America’s Secret “War” in the Caribbean

For the first time in a long time, an American president is changing the rules of engagement in our own hemisphere… and almost no one is talking about what that really means.

On paper, the military strikes off the coast of Venezuela is a counter-narcotics mission.

Trump is finally taking the fight to the narco-terrorists who’ve been poisoning this country with fentanyl and meth while Washington looked the other way. Compared to the last forty years of half-measures, decisive action is a relief.

After all, we’ve been promised “wars” on drugs since the Reagan era. This is the first time anyone has treated it like one.

But if you look at the scale and posture of what’s happening, the “drug interdiction” narrative doesn’t quite match the facts.

Drones, missiles, and nighttime strikes now define the operation. And over all of it is a president saying Maduro’s “days are numbered,” and essentially ordering him to get out of the country.

This is why Venezuela now looks less like a one-off enforcement action and more like the opening chapter of something much larger. The last time the U.S. publicly used this kind of force in Latin America was Panama in 1989.

Trump is doing what past presidents were too timid to attempt… using American hard power in our own backyard to confront a hostile regime tied into the drug trade and aligned with our adversaries.

That may be strategically correct. It may, in the long run, be the right call for the security of the United States. But it also carries risks that go far beyond a handful of destroyed boats.

What Trump Is Doing

Since September 2nd, the U.S. has carried out more than 20 strikes in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. Over 80 people have been killed. The targets are small vessels, often fishing boats or “flippers,” that intelligence officials say are being used as maritime couriers by groups like Tren de Aragua and the ELN.

The footage the president released shows a missile hitting a boat at high speed — exactly the kind of strike a Reaper drone or a Navy helicopter would carry out in a combat zone.

And now we have the USS Gerald R. Ford, the largest carrier in the world, positioned off Venezuela’s coast. You don’t deploy an asset like that unless you expect escalation, or at minimum, want your adversary to believe escalation is on the table.

While the legal framework the administration is using is not new, applying it in this context is.

Trump has determined that certain cartels and criminal networks qualify as “terrorist combatants.” Under that designation, the president can authorize lethal force without a formal declaration of war, similar to how the U.S. conducted drone strikes in Pakistan during the post-9/11 era.

The idea is if a cartel is functionally behaving like an insurgent group, then it gets treated like one.

But this is where things get complicated. Lethal force against an imminent threat is one thing. What happens after the initial strike is another.

Once a boat is destroyed, once the “threat” in the legal sense has been neutralized, what exactly is the authority to engage further?

International law doesn’t allow for machine-gunning survivors floating in the water — not even in declared wars. The U.S. prosecuted Nazi U-boat officers for that exact behavior.

This is why the Pentagon is in a legally delicate position. It’s not the strike itself that creates exposure. It’s everything that follows. If a vessel genuinely tied to narcoterror networks is hit, the administration can defend that under established counterterrorism doctrine.

But the moment you move from stopping a threat to eliminating witnesses, or from interdiction to punitive destruction, you’ve crossed into territory that lawyers and political opponents will all seize on.

All of this means that the margins for error are razor thin. And when you’re operating in a legal gray zone with high explosive ordnance, thin margins have a way of becoming bright-red warning signs.

Mission Creep

The real risk in Venezuela lies not in the legality of a single strike or even the casualties themselves… it’s the trajectory.

Mission creep is what occurs when a limited operation expands step-by-step into something far larger, not through a grand plan, but through the logic of escalation. And historically, when the U.S. applies military pressure in Latin America, that logic tends to accelerate quickly.

We’ve seen it before in Guatemala and Cuba in the 1950s, in Chile in the ’70s, and most famously in Panama in 1989, missions that began as narrow actions against criminal or destabilizing actors evolved into de facto regime-change operations.

Once the U.S. commits force in the hemisphere, the political and strategic incentives tilt toward “finishing the job.”

That’s why the current moment feels so precarious.

If Maduro doesn’t leave — and he won’t voluntarily — the U.S. faces a choice between backing down or doing more.

