US warships. Photo: Caitlin´s Newsletter/File photo.
By Caitlin Johnstone – Aug 31, 2025
As if we didn’t have enough ugliness in the world right now, Trump has deployed warships near Venezuela’s coast, prompting Caracas to ready drone and naval patrols for conflict.
In an article titled “Inside Trump’s gunboat diplomacy with Venezuela,” Axios’ Marc Caputo writes that “The U.S. has never been closer to armed conflict with Venezuela, with a fully loaded U.S. flotilla sitting off its coast and dictator Nicolás Maduro living under a $50 million bounty.”
“President Trump ordered seven warships carrying 4,500 personnel — including three guided-missile destroyers and at least one attack submarine — to the waters off Venezuela,” Caputo writes. “Officially, they’re there to combat drug trafficking. But Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt leaned into the ambiguity of the mission on Thursday, noting that the U.S. considers Maduro the ‘fugitive head of [a] drug cartel’ and not Venezuela’s legitimate president.”
The US personnel reportedly include some 2,200 Marines.
“This could be Noriega part 2,” an unnamed official in the Trump administration told Axios, saying that “Maduro should be shitting bricks.”
So they’re not even disguising the fact that Trump is at least contemplating some kind of direct military strike on Caracas. Drugs are the official-official reason for the deployment, but the unofficial-official reason that’s being freely leaked to the press is to remove the leader of a sovereign state.
It’s probably worth noting that Trump-aligned pundits like Alex Jones have been busy manufacturing consent for regime change intervention in Venezuela.
“I don’t like any of these wars,” Jones said recently on whatever his show is called now. “But if you look at US doctrine and wars that we fought that were right, it’s in Latin America, this is our sandbox. And Venezuela is a communist dictatorship with the biggest oil reserves per square foot in the world, their people are absolute slaves, and I don’t like regime change, but they’re manipulating our elections, they’re flooding us with Fentanyl, and if there were surgical strikes to take out the communists there would be an uprising and they could have elections, and it would be a good thing.”
Jones could have stopped at “communist” and “oil reserves”. Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves of any country on the planet, and is not aligned with the capitalist western empire that is loosely centralized around Washington DC. Any reasons given for US regime change intervention beyond this should be read as excuses.
Whenever the US war machine moves its crosshairs to a different target I always get people telling me “No no Caitlin, THIS time the Evil Bad Guy really DOES need to be regime changed! THIS time our government and media are telling us the TRUTH!”
And it’s always so stupid, because it’s just the same rehashed lies over and over again. The empire takes whatever actions will help it to dominate our planet and its resources to a greater extent than it already does, and then it makes up justifications for those actions.
A Funny Thing Happened to US Warships on Their Way to The Caribbean: The Invasion That Wasn’t
They’ll say they’re doing it for humanitarian reasons while ignoring the humanitarian abuses of empire-aligned nations. They’ll say they’re doing it to stop drug abuse while ignoring all the evidence regarding the actual causes of drug abuse, even as Maduro sends 15,000 troops to the Colombian border to help fight drug trafficking. They’ll say they’re doing it to stop interference in US affairs while letting US-aligned nations like Israel interfere in US politics at will.
They’re just lying. The US empire lies about all its acts of war. Trump tried to orchestrate a regime change in Venezuela the last time he was in office, and he’s doing it again for the exact same reasons. It’s an oil-rich nation that refuses to bow to the dictates of Washington, and all the worst warmongers in the imperial swamp are eagerly pushing to absorb it into the folds of the empire.
That’s all we are looking at here, and anyone who says otherwise is lying.
Caitlin Johnstone
Rogue journalist. Bogan socialist. Anarcho-psychonaut. Guerrilla poet. Utopia prepper.
