Are we going to invade Venezuela?

Speaker 1 First, it was one alleged drug boat back in September.

Speaker 2 U.S. military forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Trende Aragua narco-terrorists.

Speaker 3 11 on board were killed.

Speaker 5 When you flood American streets with drugs, you are terrorizing America.

Speaker 1 Then, a second strike in the Caribbean. Then another and another,

Speaker 1 almost every week for two months.

Speaker 1 In total, more than a dozen ships have been hit and at least 57 people left dead.

Speaker 7 We're gonna kill them. You know, they're gonna be like dead.
Okay.

Speaker 1 And Trump is still upping the ante. He's sending warships to the coast of Venezuela.
But the question is why? And what Stephen Miller got to do with it?

Speaker 7 Okay.

Speaker 1 I'm Estead Herngen, filling in around here for the next few months. That and more coming up on Today Explain from Box.

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Speaker 19 Estades cuichando a hoy explicado. Today, explained.

Speaker 20 I'm Alex Horton, and I cover the Pentagon and the military for the Washington Post.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I was hoping you can give me the state of play right now.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 7 When you come out and when you leave the room, you'll see that we just,

Speaker 7 over the last few minutes, literally shot out a

Speaker 20 boat. In early September, the U.S.
started striking boats suspected of carrying drugs in the Caribbean.

Speaker 21 President Trump says the strike killed 11 members of the notorious gang Trenderagua.

Speaker 22 The massive explosion, sending debris raining down in international waters.

Speaker 2 Now, this is the first time that we know of where the U.S. military has conducted multiple military strikes in the same day.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 That changed completely on its head when the U.S. started striking these vessels in the open ocean and in the Caribbean.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 And then what happens in September, right, is a ton of forces, you know, relative to their history in the region have come in.

Speaker 21 The Pentagon deployed three guided missile destroyers to international waters near Venezuela.

Speaker 23 The U.S. has deployed thousands of troops to the region, and more are on their way.

Speaker 6 B-52 bombers are flying off the coast of Venezuela. Special Operations helicopters were just seen flying 90 miles from Venezuela's coast.

Speaker 20 First, it was a marine amphibious assault ship, now it has grown to a force of 10,000.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 20 Traditionally, the CIA likes to be left to his own devices, which is how we get into some of these pickles around the world, right?

Speaker 20 President Trump said he had authorized CIA covert actions in Venezuela.

Speaker 24 I authorized for two reasons, really. Number one, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America.

Speaker 24 The other thing, the drugs, we have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela.

Speaker 20 It's unclear if that has begun, but their bread and butter, you know, what they're good at is getting into

Speaker 20 a country like Venezuela that's already relatively unstable, given the authoritarian rule there. The economy has been in shambles for years.

Speaker 20 There are strong opposition groups with Washington ties that are on the ground, that have powerful lobbying groups in Washington.

Speaker 20 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 it come to that.

Speaker 1 So 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.

Speaker 20 And we don't know what they're doing yet. Yeah.
So he's turned a covert action into overt action, right? Like, you know, he fancies himself as a deal maker, a negotiator. So it's possible that

Speaker 20 he wants to see a Maduro leave power. And this is one way of coercion that falls short of military action.

Speaker 1 Okay. 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Do we have actual any hard evidence that these are, in fact, drug boats?

Speaker 20 Well, how many minutes have we been on this podcast so far?

Speaker 20 Like 10 minutes or so? Yep. That's 10 minutes longer than Pete Hexeth or the president have answered questions about this to the American public.

Speaker 20 What we know about these strikes officially comes from true social posts.

Speaker 25 Truth Social. Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking narcotics, was associated with illicit narco-terrorist networks, and was transiting along a known DTO route.

Speaker 20 They come from posts on X.

Speaker 20 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. And maybe they don't have it, but

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 And what we're getting is sort of greeny 10-second videos. Now, there was a recent trick that XF, you know, just announced.

Speaker 20 One of the boats that they showed in 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.

Speaker 20 Are they oysters or is it cocaine? I don't know. So that's about the extent of what we can know officially.

Speaker 1 Well, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 And now some of these levers are starting to look like they're getting pulled. So when you take a step back and say,

Speaker 20 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. that much, which is, you know, from Venezuela to the U.S.

Speaker 20 If that doesn't make sense, if it logically doesn't pass a smell test, then what is it actually about? Right, right.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 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 and support.

Speaker 7 I said, well, we want something for our efforts beyond what you would think would be acceptable.

Speaker 7 And we said, rare earth, they have very good rare earth. As you know, we're looking for rare earth all the time.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 7 We have an opportunity to do something that could be

Speaker 7 phenomenal. And I don't want to be cute.
I don't want to be a wise guy. But the Riviera Riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so.
It's a theme.

Speaker 20 It's a theme for him. And there's just a non-zero chance that there is

Speaker 20 some of that stuff is animating what the administration ultimately wants to do. But we just don't know those outcomes yet.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 20 I would say just taking kinetic and deadly strikes in the region to begin with against people who are, in the end, suspected criminals.

Speaker 20 It 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.

Speaker 20 What is happening there is what these experts pretty much resoundingly have said.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 We see the testing the boundaries, like Jurassic Park, it's like testing the fences of what the norms and the laws are.

Speaker 20 And then you kind of walk away with a sense of some of these things are just governed by norms.

Speaker 20 It 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.

Speaker 20 Is he going to keep doing it? Probably. Who's going to stop him? You know, the people on Capitol Hill, right?

Speaker 1 No, 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?

Speaker 25 Not exactly. And do we think it's legal? Probably not.
Who's going to stop him?

Speaker 1 Probably no one.

