The Trump Administration Moves Towards A Regime Change War In Venezuela.

Trump Seems To Be Ramping Up The Possibility Of Another Regime Change War In Venezuela.

A Regime Change War On The Horizon.

Evidence is mounting that the Trump administration is planning to launch a regime change war against the Nicolas Maduro government in Venezuela, a longtime target of U.S. neo-conservatives.

The Trump administration has been targeting what it claims are Venezuelan drug vessels off the coast of Venezuela, likely a cover story for the real goal of regime change.

As Venezuelan journalist Andreína Chávez Alava documented after the first strike on September 2nd “Trump posted a 25-second clip showing a vessel being destroyed by what was later revealed to be a missile fired from a drone” and “claimed that the operation killed 11 members of ‘Tren de Aragua,’” , but “Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello stated that the 11 men were civilians and that authorities had communicated with their families”.

After the second strike on September 15th, again, “Trump shows a similar operation: a bird’s-eye view of a small boat being bombed” and “said there were ‘big bags of cocaine and fentanyl’ scattered in the ocean” but “US authorities have not released any footage of the alleged drug cargo”.

Again, during the third and fourth strikes on supposed “Narco boats” on September 16 and October 3, the Trump administration claimed they struck “narco-terrorists” but again, “did not provide dates, coordinates, or visible signs of combat, interception, or cargo seizure.”

As Andreína Chávez Alava noted, “The alleged presence of narcotics appears to rest almost entirely on statements from Trump and his officials”.

As Chávez Alava documented, in reality, “Venezuela was declared by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) a territory free of illicit crops, and the seizure of narcotics grew every year since” and the “2025 UN World Drug Report once again concluded that Venezuela is neither a major drug producer nor a key international trafficking corridor” noting that “Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia are the primary sources of cocaine in Latin America”.

As she noted, the “narco-state narrative” against Venezuela from the Trump administration is “propaganda disguised as intelligence used to justify an oil-driven regime change agenda”.

This is bolstered by a recent New York Times report, which noted that, “President Trump has called off efforts to reach a diplomatic agreement with Venezuela, according to U.S. officials, paving the way for a potential military escalation against drug traffickers or the government of Nicolás Maduro.”

According to officials speaking to the New York Times:

Richard Grenell, a special presidential envoy and executive director of the Kennedy Center, had been leading negotiations with Mr. Maduro and other top Venezuelan officials. But during a meeting with senior military leaders on Thursday, Mr. Trump called Mr. Grenell and instructed him that all diplomatic outreach, including his talks with Mr. Maduro, was to stop.

The paper noted that, “American officials have said that the Trump administration has drawn up multiple military plans for an escalation. Those operations could also include plans designed to force Mr. Maduro from power. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser, has called Mr. Maduro an ‘illegitimate’ leader”.

It noted that, “Mr. Rubio and his allies in the Trump administration have been pushing a strategy to drive Mr. Maduro from power.”

According to the paper, “Mr. Trump has grown frustrated with Mr. Maduro’s failure to accede to American demands to give up power voluntarily”.

The Washington Examiner reported that, “military planners believe the assembled forces are now sufficient to seize and hold key strategic facilities such as ports and airfields on Venezuelan territory,” noting that, “U.S. control over such locations would allow for the increased, sustained projection of U.S. military power into Venezuela”.

Planting A False Flag?

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has recently said that far-right militants in Venezuela- which have often worked with the U.S.- were planning a false flag attack against the U.S. embassy in Venezuela in order to justify U.S regime change.

As Al Jazeera reported, “In a televised interview late on Monday, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said his security forces prevented a ‘false flag operation’ to plant explosives at the United States Embassy in the capital Caracas in order to heighten tensions with Washington” saying that “two reliable sources, one domestic and one international, had informed the government of the possible attack by ‘extremist sectors of the local Venezuelan right’”.

Maduro alleged that, “The goal was to lay blame for the attack on Venezuela’s government, which would then ‘begin an escalation of conflict’ with the US”.

Trump Admits He Wants Venezuela’s Oil.

When he was running for re-election in 2024, Trump bluntly admitted that he wanted regime change in Venezuela in order to take the country’s oil.

Speaking about his regime change policy during his first term, Trump bluntly bragged, “When I left (office), Venezuela was ready to collapse, we would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil, it would have been right next door”.

Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has also been clamoring for a regime change war in Venezuela for a long time.

When the Trump administration was attempting regime change in Venezuela in 2019, Rubio even tweeted an image of deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi being sodomized to death with a bayonet by NATO-backed jihadist rebels, in an apparent threat to Maduro.

Ramping Up A Covert War.

The Trump administration’s apparent push for a regime change war in Venezuela is just ramping up a covert U.S. regime change war against Venezuela, which has been ongoing since 1998, when socialist Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela.

A leaked WikiLeaks cable showed that the U.S. embassy in Venezuela tasked the CIA cutout, USAID, with a “five-point plan” for regime change in Venezuela after the election of Hugo Chavez.

This included a plan to “Penetrate Base/Divide Chavismo”, calling to fund NGOs, “for opposition activists to interact with hard-core Chavistas, with the desired effect of pulling them slowly away from Chavism”.

The plan also included calls to “Isolate Chavez” calling to use NGOs to isolate Venezuela from “Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Costa Rica, and Washington DC”.

In 2002, the U.S. neo-cons ramped up this regime change war by backing a military coup against the elected Chavez government, which was later reversed after mass protests from his supporters.

