buildup off the coast of Venezuela, it should come as little surprise that Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize.

“Educated at Yale, her early career was broadly funded by the National Endowment for Democracy—one of the most important Western tools for co-optation, social engineering, color revolution, and regime change,” wrote the political analyst Raphael Machado on these pages. “Another relevant connection for Maria Corina is the Davos Forum, which promotes her as ‘the future of Venezuela,’ precisely for her ability to combine the most disastrous neoliberalism with the most caricatured wokeness…”

As is obvious by now, the Norwegian prize serves not as a reward to peacemakers, but as a brutal tool for anointing those favored by imperialism and to legitimize war.

In 2002, Machado launched her NGO Súmate – a so-called “election-monitoring group” – to organize violent US-backed destabilization efforts paid for by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an agency created to carry out political operations formerly executed by the CIA.

Meanwhile, the rhetoric out of Washington continues to ramp up. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has declared that Maduro is not the legitimate president of the country, due to his government’s alleged falsification of results in the 2024 election, and the Justice Department doubled the bounty for his capture to $50 million.

A US invasion of Venezuela would come at a high cost, which many Americans would oppose. By comparison, the American invasion of Panama in 1989, to overthrow the government of General Manuel Noriega, was carried out by a force of some 30,000 U.S. troops, which resulted in hundreds of casualties. Venezuela is vastly larger than Panama, and while its military is not modern, it possesses military forces that were available to Noriega. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates an invasion of Venezuela would require nearly 50,000 troops. The Trump administration, which rode to power on an isolationist platform, should be extremely worried about the causes on which it spends the lives of American soldiers.

The real threat of such an operation, however, would rear its ugly head after the invasion. Bringing down Maduro’s government is one thing; there is no real chance that the Venezuelan armed forces can put up a serious fight against the American military. However, occupying and rebuilding the country is another consideration, as the U.S. learned to its disappointment in the Middle East and North Africa, in still-struggling places like Iraq and Libya.