In the waters just off Venezuela, the United States has amassed its largest naval presence in the Caribbean since the Cold War. Guided-missile destroyers slice through turquoise waves, a nuclear-powered submarine lurks below, and thousands of Marines stand ready atop amphibious assault ships. Officially, Washington claims this is an anti-narcotics operation—a routine effort to stem the tide of drugs. But the scale of the deployment, the rhetoric emanating from Miami, and the political maneuvering in the White House tell a far more complex—and consequential—story.
According to multiple reports, what began as a policy oscillating between pragmatic dealmaking and aggressive regime change has now tipped decisively toward the latter. The so-called “drug war” is, in fact, a cover for a sweeping campaign to reshape the balance of power in Latin America, with Venezuela, Cuba, and even Colombia in the crosshairs. The architects of this strategy? President Donald Trump and his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio—a duo whose motives run deeper than the stated goal of stopping cocaine.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has not minced words. He accused the United States of using the war on drugs as “camouflage for a regime-change plan,” describing the military buildup as “the greatest military threat seen in our hemisphere in a hundred years.” Military analysts, too, have raised eyebrows at the overwhelming force assembled for what is, on paper, a law enforcement mission. As one expert put it, “If this were truly a drug-interdiction mission, it would be the most overarmed cocaine bust in history.”
The numbers back up this skepticism. Independent U.N. reports reveal that only a small fraction of cocaine destined for the United States actually originates in Venezuela. The lion’s share still moves through Colombia—a longtime U.S. ally. Yet, the United States has chosen to focus its firepower on Caracas, painting Maduro’s government as a narco-regime to justify escalating pressure while avoiding explicit war rhetoric. The facts, however, suggest that drugs are a pretext, not a purpose.
Behind the scenes, Marco Rubio’s influence is unmistakable. The Cuban-American senator-turned-Secretary of State has been the ideological engine driving the escalation. He’s led sanctions against Cuba, reactivated the Cuba Restricted List, and framed both Havana and Caracas as narco-states. For Rubio, destabilizing Cuba is as much a personal crusade as a political strategy—one aimed at building capital among South Florida’s exile communities and far-right regimes abroad. “Rubio’s foreign policy is deeply personal,” one analyst noted. “For him, destabilizing Cuba is both a family crusade and a campaign promise to the exile community that helped elect him.”
But ideology is only part of the equation. The real prize is oil. Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven reserves, an irresistible target for an administration stacked with energy lobbyists and corporate backers. Since the failed coup attempts of 2019, the U.S. has doubled down on economic sanctions, seeking to strangle Caracas while isolating it diplomatically. The current naval buildup gives Washington a military leverage it hasn’t enjoyed since the Bush administration. As one observer put it, “To understand this operation, follow the oil.”
The events of 2025 have made clear just how closely U.S. policy is tied to domestic political pressures—especially those emanating from Miami. Early in Trump’s second term, there was hope for a pragmatic reset. Special envoy Richard Grenell was dispatched to broker a deal allowing Chevron to export Venezuelan crude in exchange for Caracas accepting deportation flights of its citizens. This arrangement fulfilled two campaign pledges: boosting fossil fuels and deporting illegal migrants. But Miami’s right-wing Latin-American exile community—Cuban, Venezuelan, and Nicaraguan groups—swiftly pushed back. Their influence is legendary, and their appetite for regime change insatiable.
When the administration slashed over $100 million in grants for South Florida NGOs combatting the region’s socialist regimes, Miami elites, led by Rubio and a trio of lawmakers—Mario Diaz-Balart, Carlos Gimenez, and Maria Elvira Salazar—sprang into action. They threatened to sink Trump’s legislative agenda unless regime-change programs were restored and key allies appointed to government posts. The White House caved, rescinding Chevron’s oil license and resulting in the deportation of 238 Venezuelan nationals labeled as “narcoterrorist” combatants to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center. Ironically, 87 percent of these deportees lacked criminal records, and many were anti-Maduro dissidents.
The fallout was immediate and messy. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who had only agreed to accept hardened criminals, was reportedly furious. The situation highlighted the contradictions at the heart of U.S. policy: a regime-change crusade that, in practice, punished the very Venezuelans it claimed to support. Meanwhile, Miami’s political machinery continued to churn, with Rubio brokering a three-way prisoner swap that repatriated Venezuelans from El Salvador in exchange for the release of 10 U.S. citizens held in Venezuela. Chevron’s oil license was renewed, and deportation flights to Venezuela resumed in July 2025.
But Rubio’s ambitions didn’t stop there. He worked tirelessly to persuade the MAGA movement’s militarist factions to redirect their focus from Mexico’s cartels to Venezuela, arguing that removing Maduro would both halt drug flows and enable further deportations. Trump, surrounded by Florida natives steeped in the narrative of Venezuelan “narcoterrorism,” was convinced. In October, he ordered Grenell to halt further diplomatic outreach to Caracas, signaling a definitive pivot toward regime change.
Electoral logic played no small part in this shift. In 2024, Trump won a historic 45% of Latino voters, including 70% of Cuban-Americans and 50% of Venezuelan-Americans. But by late 2025, his approval rating among Latinos had plummeted, with an 18-point drop among Latino Republicans. Regime change in Venezuela offered a way to shore up support among Miami’s exile communities, even if it meant overlooking harsh deportations and the potential for humanitarian fallout.
Yet, as critics have pointed out, the risks are enormous. Venezuela teeters on the brink of failed-state status and is ranked among the world’s most corrupt countries. Foreign military intervention could trigger state collapse, inviting warlords and armed groups like the ELN and FARC to carve up the nation into criminal fiefdoms. Such chaos would likely spark mass emigration to neighboring countries and the U.S., jeopardize oil production, and—ironically—strengthen the drug trade Washington claims to be fighting.
Meanwhile, Colombia’s leftist government under Gustavo Petro has refused to play the role of Washington’s proxy, prompting efforts by Rubio’s camp to undermine him by painting his administration as weak on crime. The ultimate aim, however, remains Cuba. By toppling Venezuela and isolating Colombia, the U.S. hopes to choke off Cuba’s energy and trade lifelines, finally achieving the regime change that has eluded every administration since Reagan.
As history shows, American interventions in the hemisphere often begin with lofty language and end in chaos. The current Caribbean operation, described by some as a “slow-motion siege,” risks igniting a regional conflict that could destabilize Latin America for decades. And once again, it’s being sold to the American public as a moral crusade against drugs—when, in reality, it’s about oil, power, and political survival.
The stakes could hardly be higher. What starts as a “drug war” may well end as a humanitarian crisis, one that reverberates from Caracas to Miami and beyond.