Something unprecedented is taking place right now in the Caribbean Sea. The United States is currently deploying more military assets to this theater than at any other point in the 21st century. And it's the largest concentration of US military might in the Western Hemisphere since the country's invasion of Panama in 1989. This time, however, the US military is concentrating its forces just outside of the territorial waters of Venezuela. Arguably the most antagonistic country in the western hemisphere to American interests. The US has deployed three modern Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyers and one Ticonderoga
class guided missile cruiser, along with at least one nuclear-powered attack submarine just offshore of Venezuela that all collectively carry a strength package of dozens to hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles. If these Navy warships weren't enough, they've also been joined by the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit as well, consisting of the amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima along with its complement of two transport and logistical support ships.
The USS Iwo Jima, in particular, is basically a miniature-sized aircraft carrier that was captured by photographs on its way to Venezuela with multiple Harrier attack aircraft, M-22 Osprey assault helicopters, and Sikorsky heavy lift helicopters all on board. It can also, along with its two transport and logistical support ships, launch multiple hovercraft and amphibious assault vehicles for armed beach assaults under its aerial coverage, too. More than 2,500 US Marines have been deployed here with the 22nd, along with around 2,000 sailors belonging to the naval complement with the destroyers, the cruiser, and the
submarine. And on top of all of this firepower, the US has also deployed a literal combat ship to the theater as well, the USS Minneapolis-St. Paul, bringing the total number of vessels deployed in the theater so far up to nine, while at least an additional 10 F-35 fighter jets have also been deployed to airfields in Puerto Rico.
The Trump administration's officially stated purpose for deploying all of these assets nearby to Venezuela right now is to simply conduct counter-narconics operations and to halt the flow of drugs from Venezuela coming into the United States. But deploying warships and nuclear-powered submarines armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles, Harrier aircraft, F-35 fighters, and thousands of Marines ready for a beach assault, appears to be wildly overkill for that kind of a mission
alone against drug runners, who most often use nothing more advanced than motorized speed boats. Most drugs enter into the United States today through the Pacific coast anyway, while a great deal more come in through air shipments. None of which the flotilla being assembled off the coast of Venezuela will be capable of stopping. Which has led to rampant speculation that their ulterior objective may be attempting to induce regime change within Venezuela instead,
by overthrowing their president, Nicolas Maduro. Merely weeks before this flotilla began being assembled, the US government doubled the bounty it had placed on Maduro's head from $25 million to an unprecedented $50 million. The biggest bounty that the US government has ever put on a single individual's head in history.
To put how serious this $50 million bounty recently placed on Nicolas Maduro is in comparison, it's doubled the bounty that the US has put on other previous men on its most wanted lists, like Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and the former leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, all of whom topped out on the US bounty list at just $25 million by comparison. The US bounty on Nicolas Maduro today is what it once had placed on both Osama Bin Laden
and Saddam Hussein together, and the US doesn't recognize him as Venezuela's legitimate president either. And Maduro himself is far from the only man in Venezuela with a high US bounty on his head. His appointed Minister of the Interior, Díaz-Stano Cabello Rondón, now has a $25 million bounty placed on his head as well, equaling Osama Bin Laden's bounty. His Defense Minister, General Vladimir Padrino López, has a $15 million bounty, while his Minister of Industry, Tariq Zayed Anasamy Maddow, has another $10 million bounty, collectively representing $100 million worth
of bounties placed on just these four senior leaders of the Venezuelan government alone. In July, the month before all of these bounties were dramatically increased, US President Donald Trump signed a secret directive that authorized the US military to deploy force against Latin American cartels that were designated by his government as terrorist organizations, which includes Venezuela's most infamous criminal organization, Trenda Uruguay.
This secret directive has once again raised the specter of a 21st century interpretation of America's Monroe Doctrine, its historical justification for militarily intervening in the affairs of other states in the Americas. The Trump administration accuses Maduro and his close inner circle of secretly running their own drunk cartel called the Cartel of the Sons, which the Trump administration further accuses of providing material support to both Trinidad and Tobago and the Sinaloa cartel
in Mexico and their cocaine and fentanyl running operations in the United States. Thus, the Trump administration has led the U.S. into designating the Cartel of the Suns as a terrorist organization as well, which is the justification that the U.S. government is used to label Maduro and his inner circle
as narco-terrorists, and to place massive bounties on their heads with. And it might also become the Causus Belli that they use to initiate attacks on the Maduro government from the flotilla that's being assembled off of their shores. It should also be noted that there are many, many controversies surrounding the Cartel of the Sons, including as to whether or not it even exists.
Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic have all joined the United States and declared the Cartel of the Sons to be a terrorist organization. Maduro himself denies that any such organization exists. While Colombia's leftist president, Gustavo Petro, has also publicly rejected the cartel's existence and has insisted that it's nothing more than a propaganda tool being used to justify toppling Venezuela's government. Several internal reports in the US also seem to contradict many of the Trump administration's
claims here. In May, a National Intelligence Council report that was declassified concluded that the Maduro government likely didn't have any policy of cooperating with Trinidad and Tobago, nor did it direct any of Trinidad and Tobago's operations in the United States. Similarly, the Mexican government has also said that they have never found any link between Maduro's government in Venezuela and the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico. Nonetheless, the justifications and Casas Belais have been drafted and the firepower put in a place. All that's required now is to simply pull the trigger. And on the 2nd of September, the first shots were fired. A boat carrying 11
Venezuelans in international waters that had departed from Venezuela was shot by a missile, likely fired by an American MQ-9 Reaper drone, killing everyone on board. The US government claimed afterwards that the boat was carrying a large amount of drugs and that everyone on board were members of Tren de Aragua, potentially representing the first instance of a lethal US drone strike conducted against a Latin American cartel since Trump returned back to the presidency.
This operation sharply contrasts with the traditional procedures the US has used against drug-running vessels in the past, which are typically intercepted by the Coast Guard and raided so that their contents can be verified and their crews apprehended. Blowing up a suspected drug-running vessel with a drone strike isn't something
that's happened until now, and it's only added on to the escalation going on around Venezuela, since the Trump administration accuses Maduro's government of directly maintaining links to Trinidad and Tobago. Adding even more fuel to the fire, CNN has also begun reporting that according to multiple
inside sources, the Trump administration is presently considering initiating military strikes against cartel targets within Venezuela itself. Which could ostensibly mean strikes against Trinidad and Tobago or against the Venezuelan government itself, which the Trump administration claims is essentially indistinguishable from a cartel. Maduro himself seems to believe that the US flotilla gathering off of his shores are indeed
preparing to attack him and to remove him from power. He has been freaking out on social media and in speeches about the prospect, has ordered a full mobilization of his military, has called for millions of additional Venezuelan citizens to join the country's armed militias to resist any attack, has deployed at least 15,000 of his troops to the border with Colombia, and is sworn to resist and fight the U.S. to the bitter end in the event of an actual attack. On the 5th of September, a pair of Venezuelan F-16 fighters
flew close to the American warships in a show of resolve, and the U.S. warned that they could be shot down the next time if they were deemed to be a threat. It's really not an exaggeration at all to say that the United States and Venezuela have never been closer to the brink of war than they currently are now. So what exactly is going on here? How did the US and Venezuela get to this point? What are the risks of actual conflict both now and in the future?
And will we end up getting the world we played in during Mercenaries 2 back in the late 2000s. It's been building up towards this for quite some time, because the US and Venezuela have maintained a very adversarial relationship for pretty much my own entire lifetime. To give some historical recap, Venezuela should realistically be a global energy superpower because it controls the largest proven reserves of oil on the planet, more than even Saudi Arabia. The oil in Venezuela used to provide the country with fabulous riches and as recently as the 1970s, Venezuela had the highest GDP per capita in Latin America because of it. But Venezuela's crude oil is heavy, sour, and full
of impurities like sulfur, which means that it's pretty difficult to refine. Venezuela was able to gain the technical assistance it needed with drilling and refining by attracting major foreign oil companies like ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, and Shell to the country through joint ventures with Venezuela's state-owned oil company PDVSA. Oil profits were split 60-40 between government-owned PDVSA and the foreign energy companies. PDVSA gained valuable foreign experience, and the economic relationship with the United States blossomed.
