So, What Is Trump Up To In Venezuela?

The YouTube embedded above is one of very few attempts I've found anywhere to parse out what Trump's objectives are now in Venezuela. In it, Preston Stewart is a West Point graduate and Afghan combat veteran who posts about veterans' affairs on TikTok and YouTube, as well as on various podcasts. In this episode, he interviews Juan Gonzalez, whom he identifies as a former National Security Council Senior Director for the Western Hemisphere and currently a resident fellow at the Georgetown Americas Institute.

Under the principle of "trust but verity". I note that Mr Stewart has inflated Mr Gonzalez's title from "Director", as it appears on this link, to "Senior Director". He omits that Gonzalez was also "Special Advisor to Vice President Joe Biden from 2013-2015, where he advised and represented the Vice President on all policy matters related to the Western Hemisphere". Gonzalez was also Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department in 2016.

However, apparently after Trump's 2016 election, he moved to the Penn Biden Centerr for Global Diplomacy and Global Engagement, which appears to have been a holding tank for Biden loyalists while Joe was out of office. But he doesn't seem to have returned to either the White House or the State Department following Biden's 2020 election. He is currently listed as a fellow at the Georgetown Americas Institute on its website.

One thing that puzzles me is Gonzalez speaks on the screen with what appears to be his desk behind him, but on the desktop and shelves are a few books, a fair amount of bric-a-brac, and a lot of family photos -- but there's neither a computer screen nor a keyboard in sight. Hey, this is 2025 -- if you work at any sort of professional job, you work with a computer. What does this guy actually do for a living, and why does he have so much time to schmooze with a YouTuber? In fact, if he actually worked on real issues connected with Venezuela and the drug trade, wouldn't he actually need high-level approval to speak publicly on sensitive material? Just wondering. I'm not impresssed with this interview overall, but it sent me looking for other answers.

I give him credit for being up front; he clearly worked for both Obama and Biden, and he says he disagrees with almost everything Trump is doing over Venezuela --- but revealingly, he basically says nothing Obama tried to do with Chavez or Maduro worked. And in the end, he has little productive to say, other than to minimize the role of cocaine smuggling in tbhe whole Venezuela question, which is nevertheless the issue Trump, Rubio, and Hegseth have all stressed in their public remarks. He also says that it's unrealistic to expect a Venezuelan military coup against Maduro, because all the generals are carefully screened fior loyalty.

But this brought me up against remarks by another well-placed policy commentator who's begun to appear on YouTube with some frequency, Sarah Paine, a professor at the US Naval War College. She frequently mentions the disadvantages of large standing armies, as she does in this interview: they generate coups, and they need to be paid. As she puts it, they "tended to influence political institutions in authoritarian directions". Indeed, she often makes the point that in China, the Peoples Liberation Army controls the economy to benefit itself.

But this brought me to another thought: I noted back in February that Trump's strategy to stop the grift machine is to turn off the money spigot. If NGOs are feeding mass migration via settlement programs, end the federal grants that finance the NGOs. If universities are treating foreign students as a cash cow, which in turn fosters anti-Semitism, end federal grants to universities, and cut off their foreign students.

So I immediately began to wonder if Trump saw the threat of military force against Venezuelan gofast boats as a way to turn off the money spigot, and I applied Sarah Paine's insights into military rule to the question: yes, the military is in charge, but the military wants to get paid. A few moments searching the web brought up some productive insights (this may give some context to why Juan Gonzalez doesn't have a keyboard or a screen on his desk). For instance:

Venezuela was historically among the wealthiest economies in South America, particularly from the 1950s to 1980s. During the 21st century, under the leadership of socialist populist Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan economy has collapsed, prompting millions of citizens to flee Venezuela. GDP has fallen by 80 percent in less than a decade. The economy is characterized by corruption, food shortages, unemployment, mismanagement of the oil sector, and since 2014, hyperinflation.

So, given Venezuela's economic collapse, how is the military getting paid? Remember, Sarah Paine's point is that the military controls the economy to advantage itself.

Venezuela has been a path to the United States for cocaine originating in Colombia, through Central America and Mexico and Caribbean countries such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. In the 2010s, Venezuela also gradually became a major producer of cocaine.

. . . In 2005 Venezuela severed ties with the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), accusing its representatives of spying. Following the departure of the DEA from Venezuela and the expansion of DEA's partnership with Colombia in 2005, Venezuela became more attractive to drug traffickers.

. . . Since 2012, the United States government has stated that "generally permissive security forces and a corrupt political environment have made Venezuela one of the preferred routes of cocaine trafficking from South America". . . . According to the United States, "elements of the Venezuelan security forces have assisted these drug trafficking organizations".

In other words, the military is getting paid, either directly via transporting the drugs themselves, or via payoffs from the cartels, from the drug trade, since the legitimate Venezualan economy has collapsed.

Earlier this year, I noted that business-school studies of Trump's negotiating strategy point out that he carefully studies both his opponents' strong and weak points. The Venezuelans' weak points are first, that their economy is forced to rely on drug trafficking, but also, that the drug routes involve long stretches over international waters. As Secretary Rubio pointed out in his Mexico City news conference, conventional interdiction via sea-based resources amounts to little more than an overhead item for the traffickers.

On the other hand, tracking of gofast boats via electronic intelligence and drones, and immediate obliteraion of the boats via missiles, threaten something much closer to complete closure of the smuggling routes -- and if the gofast boats can't get through, this turns off the money spigot, and the military doesn't get paid.

What happens next is an open question, although in Wittgenstein's sense, the solution to the problem appears in the disappearance of the problem. Juan Gonzalez complains that only a third of US cocaine imports come via the Caribbean, but that's a third of US cocaine imports, a major dent -- and done via drones and missiles, a fairly cheap solution. Questions of coups, regime change, or boots on the ground are irrelevant. The increased US military resources are there simply to protect the drones and anti-boat missiles.

But it also serves as a template. Venezuela isn't the only country where the cartels control the state via the military. It's a template for strategy elsewhere: find a way for drones and missiles to stop the drug trade outside the borders, and other things will inevitably follow.