For months, U.S. naval forces have been gathering off Venezuela’s coast. The warships, the bomber flyovers, and the rising volume from Washington are not incidental. The likelihood of an actual intervention is not incidental. It is in line with the administration’s recently presented geopolitical priorities. The new National Security Strategy, released earlier this month, explicitly elevates the Western Hemisphere as a central arena of U.S. national security, linking migration, narcotics trafficking, and regional instability to the defense of the homeland. It also calls for a more assertive military and maritime posture in the Caribbean and Latin America and revives a hemispheric doctrine aimed at preventing disorder and hostile external penetration in the Americas. Within that framework, expanded naval deployments and coercive pressure against regimes deemed destabilizing are not aberrations but logical extensions of what is now the regime’s stated policy.
While President Donald Trump has long insisted he wants “no new wars,” his administration is nonetheless assembling the legal and political scaffolding for strikes intended to force Nicolás Maduro from power. Less visible than the Trump administration’s ultimate objectives, and potentially just as consequential, are the risks spreading outward across the hemisphere. Should intervention come, its effects—for good or ill—will not be confined to Venezuela. It would unleash unpredictable currents across a region already strained by ideological polarization, migration pressures, increasingly sophisticated networks of organized crime, and eroding diplomatic norms. What might look from Washington like a narrowly defined mission—to remove a dictator or confront a “narco-terrorist” threat—is in reality a plunge into uncertainty.
The logic behind Washington’s posture toward Caracas extends beyond Maduro himself. Venezuela remains home to the world’s largest proven oil reserves, a fact that has regained strategic salience amid global energy volatility and renewed U.S. concern with supply security. U.S. forces have already seized an oil tanker off its coast. At the same time, Venezuela has become a symbol—sometimes exaggerated, sometimes instrumentalized—of U.S. anxieties about great-power competition in the Western Hemisphere. China’s long-standing financial exposure to Venezuela and Russia’s security cooperation with the regime have turned the country into a convenient stand-in for a broader narrative about hemispheric influence slipping away. For Trump and his advisers, pressure on Venezuela serves multiple purposes at once: disciplining an adversary, signaling resolve to rivals, and asserting a vision of regional order in which Washington remains the ultimate arbiter. For Secretary of State Marco Rubio in particular, toppling Maduro is a critical step toward regime change in Cuba, a historic priority for both Democratic and Republican administrations over the past sixty years.
The administration insists that regime change would be an orderly process, but the potential for confusion across the region is intensified by the fractured Venezuelan opposition, whose most prominent voice is both a Nobel laureate and a deeply divisive figure. María Corina Machado has advanced sweeping allegations portraying Maduro as the head of multiple drug-trafficking syndicates and even as someone who helped manipulate elections abroad, including in the United States. The narrative appeals to Trump and his advisers, who increasingly depict Venezuela not merely as another authoritarian state but as the central node of hemispheric criminality, a convergence point for narcotics, corruption, and hostile foreign influence. But former diplomats, analysts, and even opposition factions warn that some of these claims rest on conflations of distinct criminal phenomena. Drug trafficking in Venezuela is real, but diffuse, a patchwork of actors, not a command structure. None of this is to defend Maduro or his regime, but converting these complexities into an imminent national-security threat is a high-risk political maneuver with uncertain long-term consequences. The fact that this basic insight is not readily acknowledged by advocates of regime change should prompt a measure of restraint.
Inside Venezuela, the U.S. military buildup has produced an atmosphere that is both tense and oddly routine. As Phil Gunson recently noted from Caracas, the city’s daily rhythms continue even as B-52s skirt airspace and the U.S. Fourth Fleet hovers just beyond the coastline. Concrete tank traps now line the coastal highway. Militias mobilize for show. Yet most Venezuelans remain more preoccupied with shortages, repression, and the fatigue of economic collapse—that is, in short, the grim norm of life in Maduro’s Venezuela. This uneasy coexistence of routine hardship and latent violence is itself destabilizing: a single miscalculation—an intercepted vessel or misread signal—could trigger escalation.