And due to the geographic proximity of the U.S. to Venezuela, American energy companies built up a dense network of heavy-duty oil refineries across the Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana that could handle refining Venezuela's nearby extra-heavy crude, which increased the U.S.-Venezuela relationship even further. By the late 1990s, an overwhelming 60 to 70% of Venezuela's oil exports were all heading
to the United States, while Venezuelan oil made up about 15% of all US oil imports, the single largest source from any country in the world at the time. But the huge amount of money that was gushing into Venezuela through the oil industry gave way to runaway corruption, mismanagement, and over-dependence. Between 1972 and 1997, it's been estimated that as much as $100 billion was simply embezzled in the country by hopelessly corrupt government officials. Meanwhile, oil came to make up a whopping 90% of Venezuela's total exports, as much
as 70% of the government's operating budget, and up to 40% of the country's entire GDP, crowding out the development to virtually all other industries in the country. In the 1980s, the price of oil crashed from about $40 a barrel in 1979 to just $10 to $12 a barrel by 1986, which severely hurt the undiversified Venezuelan economy. Inflation and debt in the country both began to soar to unsustainable levels, and in 1989, the government agreed to the terms of a financial bailout from the IMF that included steep fiscal
austerity measures like decreased subsidies, public sector layoffs, a currency devaluation, and increased taxes and interest rates. Enraged by the fact that the corrupt government had embezzled billions of dollars through the state-owned oil industry and then left its own people to suffer the consequences through these austerity measures, the result sparked a wave of deadly riots across the country, and a sharp increase in anti-government sentiment.
Riding on this wave of revolt, a revolutionary named Hugo Chavez attempted to launch a failed coup attempt against the government in 1992, briefly found himself in prison, and then eventually emerged victorious in the country's 1998 presidential election after running on an explicitly socialist political platform, with promises that he would redistribute the nation's oil wealth in order to help reduce
poverty and inequality. And so began the socialist experiment in Venezuela that has lasted for decades ever since. Chavez's policies, at least initially, actually were quite successful at reducing the country's poverty rate. But they also set in motion the chain of events that would eventually lead to Venezuela's almost complete and catastrophic collapse.
Oil production in Venezuela peaked under his watch in the early 2000s. But after workers at the state-owned oil company PDVSA began striking in 2002, he simply fired thousands of the company's most experienced workers in the industry rather than giving in to their demands, which eliminated a huge amount of the country's technical expertise and know-how. He also took steps to almost completely nationalize the entire oil industry in the country through
seizures of assets that were owned by foreign oil companies like Exxon, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips, which began greatly straining Venezuela's relationship with the United States and led to dramatically reduced foreign investment in the country, which hurt Venezuela's ability to keep their own refineries and operations running in the long term. At almost the same time, he also began providing heavily subsidized Venezuelan oil to friendly,
largely fellow leftist states in the region as well, like Cuba and Nicaragua, which further drained the country's remaining strategic reserves. Within just 15 years after being elected by 2013, Chavez oversaw the country's national debt more than double while watching their strategic reserves of oil dwindle and dwindle. It was an unsustainable system, but it was also a popular one that enabled Chavez to steadily expand the powers of his office to near dictatorial levels.
He eliminated presidential term limits and he had multiple independent media outlets harassed or even shut down. When he died in office in 2013, Chavez's right-hand man and vice president, Nicolas Maduro, took over the presidency after him. And he took the opportunity to rapidly coalesce his position into a full-blown dictatorship. In 2014, just the year after he took things over, the global price of oil collapsed again
from more than $100 a barrel to less than $30 a barrel by early 2016, which threw the Venezuelan economy that was still cripplingly over-dependent on oil into a tailspin. Chavez's generous social welfare policies and subsidies that made him hugely popular with the people, only worked so long as the price of oil remained high and Venezuela made lots of money. Once the oil price collapsed under Maduro, the nation could no longer afford its lavish Chavez-era expenditures.
Protests and riots erupted across the country as services and jobs were dramatically cut and inflation skyrocketed, to which Maduro responded to with violence and crackdowns that immediately diminished his popularity. In 2015, the Obama administration declared Venezuela a national security threat, and authorized targeted sanctions against Maduro and other government officials. But the true avalanche of sanctions and the shattering of US-Venezuela relations would come later during the first Trump administration.
