Trump weighs Venezuela strikes as US forces prepare for attack order
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine returned to the White House on Friday for a second consecutive day of deliberations centered on potential military action in Venezuela, as U.S. forces in the region prepared for possible attack orders, according to people familiar with the matter.
It remains unclear if President Donald Trump has decided to pursue such an escalation, though high-level discussions over whether to strike Venezuela — and how — have been underway for days, these people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the matter is highly sensitive. Also joining the White House meeting were Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, these people said.
A White House spokesperson declined to comment. The Pentagon press office did not respond to a request for comment.
An administration official said “a host of options” have been presented to the president. Trump is “very good at maintaining strategic ambiguity, and something he does very well is he does not dictate or broadcast to our adversaries what he wants to do next,” the official said.
Any strike on Venezuelan territory would upend the president’s frequent promises of avoiding new conflicts and betray promises made to Congress in recent weeks that no active preparations were underway for such an attack. It also would further complicate U.S. cooperation with other Latin American countries, and deepen suspicions — there and in Washington — over whether Trump’s endgame is the forced removal of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, whom Trump has accused of sending drugs and violent criminals to the United States.
Maduro, a socialist strongman, first came to power in Caracas in 2013 and increasingly has become a fixation for Trump. In August, U.S. officials increased the reward for information leading to his arrest and conviction from $25 million to $50 million, citing alleged ties to drug cartels and U.S. beliefs dating back to the Biden administration that he lost a 2024 presidential election and refused to step down.
“The United States is very plugged in to what’s going on in Venezuela, the chatter among Maduro’s people and the highest levels of his regime,” the administration official said. “Maduro is very scared, and he should be scared. The president has options on the table that are very bad for Maduro and his illegitimate regime. … We view this regime as illegitimate, and it’s not serving the Western Hemisphere well.”
The United States maintains a massive military advantage over Venezuela, but a significant expansion of its activities also risks exposing American troops to grave danger. Fighter pilots aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford, an aircraft carrier that’s been dispatched to the region, have been studying Venezuelan air defenses, though they did not yet know whether they’ll be ordered to attack, a person familiar with the matter. The Venezuelan Defense Ministry has announced a massive mobilization of nearly 200,000 air, ground and navy personnel to prepare to defend the country.
U.S. planning has raised the possibility, too, of involving the military’s elite Delta Force, according to two people familiar with the matter. The highly trained Special Operations unit prepares for an array of capture and kill missions, and saw frequent usage in two decades of U.S. wars in the Middle East.
In recent weeks, Trump and his top advisers have sent mixed signals about the administration’s intentions. He has repeatedly voiced a desire to expand “to the land” a campaign that has killed an estimated 80 people aboard small speedboats alleged to be smuggling drugs through the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean. Yet as Congress debated legislation to prevent him from starting a war in Venezuela, Hegseth and Rubio privately told select lawmakers that the administration was not currently planning to do so — an assurance that helped persuade enough Republicans to reject the measure.
During a late-October briefing on Capitol Hill, members of the House Armed Services Committee asked military officials whether the Pentagon was planning any operations inside Venezuela, a Democratic lawmaker said. They were assured then as well that the answer was no, the lawmaker said.
“I’m starting to have a major trust deficit with the department,” this person said of the Pentagon, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the briefing they received was classified. “And I’m starting to believe that their motives are not pure and that they’re not being truthful and candid with Congress.”
The Trump administration’s binding legal defense of its military operations around Latin America does not seek to justify an attack on Venezuela itself, according to several people who have reviewed the document.
Two separate lawmakers said that the administration’s argument sought to blend the laws that govern criminal drug trafficking with the laws of armed conflict.
The document compared narcotics to “chemical weapons,” the people said. It also justified the lethal strikes by claiming the U.S. is acting in “collective self-defense” with allies such as Colombia and Mexico against drug cartels funding campaigns of violence in their countries through the drug trade.
But the lawmakers, and many legal experts, argue that the comparison is misguided. Drug trafficking is a civilian criminal offense rather than an armed attack carried out by enemy combatants, who pose an imminent threat to American citizens.
“Harboring drug runners has never been considered a use of force under international law or an attack under international law,” said Dan Maurer, a former Army judge advocate general who now teaches at Ohio Northern University, on a call with reporters Thursday.
The New York Times and Wall Street Journal previously reported elements of the administration’s argument.
The Trump administration’s sprawling military mission in Latin America has roiled some of Washington’s closest partners in the region. Colombia, a longtime collaborator on counternarcotics operations, this week said it was suspending its intelligence sharing with the United States over what the country’s president, Gustavo Petro, said was a “human rights” imperative.
Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum said this week that representatives from her government met with U.S. officials after a recent U.S. strike about 400 miles from Acapulco to reaffirm existing maritime agreements and “prevent the use of bombing against vessels” so close to Mexico’s territory. Sheinbaum has said previously that “we do not agree with these attacks.”
The representatives from the two countries reached an understanding that if U.S. officials have information about suspected drug-trafficking vessels near Mexico, the Mexican Navy would be tasked with intercepting those boats, Sheinbaum said. The meeting took place after the Mexican Navy was asked to help with a search and rescue after the U.S. boat strike near Mexico late last month, according to two Mexican government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private conversation.
The U.S. Embassy in Mexico declined to comment.
With the arrival of the Gerald R. Ford, there are about 15,000 U.S. troops in the region, including personnel spread across roughly a dozen warships and reinforcements sent in recent weeks to U.S. facilities in Puerto Rico. Collectively, it marks a stunning presence in a region that historically has seen only one or two Navy vessels at a time, along with the U.S. Coast Guard conducting routine drug-interdiction operations that typically resulted in the detention of alleged smugglers and confiscation of any contraband.
As of Friday, there were seven U.S. warships in the Caribbean. They included the guided missile cruisers USS Gettysburg and USS Lake Erie; the destroyers USS Gravely and USS Stockdale; and the amphibious ships USS Iwo Jima, USS Fort Lauderdale and USS San Antonio. The Ford was nearby in the Atlantic with the destroyers USS Mahan, USS Bainbridge and USS Winston S. Churchill.
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Samantha Schmidt in Mexico City, and Isaac Arnsdorf, John Hudson, Ellen Nakashima and Noah Robertson in Washington contributed.