Are we going to invade Venezuela?

0:00First, it was one alleged drug boat, back in September. — U.S. military forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Trende Aragua narco-terrorists. — Eleven on board were killed. — When you flood American streets with drugs, you are terrorizing America. — Then, a second strike, in the Caribbean. Then another, and another. Almost every week for two months. In total, more than a dozen ships have been hit, and at least 57 people left dead. We're going to kill them, you know? They're going to be, like, dead. Okay. And Trump is still upping the ante. He's sending warships to the coast of Venezuela.

0:42But the question is why? And what Stephen Miller got to do with it? Okay. I'm Estet Herndon, filling in around here for the next few months. That and more, coming up on Today Explained from Vox. Weihnachtsschmaus und Silvestererklets sind gerade vorbei. There's also the next tradition around the corner. The big Opel Grill, certainly at your partner. With music, delicious dishes from the grill and exclusive offers. Like the Opel Frontier already at 225€ monthly in Leasing plus Sonderzahlung. And in the showroom is also the rest of the model palette ready. Up the way to the Opel Grill on Saturday, 24 January at your partner.

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1:33Today, Explains.

1:39I'm Alex Horton, and I cover the Pentagon and the military for The Washington Post. And you're the exact person to talk to right now because I've been seeing some headlines that seem to indicate that America might be making some steps toward war with Venezuela. But I don't have any sense of how likely that is or why this seems to be happening. I was hoping you can give me the state of play right now. Sure. It's been a widening conflict since early September, and it's not really clear to me either, you know, where this is going. When you come out and when you leave the room, you'll see that we just, over the last few minutes, literally shot out a boat.

2:16In early September, the U.S. started striking boats suspected of carrying drugs in the Caribbean. President Trump says the strike killed 11 members of the notorious gang Tren de Aragua. The massive explosion, sending debris raining down in international waters. This is the first time that we know of where the U.S. military has conducted multiple military strikes in the same day. This was a complete shock to people who are longtime reporters in the Pentagon and national security, because for decades the policy has been for Americans, specifically the Coast Guard, to when they see suspected traffickers is to stop the boat, arrest the traffickers, take the drugs, and send them on for civilian prosecution.

2:58That changed completely on its head when the U.S. started striking these vessels in the open ocean and in the Caribbean. President Trump has long said Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is an agitator in the region. He has said that Maduro is overseeing drug trafficking and sending violent gang members into the U.S. And then what happens in September, right? is a ton of forces relative to their history in the region have come in. The Pentagon deployed three guided missile destroyers to international waters near Venezuela. The U.S. has deployed thousands of troops to the region, and more are on their way.

3:33B-52 bombers are flying off the coast of Venezuela. Special operations helicopters were just seen flying 90 miles from Venezuela's coast. First it was a marine amphibious assault ship. Now it has grown to a force of 10 ,000. So within a matter of weeks, it has gone from a relatively quiet backyard of the United States to the most busy military theater in the world. So there's been a real escalation in just a matter of months. That's right. I also saw that the CIA was doing some sort of operations there. Where does that fit in in the sort of tools you laid out? And also, why do we know about this, considering that at least I thought the CIA did its work in secret?

4:19Traditionally, the CIA likes to be left to his own devices, which is how we get into some of these pickles around the world, right? President Trump said he had authorized CIA covert actions in Venezuela. I authorized for two reasons, really. Number one, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America. The other thing are drugs. We have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela. It's unclear if that has begun. But their bread and butter, you know, what they're good at is getting into, you know, a country like Venezuela that's already relatively unstable, you know, given the authoritarian rule there.

4:55The economy has been in shambles for years. There are strong opposition groups with Washington ties that are on the ground that have powerful lobbying groups in Washington. So the CIA's role in the covert war anyway would be to work with those opposition groups, make sure they're armed, make sure they have intelligence to give them an edge over Maduro's forces shall come to that. It's just so I have this kind of clear. You're saying that President Trump has made a show of kind of authorizing covert operations in Venezuela. But we don't exactly know what they're up to and we don't exactly know what those aims are.

5:28And we don't know if they're doing it. Yeah. So he's turned a covert action into overt action, right? Like, you know, he faces himself as a dealmaker, a negotiator. So it's possible that, you know, he wants to see Maduro leave power. And this is one way of coercion that falls short of military action. OK. So as you're saying, in the administration's telling, the focus of these operations is to topple a Maduro regime that is allegedly tied to drugs and fentanyl. But we usually hear these claims in relationship to other countries like Mexico or Colombia, not Venezuela. What do we know about these drug boats?

