The Mirage of Hard Power: The Limits and Risks of a U.S. Intervention in Venezuela

by Dorian Kantor, Felipe Santofimio, María Paula Martínez

Read the Spanish version published by El Espectador here.
Download the analysis in PDF version here.

Signaling Power Is Not the Same as Strategic Clarity

The United States has assembled in the Caribbean the most significant military deployment in the region since the Cold War: the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford, accompanied by three destroyers, some 4,000 sailors, and more than a dozen additional vessels — including guided-missile cruisers and an attack submarine — in a region that typically sees one or two naval assets at a time. Strategic and tactical aviation, including long-range bombers, supplements the naval presence. More than 10,000 troops are distributed across the Southern Command area of responsibility. By its scale, composition, and cost, Operation Southern Spear cannot credibly be presented as a counter-narcotics mission. Every indicator suggests Washington has placed the option of force against Venezuela firmly on the table.

Deploying carriers and bombers in Venezuela’s vicinity sends a clear signal of deterrence and coercive pressure — but it also eliminates diplomatic off-ramps. Washington may believe it is building leverage; in practice, it is locking itself into a narrative logic that pushes toward action. Coercive signaling without a defined political objective is not leverage. It is a trap.

Escalation in Action: Attacks on Vessels and Legal Exposure

Since this military buildup began, U.S. forces have carried out repeated strikes against small civilian vessels allegedly engaged in drug trafficking. Approximately 19 such attacks have been reported, with an estimated 75 fatalities. These operations have not only heightened regional tensions but generated serious legal scrutiny. Under international law, civilian vessels merely suspected of smuggling do not constitute lawful military targets. These operations also lack explicit Congressional authorization — a gap that carries both constitutional and strategic implications.

The Trump administration has intensified its use of the counterterrorism framework to justify an increasingly aggressive posture toward Caracas, framing Venezuela as the regional hub of narcoterrorism. The terrorism designation functions as a political pretext: it is designed to construct a legal and narrative foundation that would permit military action against Venezuelan territory without a formal declaration of war. The architecture is familiar; the risks it generates are not hypothetical.

Lessons from Panama, Iraq, and Afghanistan

U.S. military operations in Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq yield two foundational lessons for thinking about Venezuela. The first is the necessity of a clear and bounded political objective. Operation Just Cause worked because Washington defined a specific, limited goal — removing Noriega — without attempting to reconstruct the Panamanian state. Afghanistan and Iraq, by contrast, evolved into open-ended political projects without the institutional foundations to sustain them.

The second lesson concerns expectations. Tactical dominance in Afghanistan and Iraq generated political and financial commitments that proved unsustainable, while institutional dismantlement produced fragmentation, chronic violence, and escalating costs that outlasted any plausible definition of success.

Venezuela resembles Panama only superficially — a hostile regime, regional fatigue, and entrenched illicit economies. Its underlying structure is closer to Iraq and Afghanistan: a politicized military, deeply embedded armed networks, and a severely eroded state. Removing a leader is operationally tractable. Managing a fractured security ecosystem is not. Washington would need an exceptionally limited political objective and a willing regional coalition to avoid replicating the instability it generated in the Middle East.

The historical parallels are instructive. In Iraq, the fall of Saddam Hussein triggered institutional collapse, sectarian war, and the emergence of ISIS. In Afghanistan, two decades of state-building dissolved within weeks of the U.S. withdrawal, demonstrating that military superiority neither substitutes for political legitimacy nor sustains weak institutions. Venezuela shares these structural vulnerabilities: difficult terrain, pervasive clientelism, and deep alliances between the state and armed actors. The military apparatus is an organic component of the regime — dismantling it without a negotiated transition would immediately open a vacuum that criminal networks, paramilitary forces, and external actors would move to fill. The United States has neither the domestic political will nor the regional legitimacy for anything approaching that kind of commitment in Venezuela.

Military Intervention Does Not Produce Regime Change

The composition and volume of the military assets deployed make clear that a full-scale invasion is not under consideration. The more likely scenario is an air campaign along “shock and awe” lines — capable of inflicting broad damage, but incapable of producing a viable political transition. If the Trump administration’s objective is regime change, a purely military approach is structurally insufficient. Maduro cannot simply be replaced by María Corina Machado, because the opposition exercises no meaningful influence over the armed forces or the patronage networks that sustain the regime. Without a transition framework that incorporates those actors, any externally imposed change of government would either collapse immediately or deteriorate rapidly into ungoverned chaos.

Regional and Global Consequences

Venezuela does not constitute a genuine national security threat to the United States. It neither leads production of nor serves as a primary transit route for synthetic drugs. Its strategic value is more symbolic than material. Betting on oil as justification repeats the central error of the Iraq war — the belief that resource access justifies intervention. The “narcoterrorism” framing functions as a rhetorical shortcut that conceals the absence of a coherent strategy and simultaneously provides China, Russia, and Iran with a ready-made narrative in which any U.S. action reads as aggression, enabling them to expand their regional influence at Washington’s expense. Beyond the strategic costs, a military escalation would carry an immediate humanitarian toll and would intensify migration flows into Colombia, Brazil, and across the Caribbean basin.

What Is Actually at Stake

Washington does not appear to have internalized the lessons of its own military failures. The current posture — driven by advisers with openly hawkish views on Venezuela — forecloses moderate options and converts Venezuela into a regional demonstration of American hard power. In doing so, it further isolates the United States and depletes the limited reservoir of political capital and goodwill it retains in Latin America.

The premise that Chavismo can simply be “replaced” is not grounded in the political realities on the ground. Non-state armed actors and the governing coalition would not cede power without sustained resistance. Without a negotiated transition, the resulting vacuum would be filled by guerrilla organizations, criminal networks, and remnants of the state apparatus — producing an ungovernable environment with no exit ramp.

Geopolitically, extra-regional powers would move quickly to expand their influence, offering immediate political, economic, and diplomatic backing — and using the crisis to draw additional Latin American countries further into their orbit. The costs of a failed intervention in Venezuela would not be confined to Venezuela. They would be distributed across the hemisphere, with Washington bearing both the blame and diminishing capacity to shape what follows.