And if we do more, and destabilize a regime, you inherit a power vacuum. And the U.S. has rarely been able to avoid being pulled into the aftermath.

How This Plays at Home

On the home front, support for the strikes is solid… for now. Actually doing something for once to stop drug trafficking in a real way is what we’ve been asking for.

But this support is conditional, and everyone inside the movement knows it.

The base is all-in on confronting narco-terror networks. They are not all-in on another foreign commitment that slowly expands into a nation-building project. There is a deep muscle memory from Iraq and Afghanistan — a sense that Washington can be honest about the first phase of a mission but evasive about where it ultimately leads.

If the operation begins to look less like interdiction and more like regime management, the mood shifts. Fast.

Republican voters will not support a multi-year stabilization effort in a country of 28 million. They will not support U.S. personnel getting drawn into the day-to-day politics of Caracas. And they will absolutely revolt if they sense they are being walked toward a “Restoring Venezuelan Democracy” mission without a straight explanation.

This is the political risk Trump faces.

The minute this operation starts to look like Operation Restore Venezuela, the coalition fractures.

Trump’s strength on foreign policy has always come from doing the opposite of the neocon playbook. The danger now is that the operation off Venezuela’s coast expands in ways that run counter to that brand.

That’s the tightrope: maintain pressure without triggering the instincts of a base that is extremely sensitive to anything that smells like another endless project overseas.

Venezuela’s the First Domino

There’s a larger strategic backdrop to all of this that isn’t getting enough attention. Venezuela is the anchor of a regional bloc that has survived on inertia and outside support for decades.

For years, Venezuela has effectively subsidized Cuba’s survival. Cut-rate oil shipments, preferential financing, and political backing have allowed the Castro regime — now run by its successors — to limp through wave after wave of economic collapse.

If Maduro falls or flees, that arrangement collapses. Cuba loses its last real lifeline. And Russia and China — both stretched militarily and economically — are in no position to step in and replace Venezuelan support.

Beijing has already pulled back from risky Latin American entanglements, focusing on its own slowdown. Moscow is tied down in Europe and lacks the capacity to bankroll a Caribbean client state even if it wanted to.

That opens the door to something we haven’t seen since the late 1950s: a moment where the structure of power in the Western Hemisphere is genuinely up for renegotiation.

Historically, these moments have been rare. The Monroe Doctrine set the tone in the 19th century, but it was challenged repeatedly during the Cold War.

The Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the entire arc of U.S.-Soviet competition in Latin America revolved around the question would outside powers gain a foothold in America’s neighborhood?

Reagan’s pushback against Soviet influence in Central America was the last time Washington moved decisively to answer that question.

Now, for the first time in decades, the pieces are lining up again.

A reset is possible. Whether that reset leads to stability or a new round of disorder is what the next phase of this crisis will reveal.

What the White House Isn’t Saying

At this point, the U.S. operation off Venezuela’s coast can still go one of two ways.

It can remain what the administration insists it is — a short, sharp show of force meant to disrupt narcotics networks and remind a hostile regime that its impunity is over.

Or it can become the opening phase of a strategy the White House hasn’t said out loud… one aimed at forcing political change in Caracas and reshaping the balance of power in the hemisphere.

There is a narrow lane where this ends cleanly. The pressure may rattle Maduro’s inner circle. A negotiated exit becomes possible. The regime weakens without collapsing outright. And the U.S. steps back without inheriting the burden of managing a fractured state.

But there’s a broader lane too, and we’re already edging into it. Once you apply this level of sustained military pressure and frame cartel networks as terrorist combatants, you are operating in territory where events can develop faster than the American public would support.

None of this means the administration is wrong to act. In many ways, Trump is doing what previous presidents should have done.

But decisive action carries its own gravity. The closer this operation gets to a regime-change outcome, the more unpredictable the next phase becomes.

Is it a controlled demonstration of force? Or is it the first chapter in a much larger confrontation? We don’t know yet.

The choice between the two is coming… whether the White House says it plainly or not.