For those of us who have not forgotten the regime changes, interventions, and “limited engagements” that never stay limited, it is obvious that the United States is drifting toward a dangerous precipice in Venezuela. The November 24th decision to designate Cartel de los Soles as a Foreign Terrorist Organization is not a routine sanctions update. It is a major escalation.
The cartel, a criminal political network embedded within the Venezuelan state, has long blurred the line between organized crime and official security structures. But the FTO designation unlocks sweeping counterterrorism powers, including expanded prosecution, broader sanctions, and potential military or paramilitary actions. As one defense official told Reuters, it “brings a whole bunch of new options”.
Combined with recent U.S. maritime strikes, including boat bombings that experts warn may constitute war crimes, the trajectory is unmistakable. Washington is laying the groundwork for deeper involvement without publicly confronting the risks.
Interventions framed as regime change have consistently haunted U.S. foreign policy. The 1983 invasion of Grenada reshaped regional perceptions of American power. In Nicaragua, U.S. support for the Contras justified through counterterrorism and narcotrafficking narratives fractured the country for generations. In Iraq, terrorism narratives and claims of weapons of mass destruction laid the foundation for an occupation that collapsed a state. These are not distant parallels. They are historical warnings, and Venezuela carries many of the same risk factors.
Aside from the reality that any U.S. invasion would violate international law, there are domestic constraints in Venezuela that undermine any notion of a rapid or clean intervention. The desire to remove Maduro in hopes of installing a friendly, cooperative partner is wildly unrealistic and risks detonating what remains of the country’s governance. It opens the door to competing power centers and warring factions, the kind of fractured environment seen in Libya’s militia-dominated landscape.
The reality is that Venezuela is already deeply fragile. More than 60 percent of the population lives in poverty. Homicide rates exceed 50 per 100,000 residents in some regions. Criminal networks generate billions in illicit revenue and fill the void left by institutional collapse. Even with a revitalized opposition led by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate María Corina Machado, dismantling entrenched patronage networks and reversing decades of state capture is a generational undertaking, not a rapid fix.
Moreover, the United States no longer possesses many of the tools that once anchored its post-conflict engagements. USAID has been effectively eliminated in its traditional form, stripped of the independence and operational capacity that once made it the backbone of American civilian stabilization efforts. Its democracy-building and governance programs have been hollowed out, the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) has faced sustained political attacks, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) has seen its expansion stall. These institutions were far from perfect, but they provided the technical expertise and long-term capacity necessary to rebuild governance systems, justice sectors, and economic foundations.
Yet while the administration now speaks openly about the possibility of regime change, it has simultaneously hampered or dismantled the very tools that would be essential in the aftermath. Washington is left primarily with sanctions, coercive pressure, and security instruments, tools that can destabilize but cannot rebuild.
Congress is not blind to Venezuela’s crisis. Lawmakers have passed bipartisan resolutions condemning Maduro, funded humanitarian support for refugees, and enacted measures such as the Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Actand the VERDAD Act. On December 3, 2025, a bipartisan Senate coalition introduced a War Powers Resolution to block unauthorized U.S. military action. Several senators later revealed they were briefed only after U.S. strikes had occurred, raising serious questions about unchecked executive escalation.
Despite these efforts, Congress has yet to take the steps truly required. Congressional hesitation is precisely what allows abuse to take hold. The framers of the Constitution were clear that decisions over war and peace could not rest in the hands of one individual, vesting the power to declare war and to fund the military in the legislature for exactly that reason. No partisan interest should override that principle, which lies at the core of the oath every member of Congress swears to uphold. Without firm guardrails, the executive can escalate under broad counterterrorism authorities never intended to justify regime change in Latin America, producing a policy driven less by inertia than by strategy, drifting toward confrontation without a plan for what comes after.
History has already shown the consequences of the “you break it, you buy it” model of intervention. It is costly, destabilizing, and rarely delivers the outcomes policymakers imagine. If Washington is not prepared to manage the aftermath of dismantling a deeply entrenched system, politically, economically, or institutionally, then escalating toward regime change risks creating a crisis far larger than the one it hopes to solve.
That risk is dwarfed by the fact that the administration claims these efforts are necessary to confront drugs, strengthen security, and enforce counter-narcotics laws while simultaneously violating core international human rights and the foundational rules governing the use of force.
Congress must act now, before the slide toward conflict becomes irreversible. Escalation is not inevitable, but without oversight, it becomes dangerously predictable. And we already know how that story ends.
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Jared O. Bell, syndicated with PeaceVoice, is a former U.S. diplomat and scholar of human rights and transitional justice, dedicated to advancing global equity and systemic reform.
The Caribbean strikes and the moral collapse of American power
by George Cassidy Payne
Two blasts split the water. A burning hull drifted. Survivors clawed at debris, then vanished under a second strike.
That was the opening image delivered by the Pentagon in early September: a tightly edited video of a U.S. military aircraft obliterating an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean. It was released with cinematic timing, framed as a bold success in the Trump administration’s newly intensified campaign against “narco-terrorists.” But the more Americans have learned about what followed, the killing of two dazed, shipwrecked survivors in a second strike, the more the narrative has begun to disintegrate.
