The White House’s former top Latin America official has said he fears the US could stumble into a protracted guerrilla war in Venezuela after Donald Trump ordered a military strike on a boat in the Caribbean Sea, killing 11 alleged drug traffickers.
Tuesday’s controversial strike off the Venezuelan coast – which was reportedly carried out by an attack helicopter or Reaper drone – came after the US president ordered a major naval deployment to the region, ostensibly to combat South American drug traffickers.
On Wednesday, the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, told Fox News the attack was designed to send a clear message to Venezuela’s authoritarian leader. “The only person that should be worried is Nicolás Maduro … who is effectively a kingpin of a narco-state,” Hegseth said, comparing the operation to US strikes on Iranian nuclear sites and Houthi targets in Yemen.
The military buildup in the Caribbean has left some wondering if Trump is plotting to remove Maduro from power by force, despite the fact that in some ways his Venezuela policy has softened since he returned to the White House with the resumption of deportation flights and the easing of sanctions. Asked if the administration was seeking regime change in Venezuela, Hegseth said that was a decision for the president, but added: “We are prepared with every asset that the American military has.”
Speaking to the Guardian, Juan González, the national security council’s senior director for the western hemisphere during the Biden administration, called Trump’s naval deployment “a lot of political theatre”. But he cautioned: “[There is a] very high risk of military confrontation.”
“I increasingly fear that the Trump administration may stumble into an intervention scenario in Venezuela, which would be frankly disastrous,” said Biden’s former aide, who believed US Venezuela policy was now largely being dictated by hardline members of the Venezuelan opposition who had the ear of Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, a longtime Venezuela hawk.
“I think they ultimately want to try to get the US in a situation where there’s a conflict with Venezuela. I think that’s the goal,” said González, who also served in the Obama administration.
González said there would be huge risks in any US attempt to militarily remove Hugo Chávez’s authoritarian heir, who has governed since being elected in 2013 and was accused of stealing last year’s election. “After a quarter century of Chavismo, the idea that you replace the president and all of a sudden you have a Jeffersonian democracy is a little bit naive,” he said.
Instead, González feared South America’s sixth largest country could become the stage for “a protracted internal conflict” involving a variety of armed groups including government-linked paramilitary forces, criminal organizations and Colombian rebels of the National Liberation Army (ELN), whose reach stretches from Venezuela’s western border hundreds of miles into the interior.
“It’ll become the cause celebre for every kind of criminal or illegal armed group in the Americas … You’ll end up having people going to Venezuela to fight the Yankees and I think it’ll get messy,” González predicted.
“I think the United States traditionally is able to fight head-on wars very effectively. But we’re not very good at guerrilla war – and that’s kind of what a lot of these groups have been doing for over half a century.
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“The reality is that today the ingredients all exist for there to be an internal conflict inside of Venezuela, not unlike the one that Colombia has been living through for over 50 years,” González added.
The former White House official is not alone in fearing what could happen in Venezuela if a US military intervention comes to pass, even if some former US diplomats doubt that is Trump’s plan. “I believe that this more about a show of force and not about a utilization of force,” James Story, the US’s top diplomat for Venezuela from 2018 to 2023, said of the naval buildup last week.
“The one thing about President Trump is that, notwithstanding his strike in Iran, he has traditionally been against … meddling militarily in the affairs of other countries,” Story added.
Adam Isacson, a defense and security specialist from the Washington Office on Latin America, was skeptical that Venezuela was about to suffer “a Panama-style invasion on steroids”. Thousands of US troops were required and hundreds of lives lost when George HW Bush ordered his 1989 operation to topple Manuel Noriega, the Central American country’s dictator.
“Venezuela just is far bigger, far more complex and does have the seeds of an insurgency,” Isacson said. “The idea of guerrilla warfare and chipping away and carrying out terrorist attacks and just making the cost too high for the US occupiers is a very likely scenario,” he added.
