The Trump administration has raised to a fever pitch war tensions with Venezuela following the latest strike on a small vessel in the Caribbean on Friday that allegedly killed three passengers. A US fleet has assembled in the southern Caribbean, including assault ships and nuclear submarines, accompanied by F-35 fighter jets and killer drones.
In an alarming escalation, on Sunday evening the Caribbean Astronomy Society reported the sighting of a nuclear-capable, Trident missile test fired from a submarine off Florida. Without an official acknowledgement of the ballistic missile launch, the White House is threatening in its usual mafioso manner the use of nuclear weapons against Venezuela, recalling Trump’s threat in 2017 to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea.
The sinking of the vessel Friday—the third one in two weeks— was yet another extrajudicial massacre on the threadbare pretext of fighting “narco-terrorism” and interdicting drugs. As agreed by most experts, only a tiny portion of drug smuggling takes place in the southern Caribbean.
The Pentagon’s actions amount to state piracy—sinking vessels with unidentified passengers without offering any credible evidence that they were involved in narcotics trafficking. In any case, there is no justification whatsoever under either US or international law to murder unarmed individuals in international waters.
The passengers, according to residents of the Paria Peninsula of Venezuela interviewed by AP, were likely fishermen, some of whom have repurposed their boats for petty smuggling of migrants, wildlife and “other businesses” as a result of the depletion of fisheries.
The missile tests and military build-up, moreover, mark a dangerous turning point with deep political ramifications, signaling the Trump administration’s resort to unrestrained violence to overturn the Venezuelan government and assert US dominance in the hemisphere.
In his response, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has combined subservient appeals with militarist posturing. During the weekend, Caracas deployed 2,500 troops and Russian-made fighter jets armed with anti-ship missiles to Venezuela’s Caribbean island of La Orchila. There, military exercises dubbed “Sovereign Caribbean 200” involved 12 ships, 22 aircraft, and 20 vessels in a show of force against the US naval presence nearby. Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino cast the drills as a direct response to Washington’s “threatening and vulgar” deployment of warships.
Despite this militarist bluster, Reuters revealed that on September 6, four days after the first US strike on a Venezuelan vessel, Maduro sent a personal letter to President Trump requesting further talks. In the letter, Maduro absurdly argues to Trump that he is being misled by “Fake News” about Caracas.
This overture came even after the White House placed a $50 million bounty on Maduro’s head. This appeal for negotiations—akin to appealing to Hitler before the invasion of Poland—was met only with hellfire missiles from Trump. On Saturday, Trump dehumanized Venezuelan migrants in social media posts calling them “Monsters” and issuing a chilling ultimatum to Caracas to receive them back: “GET THEM THE HELL OUT OF OUR COUNTRY, RIGHT NOW, OR THE PRICE YOU PAY WILL BE INCALCULABLE.”
US Republican Representative Mario Diaz-Balart summed up the campaign of imperialist terror from Washington: “This is not a show, it is not a spectacle. In Nicolás Maduro's case, he only has three options: if he leaves now, he will end up like Noriega, in a US prison for the rest of his life, or like Soleimani, in a plastic bag.” The clear implication: exile, life imprisonment in the US, or violent death—no room for peaceful political alternatives.
The Pentagon is not yet positioned for a large-scale invasion comparable to Iraq. This reality has been shown by some fissures in the White House’s approach, with Trump’s envoy to Venezuela Richard Grenell indicating openness to negotiating Maduro’s removal.
The US government, however, has shown itself determined to reassert its hemispheric hegemony, particularly to counter China’s growing influence in Latin America, at any cost. Beijing remains one of Maduro’s closest allies and a key trading partner.
James G. Stavridis, former head of the Pentagon’s Southern Command, provided a blunt assessment to the New York Times:
The massive naval flotilla off the coast of Venezuela and the movement of fifth-generation F-35 fighters to Puerto Rico has little to do with actual drug interdiction — they represent operational overkill... Rather, they are a clear signal to Nicolás Maduro that this administration is growing serious about accomplishing either regime or behavioral change from Caracas. Gunboat diplomacy is back, and it may well work.
Reinforcing this interpretation, Franklin Mora, a former Pentagon official, told CNN that the current forces deployed in the Caribbean “are not enough for an invasion yet.” He added:
It is more of a psychological operation that seeks to intimidate and incentivize the military through fear that they will remove Maduro from power... with the equipment deployed by the US in the Caribbean, surgical operations could be carried out to destroy runways used by drug traffickers, rather than intercepting ships, as air transport is the main route for drugs leaving Venezuela.
The placing of hopes that such an attempted “surgical operation” doesn’t evolve into open warfare potentially involving mass casualties among US troops is reckless.
Adding to the theater of US military intimidation, the multinational UNITAS 2025 military exercises launched on September 15, which extend into the Caribbean and will include 8,000 troops from 25 countries including Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. These exercises signify not only a show of solidarity behind US aggression, including among ostensible “left” governments aligned with Maduro, but a disturbing indication that Latin America risks being dragged into a wider direct conflict with China.
For its part, Venezuela’s defense buildup on La Orchila showed advanced military capabilities, including Russian-made Su-30 fighter jets armed with Kh-31 Krypton anti-ship missiles, and a range of air, land, and sea maneuvers involving special forces, drones, electronic warfare, and amphibious landings.
Domestically, Trump has sought to combine his push for foreign military aggression with the establishment of a police-state dictatorship. His administration’s threats to deploy troops to American cities like Chicago, Memphis, St. Louis, and New Orleans were framed as part of a “war” against an urban working class conflated with “killers, murderers, drug dealers.” Likewise, its fascistic executive orders to dismantle basic constitutional rights have targeted immigrants and political opponents alike as “terrorists.” This fusion of a foreign and domestic total war establishes a precedent for extrajudicial killings anywhere.
The Trump administration’s military and political maneuvers against Venezuela represent a dual crisis: the looming danger of war in Latin America and a wholesale assault upon democratic and social rights within the United States. The international working class must recognize the inseparability of these struggles and unite across borders in a movement to stop US imperialism’s march toward yet another catastrophic front in an emerging third world war.