As the political and economic crisis in Venezuela deepened and Maduro grew increasingly more onocratic, the first Trump administration steadily came to embrace a policy of maximum pressure against Maduro in an attempt to force his removal from office through economic means, especially after the controversy of the 2018 election in the country. That year, Maduro claimed a one re-election to a second six-year term as president in an election that was widely marred by irregularities, the banning of major opposition candidates
from running, rock-bottom turnout, and accusations of fraud. All of Maduro's political opponents who ran against him refused to recognize the 2018 election's results, as did the US, Australia, the Organization of American States, and the EU. At the same time, many of Maduro's international allies chose to support him and recognize the results, including Cuba, Nicaragua, Russia, Belarus, China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Turkey, setting the stage for Venezuela becoming a flashpoint in the new 21st century Cold War.
The first Trump administration refused to recognize the election and first declared Maduro to be an illegitimate usurper when his second term began in January of 2019. The US recognized Juan Guaido, the head of the country's opposition-controlled National Assembly, as the interim president of Venezuela instead. Severed its remaining diplomatic relations with Venezuela and expelled the country's diplomats from Washington. Long-standing relations that had lasted for decades and had been strained for years were finally shattered to the point of open hostility. And on top of all of that, Trump led the US into unleashing an avalanche of new sanctions
on Venezuela too that were designed to try and encourage Maduro's removal. Venezuela's remaining access to the US financial system was eliminated, which made it much more difficult for the country to borrow money and refinance debt. Other sanctions were designed to target and strangle the Venezuelan oil industry. U.S. companies were completely prohibited from purchasing Venezuelan oil, while further sanctions targeted companies that were involved in transporting Venezuelan oil to third-party
countries as well. This eliminated Venezuela's ability to access the heavy-duty oil refineries around the US Gulf Coast that they had used for decades to refine their oil at, while further sanctions blocked spare parts and chemicals from entering into Venezuela to prevent them from adequately maintaining their own refineries as well. Coupled with their own self-induced brain drain of experienced oil workers fired during the Chavez years and decades of mismanagement, underinvestment, and corruption, the sanctions
helped cause Venezuela's oil production to completely collapse. And with it, so too did Venezuela's economy. After 2015, Venezuelan oil production began falling off a cliff as the sanctions began to bite. To the point where today, Venezuela is producing less oil than it was back during World War II, despite having the largest reserves in the world. Between 2014 and 2021, under Maduro's government, the Venezuelan economy collapsed by an almost
unbelievable three-fourths, one of the most catastrophic economic collapses that has ever been witnessed in modern history. Hyperinflation set in and grew to as high as 130,000% by 2018, making the Venezuelan currency almost worthless in the process. And while inflation has slowed down since then, it was still sitting at 190 percent as recently as 2023.
All of these issues collectively plunged Venezuela into what has probably been the country's greatest civilizational crisis in its entire history. Basic goods and services, including food, water, and gasoline, all became preciously scarce and by late 2022, more than half of Venezuela's population were reduced to living in poverty. By far the highest percentage seen on the South American continent.
And all of this was explicitly designed to destroy Maduro's popularity and undermine his legitimacy within Venezuela, and hopefully, lead to his removal from within. But ironically, the sanctions that Trump dumped on Venezuela during his first term contributed directly to the country's unprecedented migration crisis later during the Biden administration that he would use as an issue to help get himself re-elected in 2024. Since 2014, close to 8 million Venezuelan refugees are believed to have fled the country
all around the world, with many of them heading north towards the U.S. southern border. By 2021, shortly after Trump had left office, Venezuelans became the second most common nationality arriving at the southern border, remaining only behind Mexicans. And by 2023, the numbers of undocumented Venezuelan migrants residing in the United States have increased by nearly ten-fold from 2019 around when the heavy sanctions were first imposed, from only around 64,000
then to around 650,000 by 2023. Even worse for the first Trump administration, the sanctions didn't even accomplish their biggest goal, removing Maduro from power. He persisted clinging on to power and crushed any protest that arose against him, resulting in the deaths of dozens to hundreds of protesters since the contested 2018 election, depending on the source.
And Maduro's isolation from the US and the Western world led to him increasing Venezuela's ties with Cuba, Russia, China, and Iran instead, all of which helped to buttress his position in power in various ways. Cuba's intelligence services began providing their assistance to him. Russia and Iran both began providing Venezuela with arms to replace the loss in American weapons.
