As US hostility towards Venezuela increases, a full scale invasion and regime change coup becomes increasingly likely — following the same patterns of interventions before it.
The United States appears to be on a full-scale collision course toward military conflict with Venezuela. Anyone who has been paying attention to the Trump administration’s actions and increasingly hostile rhetoric over the past several months can see a clear shift toward imperial aggression against Venezuela.
Of course anyone familiar with the tactics of the military industrial complex can see the reality plain as day for what it really is — blatant expansionism in line with the age-old domination doctrine.
The daily escalations have become so numerous that it is almost difficult to keep up. The most prominent development in this recent series of actions has been the military buildup in the Caribbean. In recent weeks, the United States has deployed several B-1 and B-52 bombers to conduct provocative fly-by missions near the Venezuelan coast. Additionally, the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Gravely was deployed to Trinidad and Tobago for joint exercises near Venezuela’s shoreline. Meanwhile, on October 24, a War Department spokesperson also announced that the U.S. would deploy its largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, along with its strike group, to the region.
The escalations follow a series of extrajudicial killings in which the United States has carried out more than a dozen strikes against boats off the Venezuelan coast, resulting in the deaths of at least 57 people. The Trump administration has claimed—without evidence or due process—that the victims were drug traffickers.
These actions come amid the administration’s purported crackdown on “narco-terrorism,” in which officials have alleged, again without substantiation, that Venezuela—and specifically President Nicolás Maduro—is aiding and abetting cartels and drug traffickers smuggling narcotics, particularly fentanyl, into the United States.
However, official data directly contradicts these claims. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment, Venezuela is not listed as a producer of fentanyl. The same is true of a separate analysis released by the U.S. State Department in September, which identifies Venezuela’s primary drug export as cocaine bound for the European market, not the United States.
Furthermore, earlier this week, Caracas announced the arrest of mercenaries with alleged links to the CIA, who were reportedly in the planning stages of what officials described as a false flag attack. The arrest of these paramilitaries comes only weeks after the Trump administration reportedly authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to initiate subversive operations within Venezuela.
The U.S. military buildup against Venezuela bears the hallmarks of previous regime-change operations carried out by the American empire, particularly the invasion of Iraq. For those who remember the political chicanery of the early 2000s, this playbook should feel familiar.
Saddam Hussein once served as a useful proxy for Western intelligence agencies during the decades preceding the conflict. However, when he no longer served the interests of the U.S. in the region, the decision was made to remove him—followed by the fabrication of a pretext designed to manufacture public consent for war.
The corporate media went into overdrive, amplifying the Bush administration’s war propaganda. They framed Saddam as complicit in the false flag attacks of September 11, 2001, fabricated claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and promoted the notion of an alliance between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda—an organization that, as those with long memories will recall, was itself a creation of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Following Saddam’s ouster—and the subsequent seizure of Iraq’s crucial natural resources, including its vast crude oil reserves—the region was set ablaze by the perpetual continuation of the War on of Terror. CIA-backed militias were covertly shaped into the region’s next manufactured threat: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), developed under the auspices of Operation Timber Sycamore. Iraq then became a launchpad for further imperialist aggression across the Middle East.
Following the capture of Iraq, the US employed this same strategy in Syria, a 10 year campaign which culminated in last December’s ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to a US backed al Qaeda affiliate.
Much like with Iraq before it, the “impending threat” of the “Venezuelan narco-state” has been completely manufactured from thin air.
Much like its covert support for terrorist groups in the Middle East, the Central Intelligence Agency has a long history of backing some of the most violent drug cartels in Central America. From the CIA’s collaboration with traffickers during the Iran-Contra scandal—thoroughly documented by journalist Gary Webb—to the agency’s facilitation of key figures such as Pablo Escobar and Manuel Noriega, as well as the curious case of the Tren De Aragua gang being a possible asset of U.S. intelligence, the very enemy the United States claims to fight is, in many ways, one of its own creation.
Much like Iraq before the invasion, Venezuela today possesses some of the largest crude oil reserves in the world—a crucial natural resource that, as in Iraq, is deeply coveted by Western corporate powers.
Much like the Wolfowitz Doctrine was used to justify the conquest of Iraq and the United States’ expansionist aims in the region, Donald Trump’s reimagining of the Monroe Doctrine—referred to by some in his circle as the “Donroe Doctrine”—seeks to further advance U.S. imperial agendas across Central and Latin America through the pursuit of regime change in Venezuela and the capture and exploitation of the nation’s natural resources.
Such a return to the blatant militarist interventionism of neoconservative policy has not gone unnoticed, with notable figures like the ineffable Dr. Ron Paul pointing out in a recent column the neocons’ return to form, led by the infamous warhawk Marco Rubio in the push against Venezuela.
Also, like Iraq, this is far from the first time Venezuela has been the target of neocolonialist meddling. As far back as 2002, the United States attempted a regime-change coup against then-President Hugo Chávez under the administration of George W. Bush.
In recent years, there have been numerous attempts to overthrow the Maduro government, including during Trump’s previous term, when his administration launched a series of assassination attempts against President Nicolás Maduro and fully backed the rise of extremist coup leader Juan Guaidó. In 2020, Venezuela foiled several attacks, including a CIA-linked terror plot and an attempted Bay of Pigs–style invasion—code-named Operation Gideon—which resulted in the capture of two U.S. Green Berets.
Even more recently, analysis has revealed that last year’s wave of unrest following the re-election of Nicolás Maduro—hotly contested by the U.S. and its allies—was orchestrated by a network of U.S.-backed agitators. This was followed by another foiled coup attempt in which 14 mercenaries, including a U.S. Navy SEAL, were captured along with a cache of weapons.
If history is any indicator, US hostilities against Venezuela will not stop anytime soon, and if they do it will likely be in the aftermath of yet another disastrous regime change war.
Will Venezuela suffer the same fate as Iraq and so many others? Only time will tell.