US military action is very unlikely to achieve its goals regarding Venezuela

In the vacillating contours of US President Donald Trump's foreign policy, little should surprise. And outlying moments of apparent success against Iran's nuclear program, are uneasily partnered with moments of fleeting fancy, like seizing Greenland, reports CNN. 

But the looming possibility of military action against Venezuela - across a wide spectrum of violent options - drags the White House into realms of foreign involvement it has always said it loathed. And it puts it squarely in opposition to the lessons of the past two decades of US Republican military endeavors, and plenty of decades of regional experience before that. 

Just what exactly does the Trump administration want to do here, and how long does it think it will take to achieve? These are two questions an administration conventionally seeks to publicly and painstakingly lay out the answers to before military action. But it remains mired in confusion. And the variables do not look good.  The most slender goal of military action is to stop drug trafficking. Yet this is something exceptionally hard to achieve with targeted strikes. 

Firstly, Venezuela is not the hub of narcotics trafficking: that is a route which begins in neighboring Colombia, and ends on the US border in Mexico. Venezuela has been a facilitator, even permitting its territory to be used to launch the planes that carry Colombian cocaine north, and harboring depots and processing plants which operate in a climate of greater impunity than in Colombia. But it is at worst a tenth of the problem, not its heart. 

Secondly, the drug trade is so unspeakably profitable; no kinetic activity can really stop it. The incentives are simply too great. Consider the planes that fly north from Venezuela - booming during the first Trump term, using 50 covert runways in Venezuela's Zulia region to move their packages to Central America for onward transportation, according to Colombian officials.