While China began buying up most of what remained of Venezuela's dwindling oil exports. All of which essentially made Venezuela a second, larger Cuba in the Western Hemisphere from a geopolitical perspective. And on top of the sanctions, Trump also put the first bounty on Maduro during his first term as well. In 2018, the Trump administration slapped a $15 million bounty on Maduro's head, based
on accusations that he was personally directing the operations of the Cartel of the Suns, along with other high-ranking Venezuelan military and political officials. Allegedly, the U.S. government accused the Cartel of the Sons of utilizing the state apparatus of Venezuela to run a vast cocaine trafficking project into the United States, Europe, and elsewhere as an alternative source of government revenue in the face of the US imposed sanctions. They further accused Maduro and the Cartel of the Sons of collaborating with the FARC in Colombia to smuggle cocaine into the United States.
An armed Marxist guerrilla rebel force and US designated terrorist organization with its own cocaine smuggling operation. Thus, the US labeled Maduro as a narco-terrorist and charged him with drug trafficking, money laundering, and conspiracy, regarding him as both an illegitimate usurper and a wanted fugitive rather than a sitting president. And then, in between the Trump presidencies, Maduro continued doing things that kept pissing off the U.S. government even further. Initially, the new Biden administration attempted to ease Trump's maximum pressure policy towards Venezuela
and reopen engagement. After Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, Biden agreed to allow Chevron to restart a few of its operations in Venezuela again in order to help put more oil onto the market and reduce prices in order to hurt Russia. Biden also eased some of Trump's sanctions on Venezuela in exchange for political promises. In late 2023, Biden granted the Venezuelans the ability to begin exporting their oil and
gas again for a period of six months in exchange for Maduro's promise to hold a free and fair presidential election the following year in 2024, which the Biden administration hoped a period of six months in exchange for Maduro's promise to hold a free and fair presidential election the following year in 2024, which the Biden administration hoped would succeed at removing him from power for the maximum pressure strategy at fail. But almost immediately after agreeing to host this free and fair election, Maduro decided to hold a referendum within the country on whether or not Venezuela should claim roughly
70% of neighboring Guyana's territory. Part of a long-standing territorial dispute that dates back to the colonial era. This whole situation briefly captured the world's attention at the end of 2023 as fears mounted that Maduro was laying the groundwork for a full-on invasion of Guyana to claim the disputed area. If he did so and was successful, he would also seize control over nearly all of Guyana's maritime area and all of its recently discovered rich offshore oil reserves that are mostly
operated by Exxon Mobil. Guyana is believed to have 11 billion barrels of oil worth of reserves offshore, nearly equivalent to the reserves of OPEC member Algeria. And because Guyana hasn't been brutally sanctioned by the US like Venezuela and generally cooperates with Washington, Guyana now produces about as much oil as Venezuela does, despite having vastly fewer reserves overall.
As a result, Guyana has become a major component of the global oil and energy map, and most of its oil exports currently travel to the US and Europe, helping to keep Western nation supplies up, keeping oil prices down with more supply, and hurting Russia, and generally benefiting Washington's overall geopolitical calculus. A Venezuelan invasion and seizure of Guyana's territory and oil fields would never be tolerated by the US, but Maduro held the referendum for internal political purposes as well.
His government accused the opposition leaders in the country of attempting to sabotage the referendum and issued arrest warrants for more than a dozen of them on treason and conspiracy charges, helping to eliminate many of his most capable opponents from being able to run in the 2024 election at all. And so, frustrated, the Biden administration reimposed several US sanctions on Venezuela again in April of 2024, just ahead of the July presidential election in the country, which itself became marred by controversy just like the previous 2018 election had been.
Both Maduro and his primary political opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez claimed victory in the election, but Maduro curiously chose not to release any vote tallies or tabulated results that would actually prove his victory claim, and instead he insisted that he narrowly won the election with just over 51% of the total. Gonzalez and the opposition, meanwhile, claimed that they had actually won by a landslide
and they backed it up by pretty strong evidence. Like official tally sheets that were collected by poll watchers from a majority of the polling centers that showed overwhelming support for Gonzalez. The US, along with almost all of the rest of the Western Hemisphere, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea, all refused to recognize the results of the election and chose to recognize González as the winner and the legitimate Venezuelan president instead.
