As a naval aviator, Alvin Holsey trained to conduct missions that required precise targeting. For years, his job was to fly helicopters over potential targets and, using radar and other detectors, assess whether they posed a threat to the United States; if so, he had to determine whether to launch an attack.
On September 2, Holsey, now an admiral leading the U.S. military’s southern command, was put in charge of a mission unlike any that has come before: The United States was, without any warning or attempt at interdiction, striking suspected drug boats in the Caribbean Sea. Early into the mission, Defense officials told us, he privately raised concerns to Pentagon leadership about the operations, which have now struck at least 10 suspected drug-trafficking vessels that the U.S. redefined as “terrorist,” killing 43 people.
Holsey’s complaints led to a tense meeting with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, officials said, after which the 37-year Navy veteran announced that he planned to leave his post next month, less than a year into what was supposed to be a three-year tenure. (Like other officials we spoke with for this story, they requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly. The Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment on Holsey’s departure.)
Since then, the strikes have escalated even as the legal questions around them have yet to be answered. There was another strike overnight, this one killing six, according to Hegseth. And today, the Pentagon announced that the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft-carrier strike group, a multi-ship force staffed by as many as 5,000 troops, would travel from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean. The intent, the Pentagon said, is to “bolster U.S. capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors.” The ships, which are currently on a port visit in Croatia, will take just over a week; their movement was the latest indication that what began as a campaign to pick off alleged drug runners as they ply the seas in small fishing vessels is evolving into something far larger.
[Read: The boat strikes are just the beginning]
The U.S. hasn’t sent this many ships to the Caribbean since the Cuban missile crisis. There are already roughly 6,500 Marines and sailors in the region, operating from eight Navy vessels, as well as 3,500 troops nearby. Once the Ford arrives, the U.S. will have roughly as many ships in the Caribbean as it used to defend Israel from Iranian missile strikes this summer. The carrier strike group also provides far more firepower than is necessary for the occasional attack on narco-trafficking targets. But the ships could be ideal for launching a steady stream of air strikes inside Venezuela.
“The only thing you could use the carrier for is attacking targets ashore, because they are not going to be as effective at targeting small boats at sea,” Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and retired Navy officer, told us. “If you are striking inside Venezuela, the carrier is an efficient way to do it due to the lack of basing in the region.”
As U.S.-military assets in the region have accumulated, the administration’s language about deposing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has grown more threatening. A person close to the White House told Semafor this week that the administration would cooperate with Congress on its plans for military action only when “Maduro’s corpse is in U.S. custody.”
For about two months, the flotilla of American warships in the Caribbean has kept Venezuelans in suspense. The White House calls it a “counter-narcotic” mission, but Latin American analysts see it as a regime-change operation. Some Trump-administration officials hope that the threat of attacks on Venezuelan soil, coupled with the drumbeat of strikes at sea, will be sufficient to force Maduro to flee, making a direct campaign to remove him unnecessary. “Sending a message may be enough,” a senior administration official told us. “The pressure that is going to be applied will be immense.”
The antidrug mission has been “a pressure campaign to see if the regime will crack,” Elliott Abrams, who served as special representative for Venezuela during the first Trump administration, told us. Among the aims of the strikes is to prompt military defections within the regime, which could in turn lead to its demise. “The idea is that officials will say to themselves, Maduro will fall, but I don’t have to fall with him,” Abrams said. During other Venezuelan political crises—including in 2014 and 2019—there have been prominent defections. But this time, the regime has held together—so far, at least.
None of the strikes has landed in Venezuelan territory, either at sea or on land. All have been in international waters. Maduro, an autocrat who stole last year’s election, has written letters to “His Excellency” Trump, pleading for de-escalation. He’s laid peace offerings in the form of oil and riches at the White House’s doorstep. But the one thing Maduro seems unwilling to do is relinquish power, and it doesn’t look like anyone in his government will make him. And so earlier this month, the Trump administration told its last diplomat in Venezuela to pack his bags.
[Read: The Venezuelans cheering Trump’s drug war]
Maduro is not the only target of Trump’s ire in the region. The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, started complaining this month about the Caribbean strikes, claiming that they had taken the life of an innocent fisherman. Trump accused Petro on Sunday of being a “drug leader”—the same accusation he’s made against Maduro. On Tuesday, the American military struck a boat close to Colombia’s Pacific Coast. Petro, far from seeking a de-escalation, went on Univision to invoke Freud and ruminate about genitalia and machismo. At the end of the interview, he called for Trump to be ousted.
