US President Donald Trump indicated on Thursday that direct military conflict with Venezuela remains a possibility.
Speaking by phone to NBC News, he said, “I don’t rule it out, no.”
Earlier in the week, Trump authorised what he described as a “blockade” targeting sanctioned oil tankers travelling to and from Venezuela, in a move designed to intensify pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, with US authorities seizing control of an oil tanker near Venezuelan territorial waters. This has put massive pressure on the country’s heavily oil-dependent economy.
The ongoing pressure campaign has already been linked to 28 boat strikes against alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, resulting in more than 100 deaths of individuals claimed to be involved in smuggling drugs into the US from the Venezuelan coast.
The attacks have taken place against the backdrop of a wider expansion of US military activity in the area, including the deployment of significant naval forces to the southern Caribbean. They have also followed subsequent warnings from Trump about the possibility of ground operations, as well as his declaration on November 29th 2025 that the airspace in and around Venezuela was effectively closed.
Trump refused to clarify whether removing Maduro from power is his end objective, saying: “He knows exactly what I want – he knows better than anybody.”
So what does Trump want exactly? And why are these nations at each other’s throats?
US-VENEZUELA TENSIONS HAVE BEEN RISING FOR TWO DECADES
While relations between Washington and Caracas have significantly deteriorated under Trump’s second term, America and Venezuela have been at odds for decades.
Húgo Chávez, who served as Venezuelan President from 1999 to 2013, spent much of his tenure in office strengthening Venezuela’s ties to America’s main adversaries, such as Cuba, Iran, and Russia, and would frequently accuse the US of pursuing imperial objectives in Latin America.
Chávez was regarded by many as an authoritarian dictator, with Human Rights Watch writing of him:
This trend continued under Chávez’ successor, Nicolás Maduro, who continued the perpetuate widespread human rights abuses. Following protests last year, Amnesty International highlighted evidence of “possible extrajudicial executions” perpetrated by the State, adding:
In recent years the oil-producing country – which was once one of the wealthiest in the world – became marked by hyperinflation, economic disaster and mass emigration.
The government in Caracas has long claimed that the United States is meddling in Venezuela’s internal politics. Those allegations intensified in 2019, when the Trump administration formally recognised opposition figure Juan Guaidó as the country’s interim president – a decision President Nicolás Maduro condemned as an attempted overthrow of his government. Several regional states, among them Brazil, Colombia and Peru, followed Washington’s lead in recognising Guaidó as Venezuela’s rightful leader.
Following the US move, Maduro severed diplomatic relations with Washington altogether and ordered American diplomats to leave the country within 72 hours.
He accused the United States of attempting to exert control over Venezuela from outside its borders, while alleging that domestic opposition forces were working to engineer a military coup.
“We’ve had enough interventionism – here we have dignity, damn it!” he declared during a televised address from the presidential palace at the time.
VENEZUELA’S ALLEGED DRUG INVOLVEMENT
Trump has repeatedly accused Maduro and senior officials in his government of playing central roles in large-scale drug-trafficking operations.
During Trump’s first presidency from 2017 to 2021, the US Department of Justice accused Maduro of links to the so-called Cartel de los Soles, or “Cartel of the Suns”, which it described as a State-backed network made up of senior figures within Venezuela’s military, police, and political establishment, and alleged to be involved in narcotics trafficking.
The group’s name is derived from the gold sun emblems worn on the uniforms of senior Venezuelan military officers.
As part of a tougher second-term stance, the Trump administration took a series of escalatory steps, moving to classify both the Cartel de los Soles and the State-connected Tren de Aragua organisation as Foreign Terrorist Organisations, significantly widening the scope of US counter-terrorism activities.
The US administration has alleged that Tren de Aragua operates with State protection and that its members were deliberately freed from Venezuelan prisons in order to facilitate the large-scale trafficking of deadly narcotics, including fentanyl, into the United States.
The US alleges that Venezuela is giving safe harbour to Latin American criminal organisations, such as the Colombian Communist paramilitary organisation FARC, and Mexican drug cartels, allowing them to do business on Venezuelan soil in exchange for a cut of the profits. Washington claims that this results in such criminal organisation sending more drugs into the US.
As a result, Venezuelan groups have been hit with significant sanctions for “narco-terrorism”, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio accusing the group of “terrorist violence” and “trafficking drugs into the United States and Europe.”
Reports have also emerged that Trump had signed a secret order in August 2025 empowering the Pentagon to use military force against designated drug-trafficking groups operating in Latin America, and had raised the US reward for information leading to the arrest of Nicolás Maduro to $50 million, accusing him of direct involvement in narcotics trafficking.
Maduro’s government has vigorously denied any involvement in drug-related activities, denying that the alleged Cartel De Los Soles even exists, and saying it is simply a pretext for US imperialist “regime change” war.
“[Our government] absolutely rejects the new and ridiculous fabrication,” the Government said in a statement.
They claimed that the US was only designating the “nonexistent Cartel of the Suns” as a terrorist organisation to promote an “infamous and vile lie to justify an illegitimate and illegal intervention against Venezuela, under the classic US format of regime change.”
AMERICA’S CONTROVERSIAL MEASURES
Traditionally, the Foreign Terrorist Organization label has been applied to paramilitary groups such as ISIS or other Islamist factions.
Under Trump, however, its scope was widened to include eight Latin American groups accused of involvement in drug trafficking and migrant smuggling, in a move the administration framed as part of a broader campaign against what it described as narcoterrorism.
That expansion has raised legal and ethical concerns, particularly over the use of lethal force outside conventional battlefields.
One highly contentious incident earlier this year – now under congressional review – involved a suspected drug-smuggling vessel that was struck by US forces and then hit a second time to finish off survivors on board.
The intelligence underpinning such strikes has also been questioned. Some analysts dispute whether the targeted boats were conclusively proved to be involved in narcotics trafficking, while others argue that the Cartel de los Soles itself may not meet the basic criteria of a coherent organisation, given its loose and highly decentralised nature.
Additional criticism has focused on the risk to civilians. Even if vessels are engaged in criminal activity, commentators have warned that they may be carrying victims of human trafficking, raising the prospect that missile strikes could place non-combatants in grave danger.
When pressed in a recent interview with 60 Minutes on whether the strikes were intended to bring down Nicolás Maduro’s government, Trump responded in vague terms that they were “about many things,” while adding that Maduro’s time in office was nearing its end.