President Donald Trump’s blockade of oil tankers off the coast of Venezuela has put a spotlight on his current strategy against Nicolás Maduro: isolating the strongman through an incremental pressure strategy rather than the major domestic action Trump has sometimes claimed is imminent.
The end goal remains the same: to topple Maduro, according to four people familiar with the Trump administration’s thinking. The four people spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
“The regime survives on three things: oil trafficking, drug trafficking, illegal gold trafficking. They have cracked down on all three,” said a person close to the government. “This really squeezes the regime from every angle. I don’t know how they survive.”
Still, there is an acknowledgment that Maduro will not step down easily, as the Trump administration discovered during its first-term pressure campaign. This fact, combined with the military and rhetorical muscle the government has already invested, leaves few options for de-escalation.
“Whether they mean it or not, the White House has raised expectations to the point where there is no easy exit,” said another person familiar with the administration’s discussions. “At the same time, Maduro is very stubborn and knows that the United States can easily be distracted. Maduro is playing for time and Trump is playing for victory, which means neither side wants to give in.”
While the president has offered evolving justifications for his Venezuela policy, he is still considering new ways to pressure Maduro, including cyberwarfare and attacks on aircraft leaving the country.
Over the past few months, Trump has taken a series of steps to suppress the Maduro regime, which he views as a threat to the United States due to drug trafficking in Venezuela. (The United States does not officially recognize Maduro’s regime as Venezuela’s legitimate government because he is widely believed to have stolen the election from himself.)
Without congressional approval, Trump carried out airstrikes on about two dozen ships allegedly carrying drugs, killing nearly 100 people. He imposed new sanctions on the regime, including Maduro’s relatives. He declared gangs and cartels allegedly linked to Maduro as terrorist organizations. He relies on U.S. security forces, financial leverage and other means to impose sanctions, while also using a bully pulpit to issue threats.
Last week, U.S. law enforcement officers ambushed an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela and rappelled onto the deck from a helicopter, a video U.S. officials quickly released. Trump said the U.S. would retain about $10 million worth of oil. His new blockade suggests more such seizures are on the way.
Trump also said he had authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela.
Trump has said his Venezuela campaign is about exerting more control over threats to the United States within the Western Hemisphere, despite disputes over whether the priority is defending the homeland or leading to regime change.
White House chief of staff Suzy Wells said in a Vanity Fair commentary published on Tuesday that regime change is indeed the goal. Trump, she said, “wants to keep blowing up ships until Maduro calls him uncle. People much smarter than me on that front say he’s going to do that.”
A senior White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the primary goal was to “stop narco-terrorists,” but that Maduro’s ouster was a key part of that because of his alleged ties to the country’s drug cartels.
“If Maduro doesn’t take power, a lot of business will stop,” the senior official predicted.
In fact, Venezuela plays a smaller role in shipping drugs to the United States than other countries. Trump’s latest rationale for seizing oil may further obfuscate his stated rationale, undermining the notion that it’s all about stemming the flow of illegal narcotics before they reach the United States.
In a social media post Wednesday morning after Trump announced the blockade, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller appeared to provide a pretext for a war that would be at least partly to seize Venezuelan oil.
Miller wrote in a post on
Miller appeared to be referring to past nationalizations of oil assets by the Venezuelan government.
Trump told reporters Wednesday afternoon that’s how he views the issue. “They took away our oil rights. We had a lot of oil there. As you know, they kicked our company out and we want it back,” he said.
The president, not known for his patience in foreign or domestic matters, has considered a number of other options to up the ante in Venezuela.
One of the options being closely studied by the White House is to expand missile strikes beyond ships to small aircraft believed to be flying illegal drugs from western Venezuela, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Providing a legal basis for shooting down Cessnas and other small planes may be trickier than downing ships, although the White House has not stopped it from pursuing its strategy in the face of outcry from legal experts on both sides of the aisle who say the attacks are illegal.
Senior White House officials said it would not be difficult to obtain photographic evidence of drugs being loaded on planes, just as declassified aerial images showed what appeared to be drugs on some targeted ships.
The United States may also open a new cyber front in Venezuela. According to reports, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company PDVSA claimed on Monday that it had suffered a cyber attack. Officials blamed American politicians, but the cyber attack has not been confirmed. A U.S. source familiar with the matter suggested that it “may be the work of someone within the Venezuelan state oil company.”
With back-channel diplomacy ineffective, increased pressure may not be enough to force Maduro to flee, ultimately leading to a military strike on Venezuelan territory.
Although Trump has repeatedly spoken about Venezuela to the media and in social media posts, he has yet to lay out a clear situation for the country in speeches, whereas the president typically explains why military action is needed at the beginning of a conflict. Richard Haas, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said such speeches were particularly important given how confused the grounds for the conflict have become.
“If the reason was drugs, it doesn’t make sense,” Haass said, alluding to Venezuela’s main drug export being cocaine, not fentanyl, as the president had suggested. “If the reason is immigration, well, eight million people have left. I don’t think we’re worried about another million people leaving. If the reason is access to energy, that’s interesting — the question is, do you need regime change to do that? It would be great if the president or the secretary of state stood up and explained the policy.”