6:04Do we have actual any hard evidence that these are, in fact, drug boats? Well, how many minutes have we been on this podcast so far? Like 10 minutes or so? Yeah. That's 10 minutes longer than Pete Hegseth or the president have answered questions about this to the American public. What we know about these strikes officially come from true social posts. Earth Social. Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking narcotics, was associated with illicit narco-terrorist networks, and was transiting along a known DTO route. They come from posts on X. We don't know, and the administration has not even tried to lay out a body of evidence showing drugs, showing connections to Maduro or to trafficking organizations.

6:58And maybe it's they don't have it. But, you know, if if you're going to launch a war in our hemisphere, which is where this could be going, you do want to show your math. You do want to come with the receipts to the American public. And and what we're getting is sort of grainy 10 second videos. Now, there was a recent trick that that XSF, you know, just announced one of the boats that they showed and like a fan cam of these boats exploding, essentially just like clips of them just blowing up without real context. There are white bags in there. Are they oysters or is it cocaine? I don't know. So that's about the extent of what we can know officially.

7:36Well, hearing all this, I'm prone to defer to the evidence that says this may not directly be about what the administration says this is about. Maybe this isn't about drug boats. So what are the other possibilities? We know Venezuela has unique reserves of oil that are envy of places across the world. Is this about that? It could be. You know, when you look at the small circle of people who will decide where this operation goes at the White House, you have a lot of antagonists of Maduro and Venezuela in there. And now some of these levers are starting to look like they're getting pulled. So we take a step back and say, this doesn't make sense that you would target the final node of drug trafficking in a place that doesn't really impact the U.S.

8:20that much, which is, you know, from Venezuela to the U.S. If that doesn't make sense, if it logically doesn't pass a smell test, then what is it actually about? Right, right. And you look at Venezuela, you look at its oil reserves, you look at its pristine coastline, and you start to put these things together that Trump has been interested in deals and outcomes where the U.S. benefits financially. We saw that in Ukraine where he put a lot of emphasis on minerals and precious mining as one possible negotiation tactic with the Ukrainians in support. I said, well, we want something for our efforts beyond what you would think would be acceptable.

8:58And we said rare earth. They're very good rare earth. As you know, we're looking for rare earth all the time. We see that with his ongoing negotiations in Gaza, with the administration's interest in developing Gaza into something that looks more like Trump Hotel. We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal. and I don't want to be cute. I don't want to be a wise guy, but the Riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so - It's a theme. It's a theme for him. And there's a non-zero chance that there is some of that stuff is animating what the administration ultimately wants to do.

9:36But we just don't know those outcomes yet. You know, regime change in Venezuela, as you mentioned, has been the goal of many Republicans for some time. It's actually outlined in Project 2025. But as you're laying out in the timeline, the escalation on this front is fairly recent and a break with U.S. policy on the past. If you could think what is the single biggest factor that caused that shift in policy, that has gotten us closer to inching toward a conflict with Venezuela than we have been before, what would you say that is? I would say just taking kinetic and deadly strikes in the region to begin with against people who are, in the end, suspected criminals.

10:16It is hard to find any law of war expert or former military attorney who says, this isn't law enforcement. This isn't a military operation. You know, this looks like murder. And it's patently illegal what is happening there, is what these experts pretty much resoundingly have said. And, you know, the administration, I think, they're starting to test the limits of the law, of international law, of what you can use the military for. We see the testing the boundaries like Jurassic Park. It's like testing defenses of what the norms and the laws are. And then you kind of walk away with a sense of some of these things are just governed by norms.

10:55It was the norm in the Pacific and in the Caribbean to deal with this as a civilian law enforcement matter. And Hexeth and Trump have turned it into a military operation. Is that legal? Maybe not. Is he going to keep doing it? Probably. Who's going to stop him you know the people on capitol hill right like no no you're right you're right you're right i'm like it's just kind of funny do we know why he's doing it not exactly and do we think it's legal probably not who's gonna stop him probably no one and this has the roots and in in the post 9-11 world of congress abdicating authority of declaring conflict to the president and and not trying to corral him or fecklessly and failing to do so in numerous occasions and this is no exception.

11:44Alex Horton, Washington Post. Coming up. The administration's story on Venezuela doesn't really add up. So why are we inching toward a war? That's next.