Speaker 20 And this has the roots in the post-9-11 world of Congress abdicating authority of declaring conflict to the president and not trying to corral him or fecklessly and failing to do so in numerous occasions.

Speaker 20 And this is no exception.

Speaker 1 Alex 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.

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Speaker 9 You're listening to

Speaker 9 Explained.

Speaker 1 I'm Estead 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 23 There have been elements of the Republican establishment that have wanted Maduro ousted in Venezuela.

Speaker 23 And they've wanted him ousted for for a bunch of typical sort of establishment reasons on the kind of hawkish neocon right.

Speaker 6 Now is the time to rid the civilized world of Nicolas Maduro. Now is the time to act.

Speaker 26 We must keep the pressure on and continue to isolate and delegitimize Maduro's regime.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 23 They get oil from Venezuela and they've kind of all been sort of oriented around Venezuela going back decades now.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 5 The 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 23 And that the way to do it was to impose sanctions, it was to threaten military action.

Speaker 23 And interestingly, during the first Trump term, the administration itself wasn't willing to go much farther than issuing threats. So nothing much happened.

Speaker 23 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. He was into making all kinds of threats.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, 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?

Speaker 1 Is it just that Marco Rubio has a bigger role and he's now the Secretary of State?

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 23 This is the viewpoint he brings into the administration. Now he's the Secretary of State.
He's the acting national security advisor.

Speaker 23 You'd think that this recent turn toward overt military action would reflect his consolidated influence inside the administration. Right.
I'm not clear that it necessarily does. What do you mean?

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 23 And the most important of them is Stephen Miller.

Speaker 19 These people chose to invade us.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 23 The president's sort of chief immigration advisor, his sort of domestic political tsar, if you want to call him that, the deputy chief of staff at the White House, the Homeland Security Advisor at the White House.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 23 Because at the start of the second Trump term, there were two different main factions on how the administration should proceed with Venezuela.

Speaker 23 One was 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.

Speaker 1 In one hand, Camp Rubio.

Speaker 23 That's right. And on the other hand, Camp Rick Grinnell,

Speaker 23 who was the president's special envoy

Speaker 23 and had a kind of more conciliatory view of what the U.S. could do in Venezuela.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 23 There are American prisoners held in Venezuelan jails. He tries to get them back.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 27 Not 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.

Speaker 23 And so Rubio and Grinnell are kind of at cross purposes going into this past summer.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 23 But again, that's not necessarily because Rubio has sold the president on a kind of ideological premise for militarism.

Speaker 23 It's because now there's a new set of players who are actually weighing in and 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.

Speaker 1 The problem I'm kind of seeing here, isn't Miller a domestic policy guy? Obviously, he's famous for leading the administration's charge on immigration enforcement.

Speaker 28 We can't take the risk of letting these Biden illegals roam around freely, unchecked, uncontrolled, unvetted, uninvited by the American people.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 23 Absolutely. I mean, this is my main question, too.
I mean, what is this is not Miller's kind of typical portfolio?

Speaker 23 And my understanding is that there are two things here that are principally motivating Miller.

Speaker 23 The first and fairly basic one, this is an opportunity, in Miller's view, to expand the power of the president.

Speaker 23 I mean, the president, it 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.

Speaker 23 He has basically said that we owe Congress and foreign governments zero explanation.

Speaker 23 This is an opportunity to really engage in a much more muscular, unfettered display of what the president can do, how he can act. He can call someone a narco-terrorist, and that's that.

Speaker 23 That's grounds enough to literally launch a premeditated murder attempt. And so it's very important to kind of take stock of that.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 29 Here's a look at a U.S. Army Reserve base in suburban Chicago Chicago where National Guard troops from Texas arrive today.

Speaker 27 It's not every day you see the National Guard in Memphis.

Speaker 2 This afternoon, the governor directed DPS and the National Guard to deploy to Austin this weekend.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 1 That's prong one of it.

Speaker 23 And 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.

Speaker 19 You have a Venezuelan gang.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 23 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 were criminals.

Speaker 24 We 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.

Speaker 23 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 Trentaragua.

Speaker 30 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.

Speaker 23 This prison gren from Venezuela is infiltrating American cities. It's literally invaded the country.
This is language the administration has used.

Speaker 1 This is the MS-13 playbook.

Speaker 23 Exactly. 100%.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 23 And so you're seeing things like these boat strikes internationally, and you have the United States basically declaring war on Venezuela itself.

Speaker 1 I kind of want to end on this question because a lot of listeners would think, okay, I hear you. Executive power, executive authority, the kind of of rival teams of the administration.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 23 The short answer, as I understand it, is I have no idea. And it's not clear to me that they have an idea.

Speaker 23 I mean, I'm constantly sort of pinging my contacts with every new development, asking, like, all right, how do you interpret this?

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 23 These 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.

Speaker 23 And it's amazing that they're on the table.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, we don't know if we're going to war, but we know they want us to think that we might.

Speaker 9 That's it. That's it.

Speaker 23 And meanwhile, like as you say it like that, like there's the drumbeat of, I mean, almost every day, you know, the casualties are mounting, the threats are increasing.

Speaker 23 It's a really wild game of chicken.

Speaker 23 It's hard to believe it's happening.

Speaker 1 That was Jonathan Blitzer of The New Yorker. The show today was produced by Hadi Mwagdi, edited by Jolie Myers, and fact-checked by Laura Bullard.
Our engineers are Patrick Boyd and Adrian Lilly.

Speaker 1 I'm Estead 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.

Speaker 1 You'll be hearing a lot of me over the next few months while Sean is out. And congrats to Sean.

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