The Venezuela Military Deployment Is about Cronyism, Not National Security.
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The Venezuela Military Deployment Is about Cronyism, Not National SecurityIn recent weeks, four US Navy ships and a nuclear submarine, all carrying thousands of service members, have been deployed by President Trump to the waters off Venezuela’s coast.
Tensions between Trump and the Venezuelan regime led by President Nicolás Maduro are nothing new. In his first term, Trump accelerated Washington’s long-standing strategy of using brutal sanctions to crush the Venezuelan economy while trying to prop up domestic officials aligned with the US government.
However, as is often the case, the Venezuelan people haven’t seen the foreign government helping to destroy their economy, or the domestic figures being backed by it, to be worth supporting. So Maduro remains in power.
Early in this second Trump term, the administration tried to ratchet things up by linking Maduro’s regime to a Venezuelan gang operating in parts of the US called Tren de Aragua. That link was used to justify the government’s national emergency declaration at the southern border by framing the gang’s violence here in the US as a literal invasion by the Venezuelan government.