12:09You're listening to Today Explained. I'm Estet Herndon. This week, a headline in The New Yorker got my attention. The real target of Trump's war on drug boats by Jonathan Blitzer. The reporting seemed to suggest there was a through line between Trump's actions in Venezuela and his actions here at home. So I called Jonathan to learn more. There have been elements of the Republican establishment that have wanted Maduro ousted in Venezuela. And they've wanted him ousted for a bunch of typical sort of establishment reasons on the kind of hawkish neocon right. Now is the time to rid the civilized world of Nicolas Maduro.

12:51Now is the time to act. We must keep the pressure on and continue to isolate and delegitimize Maduro's regime. Mainly that if you lose Venezuela, if the regime in Venezuela collapses, then there is a kind of domino effect among other socialist regimes across the region in Cuba, in Nicaragua, and elsewhere that would fall because they depend in many ways on the strength of the Venezuelan regime. They get oil from Venezuela, and they've kind of all been sort of oriented around Venezuela going back decades now. And so for people like Marco Rubio, who obviously during Trump's first term was just a senator, there was a kind of axiomatic view among these types that you had to pressure Maduro to leave office.

13:39The Maduro regime is not a government. They are a mafia. You have to think of them as an organized crime ring. And everybody around Maduro is a criminal. And so you break them the way you break an organized crime ring. You put pressure on all of them until these thieves and these criminals that have no honor, they start turning on each other. And that the way to do it was to impose sanctions. It was to threaten military action. And interestingly, during the first Trump term, the administration itself wasn't willing to go much farther than issuing threats. So nothing much happened. And Trump himself was someone who, it seems fair to say now, was not comfortable with the idea of a kind of direct military intervention.

14:19He was into making all kinds of threats. He was into the rhetorical side of it, but wasn't quite ready to face the music of what an actual kind of military engagement would involve. And so what changed then from the first term of Donald Trump, where he was unwilling to kind of make that next step, to this next term? Is it just that Marco Rubio has a bigger role and he's now the secretary of state? Well, that's what's so interesting, as I see it, in terms of what's happening right now. Because you'd think on paper that this represents the kind of triumph of Marco Rubio. This is the viewpoint he brings into the administration.

14:51Now he's the Secretary of State. He's the acting National Security Advisor. You'd think that this recent turn toward overt military action would reflect his consolidated influence inside the administration. I'm not clear that it necessarily does. What do you mean? Oh, I think more than anything else, what this recent turn toward outright militarism reflects is that there are a new set of players who are weighing in on this issue. And the most important of them is Stephen Miller. These people chose to invade us. So there's a lot of concern from the corporate media about the invaders. But it's our responsibility to return them back to where they came from or another country willing to take them.

15:27The president's sort of chief immigration advisor, his sort of domestic political czar, if you want to call him that, the deputy chief of staff at the White House, the homeland security advisor at the White House. As far as I can tell from my sourcing, he was the person in this particular instance who put his thumb on the scales for the Rubio position inside the administration. Because at the start of the second Trump term, there were two different main factions on how the administration should proceed with Venezuela. One is very much what we've outlined, the Rubio vision of things. You know, ramp up sanctions, ramp up hostility, you know, try to force the issue and oust Maduro from power.

16:06On one hand, Camp Rubio. That's right. And on the other hand, Camp Rick Grinnell, who was the president's special envoy and had a kind of more conciliatory view of what the U.S. could do in Venezuela. So, for instance, in the winter of this past year, he flies down to Caracas, to the capital of Venezuela, meets directly with Maduro, and starts to engage in negotiations on prisoner exchanges. There are American prisoners held in Venezuelan jails. He tries to get them back. He tries to, in some ways, continue some of the policies of the Biden era in terms of, you know, not necessarily ramping up sanctions, but trying to find a kind of middle path.

16:46Not only did we get the hostages back without paying a penny, but we also got the Venezuelan government to take illegal immigrants in our country from Venezuela back to Venezuela. And so Rubio and Grinnell are kind of at cross purposes going into this past summer. And what I've been told is beginning around August is when the dynamic shifts and Grinnell starts to recede and that the Rubio position starts to win out. But again, that's not necessarily because Rubio has sold the president on a kind of ideological premise for militarism. It's because now there's a new set of players who are actually weighing in.

17:27And Miller has a slightly different argument that he's pushing that seems to be carrying the day and everything is falling into place from there. The problem I'm kind of seeing here, is it Miller a domestic policy guy? Obviously he's famous for leading the administration's charge on immigration enforcement. We can't take the risk of letting these Biden illegals roam around freely, unchecked, uncontrolled, unvetted, uninvited by the American people. And things that more so are happening within the United States. What's he doing kind of leading the administration policy or at least weighing in to this extent when it comes to Venezuela?