While Russia, Belarus, Iran, China, Cuba, and others chose to support Maduro's claim and continued recognizing him as the country's president instead. Anti-Maduro protests erupted across Venezuela in the wake of the results, which Maduro used the army to crush in a massive crackdown that resulted in more than 2,000 arrests and more than two dozen deaths. Maduro's government later issued an arrest warrant for González himself, who fled the
country in exile for Spain, where he still remains to date a year later with the continued backing and support of the EU and US to the Venezuelan presidency. Maduro had unequivocally become a full-blown dictator in Venezuela who openly stole elections without any care of the consequences. Venezuela's score on the corruption's perceptions index correspondingly plummeted, falling by more than 40 places since 2005
to the point where it's today, ranked as the third most deeply corrupt country on the earth. Worse off than even countries like Syria, Eritrea, and North Korea. Trump's policy of economic warfare and sanctions during his first term had failed
to bring about change in the country, and even backfired in the sense that it contributed to the migration crisis at the US southern border, while Biden's policy of engagement and diplomacy failed to bring about any change as well. Maduro still remained for out at all and if anything was growing even more authoritarian and dictatorial, while American influence in the country was steadily being replaced by Russian,
Chinese and Iranian influence instead, giving many of America's greatest geopolitical enemies a foothold in the Western Hemisphere. In the final days of the Biden administration in January of 2025, he had the bounty on Maduro's head increased from $15 million up to $25 million to increase the pressure further, and then came the second Trump administration and another shift in tactics. Initially, Trump tried to return back to the economic warfare policies of his first term by canceling Chevron's licenses to do any business in
the country. That decision was championed by a Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, who has long been an outspoken hawk on Venezuela within Washington politics. But it was also condemned by other parties within Trump's own MAGA movement, like by big oil interests and by personalities like Laura Lumer, who argued that the move surrendered Venezuela's strategic oil fields to China. By July, Trump relented to the pressure growing within his own party and allowed Chevron to continue their operations in Venezuela, while he attempted to negotiate
with Maduro on his deportation policies involving the hundreds of thousands of undocumented Venezuelans residing within the United States. Trump sent his special envoy, Richard Grenell, directly to Venezuela to meet with Maduro in person. They agreed that in exchange for a reduction in some sanctions, Venezuela would release some American hostages and they would begin accepting deportation flights of their citizens from the United States.
Through the month of July alone, the U.S. government sent nine deportation flights to Venezuela, a sign of how close Washington and Caracas were cooperating together fairly recently. However, Trump was also aware of three things. His own policy of sanctions and isolation to try and remove Maduro from power during his first term had failed.
Biden's policy of diplomacy and engagement had failed to remove Maduro from power as well. And further diplomacy and engagement on his part was deeply unpopular with large segments of his own voter base, especially among the Cuban exile community in South Florida and his own Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. Trump has likely calculated that another tactic to remove Maduro from power or to force him
into compliance was needed without escalating all the way to full-blown war, and thus why he has likely decided to resort to a bout of gunboat diplomacy now. With a secret directive authorizing the US military to attack cartels that he's designated as terrorist organizations, his doubling of the bounty on Maduro's head to $50 million, and his surrounding Venezuela's territorial waters with warships and submarines, not to even mention the blowing up of the alleged Trinidad and Tobago boat out in international waters, Trump is attempting to apply even more pressure on Maduro than anyone else has ever done before.
Getting rid of Maduro in the country and replacing him with a more friendly regime would do several things for US interests. First, if it is to be believed that the cartel of the sons actually exists and Maduro is indeed using the powers of the Venezuelan state to align with Trenderragua and other cartels to smuggle cocaine and fentanyl into the United States. Toppling him from power would curb a significant source of drugs entering into the country.
Secondly, removing Maduro from power and replacing him with someone more friendly to Western interests would remove the Venezuelan territorial threat to Guyana and all of its oil fields. While it would also help to restart Western oil companies activities within Venezuela itself. Which after a few years time of fixing could help get massive amounts of Venezuelan oil back onto the world market again. After decades of absence and neglect. Which would further reduce global oil prices and help ease inflation and hurt Russia's economy and its war-fighting ability in Ukraine and elsewhere. Finally, removing Maduro from power would remove a growing base of operations for major US adversaries in the Western Hemisphere.
Russia has announced plans to begin constructing a major ammunition factory in Venezuela and has sold billions of dollars worth of arms to the country, and has been rumored to be considering installing Areshn hypersonic nuclear capable missiles on Venezuelan territory as well. Though that so far has been unsubstantiated. Meanwhile, there's also been a significant amount of military cooperation going on between Venezuela and Iran as well. Built upon their mutual opposition towards the US.