That risk was underscored by the recent U.S. seizure of a Venezuelan oil tanker carrying sanctioned crude. The vessel was allegedly part of a network moving oil through intermediaries tied to Cuba and Asian markets, generating hard currency while sustaining Havana’s energy and security support for Maduro. In Washington, the operation was framed as lawful enforcement, signaling a willingness to combine naval power, legal authority, and economic coercion into a unified pressure campaign.
The implications of this tense moment concern individuals and governments well beyond Venezuela’s borders. Colombia, Guyana, and Brazil would almost immediately confront the fallout of any escalation. New waves of refugees, strained border controls, and domestic political volatility are all possible, if not highly probable. Even governments critical of Maduro fear the precedent of a unilateral U.S. strike grounded in disputed allegations and a revived “drug war” logic. The memory of Iraq earlier this century remains raw—not only because of the reliance on faulty intelligence, but because of the regional disarray that followed across the Middle East. Foreign ministries across Latin America have long warned that toppling a dictator can create power vacuums that swallow entire landscapes. The scenario of a fractured Venezuelan state, splintered among military factions, armed groups, and criminal networks, is taken seriously in policy circles from Bogotá to Brasília.
The risks for Washington are substantial as well. Trump’s advisers appear convinced that a decisive show of force could crack the regime, prompting defections among senior officers. But that assumption discounts the survival instincts of Maduro and the military elite around him. As Gunson argues, even those who privately resent the president would hesitate to hand power to Machado, whom they view as an implacable foe. And if a U.S. strike kills civilians, undermines state institutions, or triggers reprisals, the fiction of a neat, “surgical” intervention will collapse instantly. What Trump frames as narcotics enforcement would look, throughout the hemisphere, like a familiar imperial gesture dressed in new language.
Indeed, the contradictions in Washington’s approach are glaring. The administration denounces “forever wars,” yet leans on a logic of perpetual crisis to justify pressure. It dismisses multilateral diplomacy while advancing contested legal theories to authorize the use of force at sea. It elevates the most incendiary claims from opposition figures even as long-time observers warn that the United States is once again listening too readily to exiles promising painless regime change. In fact, by refusing to characterize Maduro’s ouster as “regime change”—presumably out of a concern for the term’s connotations in 2025—supporters of such action have not clarified their aims so much as obscured them.
If strikes come, they will likely not arrive as a formally declared war but as something less defined: a narrow raid, a one-time strike, a Special Operations action intended to topple a government without the political weight of an invasion. But interventions of this sort seldom remain contained. They ripple outward, reshaping alliances and creating opportunities for actors—from armed groups to opportunistic governments—who interpret ambiguity from Washington as permission to pursue their own agendas. The greatest danger is not simply that a strike fails to unseat Maduro. It is that it succeeds in ways that set off new and unpredictable forms of disorder across the hemisphere.
Governments of every political stripe in Latin America are no doubt preparing at this moment for scenarios they cannot fully anticipate. They understand that whatever the U.S. intends, the consequences will not stay within Venezuela’s borders. The region already hosts millions of Venezuelan migrants; a violent rupture could multiply those flows several times over. Border tensions could reshape domestic politics in Colombia or Brazil. States that have tried to keep their distance may find themselves compelled to choose sides.
Trump says he seeks stability. But the path he is charting leads directly through terrain where stability is the first casualty. The buildup of naval power, the strategic weight of oil, the specter of Chinese and Russian influence, and the embrace of opposition narratives that bend facts toward provocation all point to an intervention that is undeclared yet profoundly consequential. The question is no longer only whether it will happen, but what it will set in motion. Venezuela is at the center of this gathering storm, but the entire hemisphere lies in its potential path. What happens next will reverberate far beyond Caracas. It will shape migration, diplomacy, regional politics, and the delicate understandings that have held the Americas together. At minimum, one might hope for an acknowledgment of that reality from those now poised to decide.
Cover photo: Protesters gather in Manhattan, NYC, on December 6, 2025, for the No War in Venezuela rally and protest. People rally against the Trump Administration’s deadly missile strikes in the Caribbean and potential war with Venezuela. (Photo by Neil Constantine / NurPhoto via AFP)
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