18:05Absolutely. I mean, this is my main question, too. I mean, what is this is not Miller's kind of typical portfolio. And my understanding is that there are two things here that are principally motivating Miller. The first and fairly basic one, this is an opportunity, in Miller's view, to expand the power of the president. I mean, the president, should be said right now, in launching these strikes on boats, first in the Caribbean Sea and now in the Pacific, is completely circumventing Congress. He has basically said that we owe Congress and foreign governments zero explanation. This is an opportunity to really engage in a much more muscular, unfettered display of what the president can do, how he can act.

18:46He can call someone a narco-terrorist, and that's that. That's grounds enough to literally launch a premeditated murder attempt. And so it's very important to kind of take stock of that. And I will say, in addition, as one former administration official told me, you know, even though what you're seeing is happening in an international theater, in some ways you have to understand it against the backdrop of what's happening in the U.S. Here's a look at a U.S. Army Reserve base in suburban Chicago where National Guard troops from Texas arrived today. It's not every day you see the National Guard in Memphis.

19:17This afternoon, the governor directed DPS and the National Guard to deploy to Austin this weekend. The clock is ticking, and unless a higher court intervenes, we could see National Guard troops on the streets of Portland within the next hour. In some ways, according to this particular source, the way to think about some of these strikes in that context is as an attempt by the administration and by this Millerite kind of wing inside the administration. to basically flex its muscles and say, you know, get used to the idea of militarized American power on a kind of daily level in your lives. That's prong one of it.

19:54And the second prong is, you know, Miller has waged a campaign against immigrants of all sorts living in the United States, but particular Venezuelan immigrants. You have a Venezuelan gang that is taking over entire apartment buildings in Aurora, Colorado. And that's responsible, by the way, for some of the most heinous crimes that have happened all over the United States. And that has been in many ways how the administration, at least in its early months, justified its crackdown on immigrants writ large in the United States. It basically tried to criminalize the identity of Venezuelan immigrants in much the same way that it did to Central American immigrants during the first Trump term, when it used Central American gangs like MS-13 to try to create this impression that all immigrants are criminals.

20:34We had gangs from countries that you wouldn't believe. More than 20 of the criminals we indicted and arrested in the past seven days were illegal aliens. What's happened during the second Trump term, because during the Biden years you had a large number of Venezuelans arriving in the United States, was that the current administration is saying Venezuelans who live here are members of this gang called Tren de Agua. These are heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators, who have no right to be in this country and they must be held accountable. This prison gang from Venezuela is infiltrating American cities.

21:08It's literally invaded the country. This is language the administration has used. This is the MS-13 playbook. Exactly. 100%. Only the difference from Trump 1 to Trump 2, aside from the obvious fact that now we're not talking about Central Americans and we're talking about Venezuelans, is there is no one inside the administration willing to say to Miller or to Trump, no. And so you're seeing things like these boat strikes internationally, and you have the United States basically declaring war on Venezuela itself. I kind of want to end on this question because a lot of listeners would think, OK, I hear you.

21:38Executive power, executive authority, the kind of rival teams of the administration. But I guess to me, the still the most important question is the tangible one in front of us. Like, are we going to war with Venezuela? And do we know? The short answer, as I understand it, is I have no idea. And it's not clear to me that they have an idea. I mean, I'm constantly sort of pinging my contacts with every new development, asking, all right, how do you interpret this? And in a certain sense, there is no question that, you know, the message that the administration is trying to send, and it certainly seems willing to deliver in at least some respect, is, you know, we don't need these assets in the region if we're just going to blow up drug boats.

22:22These assets get moved into the region for us to begin to launch some sort of incursion on land in a place like Venezuela. So these are huge questions. And it's amazing that they're on the table. Yeah. I mean, we don't know if we're going to war, but we know they want us to think that we might. That's it. That's it. And meanwhile, as you say it like that, there's the drumbeat of, I mean, almost every day. The casualties are mounting. The threats are increasing. It's a really wild game of chicken. It's hard to believe it's happening.

22:59That was Jonathan Blitzer of The New Yorker. The show today was produced by Hadi Mawagdi, edited by Jolie Myers, and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. Our engineers are Patrick Boyd and Adrian Lilly. I'm Estet Herndon. I joined Vox last week after a decade of journalism at the New York Times and the Boston Globe. Get used to this voice. You'll be hearing a lot of me over the next few months while Sean is out. And congrats to Sean. This is Today Explained.

23:33Thank you.