Venezuela has allegedly enabled itself to be used as a point of entry for Hezbollah into the greater Latin America region and the two are known to have collaborated on drone technology for years now. Just last year in 2024, Venezuela unveiled a new kamikaze drone that they call the Zamora V1, which is based on the same well-known Shahed 136 drone that has been used extensively by the Russian army in Ukraine. So far, the Zamora V1 is much more primitive than the Shahed 136 is, with a much shorter
range and a much smaller explosive payload. But if the Venezuelans ever managed to get it up to par, with further help from the Iranians, they could conceivably eventually use the drones in swarms to attack strategic targets as far away as Florida and the Panama Canal, which is probably a capability that the United States would not like an adversary like Venezuela to possess. With all of that being said, however, the number of military assets that Trump has so
far deployed around Venezuela are not enough for a full-blown invasion into the country. But that's probably not what Trump is actually wanting to do anyway. It is still the largest overseas deployment of US military assets in the Western Hemisphere since the 1989 invasion of Panama. But Venezuela in 2025 is not the same thing as Panama in 1989. Back then, the US had similarly indicted Panama's dictator, Manuel Noriega, on federal drug
trafficking charges and decided to invade the country in order to remove and arrest him. But that operation involved nearly 30,000 US troops, many of whom were already stationed directly in Panama near the Panama Canal zone back when it still existed. And Panama was a much smaller country with a much smaller population than Venezuela has today.
Only 4,500 US troops have so far been positioned around Venezuela aboard their ships. Far too few to actually invade the country, remove Maduro from power, and occupy it. But that isn't to say that they can't still help remove Maduro from power anyway. Trump is likely betting that following the hotly disputed 2024 election and protests in the country, that Maduro is presently deeply unpopular with his own people. The 50 million dollar bounty on his head, and the tens of millions of dollars on his cronies
heads along with the presence of all the US warships gathered just off shore might just tempt someone to launch a rebellion with the expectation that the US warships and air power will give assistance to them. Giving the US the ground forces that it needs without having to commit any of their own. Similar to how NATO air power helped Libyan rebels on the ground topple Muammar Gaddafi's regime in 2011. If a similar series of events were to transpire in Venezuela, the U.S. also already has the man in waiting that they would want to replace Maduro with.
Edmundo Gonzalez, still in exile in Spain, whom Washington still recognizes as Venezuela's legitimate president. The Tomahawk missiles on board the Destroyers, Cruiser, and Submarine, along with the F-35s known to be deployed to Puerto Rico, enables the United States to decide on surgical aerial strikes against Maduro's most critical assets and infrastructure. They could choose to attack narcotic sites or even elements of the state like military and command sites, or even Venezuela's remaining operational oil production and refinery sites.
They could even resort to attempted decapitation strikes, targeting Maduro himself and or his senior generals and officers. The Marine Expeditionary Unit, while not large enough to assault the beaches and march all the way to Caracas and arrest Maduro alone, could also be utilized in a more limited raid under extensive aerial cover to attempt an arrest and extraction of Maduro under certain circumstances.
Like in the event of a major rebellion and its associated chaos in the country. Doing something like this would be far from unprecedented for Trump, and would in fact represent his preferred way of deploying US military power. During his first administration, he ordered Tomahawk missile strikes against the Assad regime in Syria in 2017. He ordered a special forces raid in Syria in 2019 that killed the leader of ISIS. And it's recently come to light that he also authorized a failed Navy SEAL raid into North
Korea that resulted in three killed North Korean civilians. In 2020, he authorized a drone strike in Iraq that assassinated Iran's most senior military commander. And already in 2025, he's launched a sea and air campaign against the Houthis in Yemen and ordered a B-2 bomber raid on Iran that blew up Iran's most critical nuclear research sites. Trump doesn't like getting involved in big land wars, but he does like employing surgical air strikes and raids, and the forces he has gathered just outside of Venezuela could fit
this pattern of his with limited strikes against the Maduro regime itself or against Tren de Aragua and other cartel targets. To give you an idea of the current capabilities of the Venezuelan military, consider the fate of the Venezuelan Navy's patrol boat, Neguada, in 2020. While operating in international waters, the Neguada attempted to intercept a cruise ship called the RCGS Resolute. The Venezuelans fired warning shots and ordered the Resolute to follow them to a port in Venezuela,
before they then collided their ship with the Resolute and sank themselves without anybody on the Resolute ever doing anything at all. Maduro himself then denounced the captain of the Resolute as a pirate and a terrorist, while the Venezuelan defense minister described what happened as an act of imperial aggression on the part of the Resolute, a cruise ship. Venezuela has some fighter jets, tanks, warships, and submarines and their Iranian-assisted drones.
