Michelle Goldberg discusses the bizarre buildup to a U.S. attack on Venezuela:
To hear the administration tell it, our hostilities with Venezuela are largely about the country’s role in drug trafficking. But fentanyl, the drug at the center of America’s addiction crisis, neither originates nor passes through Venezuela. The country is a transit hub for cocaine trafficking, but mostly to Europe. So the administration’s drug war rhetoric seems like a pretext. But a pretext for what?
Regime change in Venezuela has been one of Trump’s few fairly consistent policies since his first term. He sought regime change in 2019 and backed Guaido through the end of the term. Almost as soon as he was back in office, Trump had Venezuela in his sights again. Once he had picked Rubio to be his Secretary of State, the writing was on the wall. It was practically guaranteed that he would be pursuing regime change in Caracas again, and that is what we are seeing unfold right now.
Why target Venezuela? My best guess is that he was frustrated with the failure of his Venezuela policy in the first term, he sees Maduro as a relatively vulnerable target, and he thinks he can rack up a foreign policy “win” at low cost. Bombing Venezuela is wrong and stupid, but it would satisfy almost every faction of the Republican Party. He is also surrounded by Floridian hardliners that have been telling him how easy this will be. Trump may think that he can have a quick war against an extremely weak country and reap the political rewards. He is almost certainly wrong about this, and if he attacks Venezuela it is likely going to haunt the remainder of his presidency.
I assume the anti-cartel framing is being done mostly for the benefit of Trump supporters that don’t like the idea of ideological regime change wars but have no problem with using force to beat down other countries. Regime change in Venezuela is very much Rubio’s policy and it is being pursued for clearly ideological reasons, but if they can dress it up as an attack on cartels that makes it easier for a lot of Trumpists to accept. It may be that Rubio needed to dress it up this way to get Trump fully on board with military action.