Yesterday, Trump seemed particularly resolved. “There will be land action in Venezuela soon,” he said after two American bombers flew near Venezuela’s coast but stayed over international waters. Whatever he opts to do, Trump isn’t planning to consult Congress before acting. “I’m not going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war,” he said. “I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. Okay? We’re going to kill them. You know, they’re going to be, like, dead.”
Although the U.S. has called those who have been killed in its air strikes “combatants,” the administration has not provided any evidence to either Congress or the public of the threat they posed to the U.S. When two people survived a strike last week, the United States chose not to hold them, which would have led to a court hearing at which a judge might have ordered the administration to provide legal justification for the strikes. Instead, the U.S. released them to their home country. Hegseth called the decision “standard” practice in warfare.
The unending news cycles since the 2016 presidential campaign have obscured many of its particulars, but actual issues were debated in that race. Trump’s pledge to end U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts set him apart, not just from Democrats but also from other Republican contenders. Night after night at his rallies, Trump thundered against American involvement in the “forever wars” of Afghanistan and Iraq, and pledged that, if he were elected, he would not put U.S. troops in harm’s way.
The escalation of pressure on Venezuela coincides with the ascension of Marco Rubio within the Trump administration. Early on, isolationists such as Vice President J. D. Vance held more sway with the president, but the secretary of state has kept accumulating jobs and power within Trump’s orbit. Rubio has long loathed the Venezuelan regime, and while still in the Senate, he began quietly undercutting American economic ties to the nation and the administration’s own diplomatic efforts. But he did not make the case to Trump with arguments about democracy or human rights, causes that the president has rarely embraced. Instead, he made it about drugs.
That pitch dovetailed with the hawkish immigration plans being embraced by the powerful White House aide Stephen Miller. Rubio’s approach worked. The administration has cited vague Article II powers as legal justification for the strikes, and Rubio has made the case that the attacks were legal because Maduro was no longer considered a head of state, but rather the head of a drug-running terror operation.
“These cartels are the al-Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere, using violence, murder and terrorism to impose their will, threaten our national security and poison our people,” Hegseth wrote on social media. “The United States military will treat these organizations like the terrorists they are—they will be hunted, and killed, just like al-Qaeda.”
All of the military experts we consulted agree that the United States doesn’t appear to be preparing for a boots-on-the-ground invasion like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. More likely, they said, the administration is gearing up for a “push the button, watch things explode” operation, like the strikes against nuclear facilities in Iran in June. Among the potential targets being considered is infrastructure used by suspected narcotics traffickers, officials familiar with the administration’s thinking told us.
But such a campaign would not be without peril for the troops carrying it out. Since the strikes began, Venezuela also has already flown F-16s over American destroyers operating in the region. During any attack in Venezuelan air space, U.S. pilots would likely come up against Maduro’s air defenses. Analysts differ over how much of Venezuela’s air defense is fully functional and maintained, but they are in consensus that its military has a network of anti-aircraft batteries, multiple air-defense units armed with cannons, and numerous portable air-defense systems. The military also has a sophisticated long-range-missile system capable of shooting down aircraft and ballistic missiles, according to Geoff Ramsey, a Venezuela expert at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank.
Ramsey warned that even if the strikes lead to defections and eventually the fall of the regime, multiple pro-government armed groups in the country could challenge a new government and contribute to a bloody outcome that would look something like Libya after the 2011 fall of Muammar Qaddafi.
[Read: The legacy of Obama’s ‘worst mistake’]
“I think ultimately, what you need is a way to channel the enormous pressure that Maduro is under towards a peaceful, democratic outcome,” Ramsey told us. “And I think you can get there without firing Tomahawk missiles into the country.”
During the Arab Spring, Trump had initially said that he supported U.S. and NATO intervention in Libya. But as instability followed, he shifted his position. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump said that Libya would have been better off if Qaddafi had stayed in power.
“I was never for strong intervention,” Trump said that year. “It’s a total mess.”
Now he seems to have rediscovered his interventionism.