But the sanctions that have been levied upon them for years have prevented them from acquiring spare parts and performing routine maintenance on a lot of them. And while Venezuela is known to have the Russian-produced S-300 anti-air system that dates back from the 2000s, it's likely that America's more modern F-35 fighters that are currently in Puerto Rico could evade their detection, while the S-300s would also struggle against the Tomahawk cruise missiles as well.
If Trump gives the order for the flotilla to begin launching aerial attacks at targets within Venezuela itself, rather than just limiting them to drug runners out in international waters, there's likely little that Maduro could realistically do to actually stop them. Whether that results in a rebellion or Maduro's removal from power, however, is a different thing entirely. There were great hopes within Israel and the United States that the aerial bombing campaign
launched against Iran earlier this year would have led to a rebellion that would topple the Iranian regime as well. But that never ended up materializing and if anything, foreign bombs falling on Iranian soil only solidified the regime's authority with its people. There is no guarantee that attacks on Venezuela would do anything different. And then even if it does end up working out as intended and Maduro does end up getting
removed, there's no guarantee of what the ensuing chaos in Venezuela could produce. Toppling Gaddafi in Libya and Saddam in Iraq both led to decades of chaos in those countries, and armed non-state actors in Colombia like the ELN, who have extensive influence in Venezuela, could capitalize on the chaos produced in unpredictable and potentially undesirable ways. Venezuela could end up developing into a situation like a neighboring Colombia, which has been
experiencing a constant low-level conflict between various non-state militias and armed groups from the past half-century now. Interestingly, just before I released this video, the Venezuelan government began accusing the US of conducting intelligence flights over the Caribbean region against them. Venezuela's defense minister, who has that active 15 million dollar bounty on his head issued by the US government, stated that American intelligence and reconnaissance operations, including spy flights against Venezuela, had tripled across the month of August. This led to the defense minister claiming that the US was seeking a justification for an armed intervention in Venezuela to remove Maduro from power.
And since then, one of the US Navy warships reportedly raided a Venezuelan fishing boat within Venezuela's own waters. The first apparent search and seizure operation by the Navy force that's gathered in the region. I've been a long time user of Ground News and I've partnered with them since 2022. Because as a product, I trust to give me the information I need to better understand how
a story is being framed and the context behind it. Ground News is an app and website on a mission to give us the transparency we're looking for in the news. It pulls in thousands of articles every day from all around the world into one place to show us how the different outlets cover the same story. So for each story, you get a visual breakdown
of each outlet's bias, its reliability, and who owns the source. Let me show you how it works. On Ground News, you can see that over 250 news outlets are covering this story with the majority leaning left and center. And if I scroll down, I can see every outlet that's reported on this story. Venezuela and left-leaning sources have
called the seizure of the fishing boat illegal and have described it as a hostile raid that violated Venezuela's national sovereignty. While the U.S US government and right-leaning sources have stressed it as a necessary action of US anti-drug enforcement and a justified seizure within a law and order context. This story was also a blind spot for people who read right-leaning sources. Ground News has an entire feature they call the Blind Spot Feed to make sure you don't miss out on any stories that are being disproportionately reported by either side of the political spectrum
like this one we just saw. I use Ground News daily and as a critical research tool for my videos. I find it crucial in today's increasingly polarized media environment, and as viewers of my channel, I think you'd find it extremely valuable too. Which is why I've partnered with Ground News to get you 40% off of their Unlimited Access Vantage Plan.
If you subscribe through the link down below in my description, at ground.news slash reallifelore, or by scanning the QR code that's here on your screen as well. It's the same plan that I use. Ground News and I share the same mission, and by checking them out, you'll also be supporting my channel as well. Ground News and I share the same mission, and by checking them out, you'll also be supporting my channel as well. And as always, thank you so much for watching.
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