‘They cannot communicate the clear end goal,’ one GOP senator told NR. The administration insists its strategy revolves around stopping the flow of illegal drugs.
The White House has spent recent months keeping Venezuela’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, guessing about President Donald Trump’s desired end game in the region.
The administration has amassed a robust U.S. naval presence in the Caribbean, killing dozens of people in targeted strikes on alleged drug boats while increasing its reward offer for information leading to the arrest or conviction of the Venezuelan dictator to $50 million. Trump warned airline companies, pilots, drug runners, and human traffickers late last month that the “airspace above and surrounding Venezuela” should be considered “closed in its entirety.” And he suggested on Thanksgiving that land strikes in Venezuela were imminent: “The land is easier. That’s going to start very soon. We warned them, stop sending poison into our country.”
The president has not sought congressional authorization for his controversial boat-strike campaign, which has come under intense scrutiny in recent weeks following a series of conflicting reports on a recent double-tap strike and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s role in the operation.
The administration has made clear that the White House views Maduro as an illegitimate leader while deflecting on the lengths Trump might go to push him out of power. As of this week, the president is not ruling out U.S. troops on the ground in Venezuela. “I don’t want to rule in or out. I don’t talk about it,” he said when pressed on the matter during an interview this week with Politico’s Dasha Burns, during which he insisted that Maduro’s “days are numbered.”
Meantime, the administration’s military buildup in the region is seen by many Republican lawmakers as part of a calculated strategy to put pressure on the authoritarian strongman as Trump weighs potential military escalation in the region.
“We all know that Maduro continues in office, even though he lost the last election, and they are narco-terrorists,” says Senator Cynthia Lummis (R., Wyo.). “They are sending drugs that are killing thousands of Americans, and this is a legitimate country of concern that’s attacking America in a way that is different, and so it requires a different strategy. And I think that’s why he’s staying vague.”
“I don’t know what’s happening inside the White House” when it comes to the administration’s Venezuela strategy, Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) said in a recent interview with NR. The Missouri senator said his sense is that Trump is “being deliberately vague” to put pressure on Maduro and leave him with the impression that “anything’s possible” when it comes to U.S. military action.
Hawley thinks that the president’s targeted drug-boat strikes fall under the Constitution’s Article II authority and do not require congressional authorization. “I do think that striking boats that are operating in international waters that are operated by narco-terrorists with illegal cargo bound for American shores — that looks a lot like international piracy,” Hawley said. But further escalation in the region could require congressional authorization, he added. “Putting troops on the ground in Venezuela looks a lot like a war to me,” Hawley said.
Many Republican lawmakers appear to be in wait-and-see mode, insisting publicly that they are broadly aligned with the administration’s posturing in the region while suggesting they’re slightly unsure about how, or whether, the situation might escalate.
Not every congressional Republican is comfortable with the White House’s ambiguity.
“They cannot communicate the clear end goal,” one Republican senator told National Review of the White House’s Venezuela messaging. “The end goal is to topple Maduro, which is an impure end goal. Therefore, they have to use this artifice of a drug war treated as a real war in order to obscure what their clear intentions are.”
As the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board recently observed: “The political cover for this intimidation campaign is that Mr. Trump is fighting drug cartels, but you don’t send 25% of the Navy’s deployed warships, F-35 fighters, and thousands of Marines merely to blow up drug boats.”
As National Review recently reported, Trump’s decision to pardon convicted drug trafficker and ex–Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández has also confused and frustrated a small but vocal cohort of congressional Republicans, some of whom have suggested that the pardon sends undermines the legitimacy of the administration’s campaign against narcoterrorism in the region.
Still other Trump-loyal Republicans insist that the White House’s messaging on Venezuela has been crystal clear all along.
“Our strategic objective is to rid the hemisphere of a drug and human trafficking operation led by an illegitimate leader of Venezuela,” Senator Bernie Moreno (R., Ohio) told NR last week. He also said that the White House’s decision to leave the door open to land strikes in Venezuela “shows how deliberate President Trump is about avoiding kinetic warfare” in the region.
Pressed about GOP lawmakers’ questions surrounding the scope of the administration’s aims in the region, a spokesperson emphasized the president’s desire to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the U.S.
“On the campaign trail, President Trump promised to take on the cartels — and he has taken unprecedented action to stop the scourge of narcoterrorism that has resulted in the needless deaths of innocent Americans,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement to NR. “All of these decisive strikes have been against designated narcoterrorists bringing deadly poison to our shores, and the President will continue to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country.”
The president’s fluid posture toward Venezuela underscores the fluid nature of Trump’s foreign policy, which remains difficult to define a decade into his political career.
Trump spent the entire 2024 campaign railing against “endless wars” and pledged to spend his second term bringing protracted world conflicts to an end. During a speech earlier this year in Saudi Arabia, Trump tore into the interventionist Republican Party of years past. “The so-called ‘nation builders’ wrecked far more nations than they built — and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves,” Trump said.
And yet that stated desire to bring peace to the world keeps the president out of the isolationist posture so many of his most ardent supporters would like to see him adopt. Trump does not shy away from the authorization of deadly U.S. military force overseas, as his first-term authorization of the Qasem Soleimani strike, second-term authorization of U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, and targeted strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug boats demonstrate.