Pentagon Poised to Strike Venezuela Targets

When asked on Friday if he is considering strikes in Venezuela and if he has made up his mind, Trump denied it.

“No. It’s not true,” the president told reporters aboard Air Force One while en route to Florida.

“We are certainly looking at land now because we’ve got the sea under control,” Trump said at the White House earlier this month when discussing if he was looking at ground strikes in Venezuela.

Mark Cancian, a former Defense Department (DOD) official and senior adviser at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said the U.S. is now “much more likely” to conduct strikes.

“First, they’ve been building up assets and activities to do that. They don’t have to do it, but it would be harder to back off unless something happened. I mean, something like, Maduro left, or something like that. But Maduro just stayed there, and the Trump administration did nothing after all this buildup, that would look like a Maduro victory, and he would treat it like that,” Cancian said in an interview with The Hill.

“So they’re going to have to do something, unless Maduro steps down or does something dramatic enough that Trump could claim a success,” he added.

The Miami Herald reported Friday, citing unnamed officials, the potential strikes would aim to ax the hierarchy of the drug cartels in Venezuela. Secretary of State Marco Rubio rebuffed the article, saying it is a “fake story.”

Christopher Hernandez-Roy, a senior fellow and deputy director of the Americas Program at CSIS, noted the denial of reports by Trump, but added that the U.S. military’s role is to “identify strike packages to provide the President with options.”

Hernandez-Roy told The Hill that strikes inside Venezuela would represent a “significant escalation” and they would be “more difficult to explain as simply counter-drug operations, especially if the targets are facilities controlled by the Venezuelan military.”

“If strikes on land occur, I would expect them to be on targets that are more credibly associated with [Drug Trafficking Organizations], say a dock where drug boats are known to depart from, or a warehouse near a dock, or some other infrastructure not connected to the government or the military that is associated with drug trafficking,” he said on Friday.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, when asked Friday while in Malaysia about the military buildup in the Caribbean, said the administration takes the “security of our hemisphere very seriously.”

“I’m obviously not going to talk about the particulars of why troops are where in every circumstance, but they’ve got a clear mission and they’re executing,” he said.

In light of reports of the U.S. eyeing strikes against Venezuelan targets, Russia, a close ally of Caracas, issued support for Venezuela’s leadership in “defending its national sovereignty, taking into account the dynamics of the international & regional situation.”

“We stand ready to respond appropriately to the requests of our partners in light of emerging threats,” Russia’s foreign ministry said Friday in a statement on social platform X.

Progressives, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) voiced their opposition to the potential strikes inside Venezuela, demanding that Trump get Congress’s approval for military action inside the country, while Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) proclaimed that Maduro “wanted an early Christmas, but Halloween always comes first.”