For many, the scene forces a reckoning: what happens when “national security” becomes a blank check for lethal power?
Maybe it’s miscalculation, maybe it’s panic, but the fearmongering is falling flat. Most Americans do not view drugs as a national security threat, let alone see suspected smugglers—if that’s even what they were—as enemy combatants. The War on Drugs was always more metaphor than strategy, and it collapsed once the theatrics stopped working. People were ready for it to end.
So when a military aircraft fired on a burning, disabled boat with survivors clinging to wreckage, the public reaction was visceral. The disproportionality was impossible to ignore. As Peter Baker noted, it’s like a police department deciding to drop a bomb on a suspected drug house, an assault on basic intuition about force and justice in a democracy.
Then came the explanation that stunned nearly everyone. Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, the mission’s commanding officer, justified the second strike by claiming the survivors could have climbed back into the boat and finished delivering the drugs. It stands out as one of the most baffling and grotesquely flimsy justifications ever offered by a U.S. military officer, an argument that collapses under the slightest scrutiny, reducing human lives to loose ends in a bad action script.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a former Black Hawk pilot and combat veteran, called it plainly: “essentially murder.” On CNN, she pushed back forcefully against Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comparison of the operation to counterterrorism missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. “There was actually a vote by Congress to put us at war,” she reminded. “There was no such vote, no such debate here. They have not been authorized to be at war.” The individuals on that boat, she noted, “were not even aimed at the United States.”
Sen. Adam Schiff went further. On Meet the Press, he labeled the second strike “unlawful,” “unconstitutional,” and “morally repugnant.” If Hegseth and the Pentagon are so proud of what they’ve done, he asked, why not release the second video?
That question has no satisfying answer. The Pentagon refuses to release footage of the strike that killed the survivors. No independent forensic record of the weapons used, target selection, or post-strike assessment exists. Outside observers have been told only that a “kinetic strike” occurred—an evasive term that obscures more than it reveals. This opacity doesn’t just raise red flags; it detonates them. Without transparency, there is no meaningful way to assess proportionality, necessity, or compliance with international law.
Equally disturbing is the chain of command. Secretary Hegseth now says he did not personally witness any survivors after the first strike because he left the operation midstream to attend another meeting, invoking the “fog of war.” Leaving mid-operation, while survivors were still alive, forces unavoidable questions about intent, responsibility, and moral judgment. Whether his absence reflects indifference, incompetence, or a deliberate desire not to witness the killing that followed, the effect is the same: a lethal decision made without full accountability.
Admiral Bradley has denied reports that he received any “no quarter” order from Hegseth. He insists the operation was both lawful and carefully overseen by a Judge Advocate General officer. Sen. Tom Cotton echoes this defense, arguing that dozens of personnel, including military lawyers, observed the mission and found no legal issue. But checking a legal box does not absolve the moral weight of killing defenseless men.
And the legal backdrop leaves little room for interpretation. International law is unequivocal: shipwrecked individuals are protected persons. They cannot be targeted. They cannot be executed. They cannot be left without aid. This is not an arcane debate about gray zones, this is the bedrock of maritime and humanitarian law.
Yet the administration continues to frame the dead as “narco-terrorists,” insisting the strikes were a necessary step to protect the American public from deadly drugs. The rhetoric is familiar: broad, sensational, and strategically vague. It casts an ever-widening circle of potential targets, relying on fear to justify violence.
Which brings us to Venezuela.
We need to be asking: why release the footage when they did, why concentrate so much attention on Venezuela, and why execute an operation that ensured no one survived to contradict the official story? Increasingly, the pattern resembles a manufactured pretext, an incident shaped with emotional precision to lock in public perception before alternative facts can surface. Venezuela, with its vast oil reserves, political volatility, and deepening ties to Russia and China, is a convenient adversary through which to project American power in a 21st-century Monroe Doctrine dressed in counter-narcotics language.
In this reading, the strike is not an isolated tragedy but an early move in a broader geopolitical campaign. Admiral Bradley may believe he is acting in alignment with national security goals; from the outside, the connection between a half-sunk fishing boat and great-power strategy looks tenuous at best. But that is the disturbing part: not just what happened, but what the public is being prepared to accept next.
The choreography echoes the Gulf of Tonkin playbook—ambiguity weaponized, narrative locked in, consequences sealed before the public can blink.
And it leads to a deeper question: what kind of country do we want to be?
The Caribbean strikes are more than tactical operations; they are a test of national character. When influence becomes the ultimate measure of safety, morality becomes the first casualty. Without public scrutiny and full transparency, legality, proportionality, and human cost become negotiable, reshaped to match strategic objectives.
History will judge the strikes. But it will also judge the ethical lines we allowed to fade in their wake.
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George Cassidy Payne, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Rochester-based writer whose work sits at the intersection of politics, ethics, and lived experience. A poet, philosopher, and 988 crisis counselor, he covers issues of democracy, justice, and community resilience.
