Why US Attack on Venezuela Is Inadmissible and Improvident

Edward Wong

On a spring night in the Oval Office, US President Donald Trump asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio how to get tougher on Venezuela.

It was just before Memorial Day, and anti-leftist Cuban American lawmakers whose votes Mr. Trump needed for his signature domestic policy bill were urging him to tighten a vise on Venezuela by stopping Chevron’s oil operations there. But Mr. Trump did not want to lose the only U.S. foothold in Venezuela’s oil industry, where China is the biggest foreign player.

The president was considering allowing Chevron to continue. But he told Mr. Rubio, a longtime hawk on Venezuela and Cuba, that they had to show the lawmakers and other doubters they could bring the hammer down on Nicolás Maduro, the leftist autocratic leader of Venezuela, whom Mr. Trump had tried to oust in his first term.

Another aide in the room, Stephen Miller, said he had ideas. As Mr. Trump’s homeland security adviser, he had been talking with other officials about Mr. Trump’s campaign vow to bomb fentanyl labs. For various reasons, that notion had faded, and in recent weeks Mr. Miller had turned to exploring attacks on boats suspected of carrying drugs off the shores of Central America.

Mr. Miller’s deliberations had not focused on Venezuela, which does not produce fentanyl. But three separate policy goals began merging that night — crippling Mr. Maduro, using military force against drug cartels and securing access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves for U.S. companies.

Two months later, Mr. Trump signed a secret directive ordering the Pentagon to carry out military operations against Latin American drug cartels and specifically calling for maritime strikes. Though the justification was drugs in general, the operation would concentrate enormous naval firepower off the coast of Venezuela.

The result has been an increasingly militarized pressure campaign intended to remove Mr. Maduro from power.

It has been marked by U.S. strikes that have killed at least 105 people on boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, a quasi-blockade of oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuelan ports and threats by Mr. Trump to carry out land strikes in Venezuela.

It reflects overlapping drives by Mr. Rubio and Mr. Miller, who have worked in tandem on policies against Mr. Maduro. Each has come to it with a focus on long-held goals: for Mr. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants who also serves as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, a chance to topple or cripple the governments of Venezuela and its ally, Cuba; and for Mr. Miller, an architect of Mr. Trump’s anti-immigration policies, the opportunity to further his goal of mass deportations and to hit criminal groups in Latin America.

This account of how Venezuela moved to the center of the administration’s foreign policy agenda this year — to the point of a possible war — is based on interviews with current and former U.S. officials, almost all of whom agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity because of sensitivities about national security. Among the findings:

• Mr. Miller told White House officials in the spring to explore ways to attack drug cartels around their home countries in Latin America. Mr. Miller wanted attacks that could draw widespread attention to create a deterrent.

• The focus on Venezuela intensified after late May, when Mr. Trump was upset about tough negotiations involving Chevron. Venezuela’s oil has been more central to Mr. Trump’s deliberations than previously reported.

• In meetings in the early summer, Mr. Rubio and Mr. Miller talked with Mr. Trump about striking Venezuela. The president appeared swayed by Mr. Rubio’s argument that Mr. Maduro should be seen as a drug kingpin.

•  Mr. Miller told officials that if the United States and Venezuela were at war, the Trump administration could again invoke the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century law, to expedite deportations of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans the administration stripped of temporary protected status. He and Mr. Rubio had used it earlier in the year to summarily deport hundreds of Venezuelans to a notorious prison in El Salvador, only to be stopped by court rulings.

• The secret order for military action against the cartels that Mr. Trump signed on July 25, calling for maritime strikes, is the first known written directive from the president on such strikes. Administration officials referred to the boat attacks as “Phase One,” with SEAL Team Six taking the lead. They have discussed a vague “Phase Two,” with Army Delta Force units possibly carrying out land operations.

• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth kept many career uniformed military officials and lawyers from the drafting of the “execute order” that guides the boat strikes. As a result, the order had problematic holes in it, including a lack of language on how to deal with survivors.

Mr. Rubio, Mr. Miller and other principals oversaw an often haphazard process shrouded in secrecy. Their ability to contain planning to a closed circle has been aided by the gutting throughout the year of portions of the federal bureaucracy, including the National Security Council, which coordinates interagency discussions.

In September, the administration pushed into what is so far the bloodiest stage of its anti-Maduro campaign. That now amounts to 29 lethal boat attacks over the past four months, operations that many legal experts say are murders or war crimes. The administration says it has intelligence linking the boats to drug trafficking but has not publicly presented evidence for that assertion.

Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that the administration was working “to deliver on the president’s agenda to keep this poison out of our communities.”

Mr. Rubio told reporters on Dec. 19 that the goal of the boat strikes was to ensure that “no one wants to get on drug boats anymore” by pounding into them a “fear of the reaper.”

And he reiterated that the Justice Department had obtained a grand jury indictment against Mr. Maduro in 2020 on charges of working with Colombian cocaine producers, who sometimes send their product through Venezuela. Mr. Maduro’s government, he said, is “an illegitimate regime that openly cooperates with terrorist elements.”

The seeds of militarizing the approach to Mr. Maduro and Venezuelans were planted in February, when Mr. Rubio struck a deal with Nayib Bukele, the authoritarian leader of El Salvador, at his lakeside villa: The United States would pay nearly $5 million to send about 300 Venezuelans accused of being gang members to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT.

Soon after his visit with Mr. Bukele, Mr. Rubio designated eight Latin American criminal groups as foreign terrorist organizations. Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, topped the list.

Mr. Miller had already landed on a legal tool to bypass due process: the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century law that permits immediate detention and deportations of citizens of a country that has invaded the United States or is at war with it.

Mr. Trump signed an executive order in March invoking the act, with a title warning of “the invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua.” In retrospect, the order was an important opening salvo against Mr. Maduro: It was the administration’s first formal framing of Mr. Maduro and the United States as being in a type of war. Contrary to a secret U.S. intelligence assessment, it said Tren de Aragua was an instrument of Mr. Maduro.

Many of the more than 250 Venezuelan men sent to El Salvador had no ties to Tren de Aragua or notable criminal records, and some have described widespread torture and abuse at the CECOT prison.

Courts soon ruled that illegal immigration does not count as the kind of invasion that justifies using the wartime deportation law. But Mr. Miller later talked about reviving the use of the Alien Enemies Act if the United States were in an actual war with Venezuela, a former U.S. official said.

At the same time, Mr. Miller was exploring policies unrelated to Venezuela that, like the deportations, had their roots in the so-called U.S. war on terror. He looked at the idea of bombing fentanyl labs in Mexico. But it became clear that Mexican leaders would not consent, and the administration feared losing their cooperation on drug and migrant issues. The Washington Post reported earlier on Mr. Miller’s discussions about striking cartels in Mexico.

By early May, Mr. Miller’s team began asking for further options for using force against drug cartels.

Edward Wong is a Diplomatic Correspondent for The New York Times. Courtesy: NYT