The U.S. “National Endowment for Democracy”, a cutout of the CIA’s regime change arm, trained members of the military Junta behind the coup through its subsidiary, the International Republican Institute (IRI).

As Mother Jones reported, “in 2001 the (Bush) administration increased funding for IRI’s activities in Venezuela sixfold, from $50,000 to $300,000 — the largest grant any of NED’s democracy-promotion organizations received that year”, adding that, “IRI staffers spent much of their time cultivating the opposition. IRI worked closely with Acción Democrática, a group that, IRI’s own documents acknowledge, ‘refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Chavez presidency.’ IRI also tutored opposition figures, including Caracas mayor Alfredo Peña, an outspoken Chavez critic, on how to create a political party”.

The Magazine noted that, “In April 2002, a group of military officers launched a coup against Chavez, and leaders of several parties trained by IRI joined the junta. When news of the coup emerged, democracy-promotion groups in Venezuela were holding a meeting to discuss ways of working together to avoid political violence; IRI representatives didn’t attend, saying that they were drafting a statement on Chavez’s overthrow. On April 12, the institute’s Venezuela office released a statement praising the ‘bravery’ of the junta and ‘commending the patriotism of the Venezuelan military.’”

Similarly, Elliot Abrams, who at the time was deputy national security adviser for the Bush administration and previously ran Ronald Regans’s South America policy, consisting of backing death squads in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, backed the Venezuela coup.

As Politico reported at the time, Abrams “supported a military coup attempt in Venezuela in 2002, damaging the U.S. relationship with the government there after the plot ultimately failed”.

The Guardian noted at the time that, “Elliot Abrams gave a nod to the attempted Venezuelan coup”.

This regime change policy continued after Nicolás Maduro was elected, following Hugo Chávez’s death in 2013.

Leaked documents show that in 2013, the National Endowment for Democracy was given $300,000 to run a campaign attempting to swing Venezuela’s National Assembly to the U.S.-backed opposition.

The plan called to “mobilize a voter database that identified and targeted swing voters through social media” and move them towards the U.S.-backed opposition.

As Jacobin magazine reported, “indeed, in December 2015, the opposition won a majority in the Venezuelan National Assembly for the first time since Chávez came to power in 1999”.

The most sadistic aspect of this covert regime change war has been the sanctions, which have been intentionally designed to force Venezuelan citizens into poverty, leading to tens of thousands of “excess deaths”, in hopes that it will lead to regime change.

The economists Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot documented that between 2017 and 2019, when the harshest sanctions were placed on Venezuela by the Trump administration, 40,000 people died due to a shortage of food and medical supplies brought on by the sanctions.

As Mark Weisbrot wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

In Venezuela, the first year of sanctions under the first Trump administration took tens of thousands of lives. Then things got even worse, as the U.S. cut off the country from the international financial system and oil exports, froze billions of dollars of assets and imposed “secondary sanctions” on countries that tried to do business with Venezuela.

Venezuela experienced the worst depression, without a war, in world history. This was from 2012 to 2020, with the economy contracting by 71% — more than three times the severity of the Great Depression in the U.S. in the 1930s. Most of this was found to be the result of the sanctions.

Alena Douhan, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of the unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights, wrote in 2020 that, “the economic blockade of Venezuela and the freezing of Central Bank assets have exacerbated pre-existing economic and humanitarian situation by preventing the earning of revenues and the use of resources to develop and maintain infrastructure and for social support programs, which has a devastating effect on the whole population of Venezuela, especially those in extreme poverty, women, children, medical workers, people with disabilities or life-threatening or chronic diseases, and the indigenous population”.

Francisco Rodríguez, one of the top opposition economists in Venezuela, noted that “it is hard to deny that they (sanctions) have had a sizable negative impact on living conditions in the country (Venezuela)” adding that, “economic statecraft aimed at the Venezuelan government has strongly impacted the country’s economic and humanitarian conditions”.

Along with ramping up the sadistic sanctions, the Trump administration, in its first term, ran several coup attempts in Venezuela.

The administration recognized the unelected U.S. puppet, Juan Guaidó, as the official president of Venezuela and gave 1 billion dollars in aid to his fake “interim government” between 2018 and 2020.

Juan Guaidó, in turn, repeatedly attempted to overthrow the actual Venezuelan government, including in 2020 when he declared himself president of Venezuela without being elected and attempted to storm the National Assembly with his supporters.

In 2019, the Trump administration also backed defecting Venezuelan troops in Colombia, who attempted to overthrow Maduro and install Juan Guaidó, a plan that was foiled by the Venezuelan government.

The aforementioned Elliot Abrams, who was the special envoy to Iran and Venezuela under the first Trump administration, even attempted to send weapons disguised as “humanitarian aid” to the Venezuelan opposition, a repeat of his strategy during the Regan administration, where he “used humanitarian aid shipments to smuggle weapons to Nicaragua’s Contras in the ’80s”.

As NPR noted at the time, “The operation is designed to foment regime change in Venezuela — which is why much of the international aid community wants nothing to do with it” adding that, “That’s why the International Committee of the Red Cross, United Nations agencies and other relief organizations have refused to collaborate with the U.S. and its allies in the Venezuelan opposition who are trying to force President Nicolás Maduro from power”.

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy admitted in 2020 that, “We just have to be clear that our Venezuela policy over the last year and a half has been an unmitigated disaster,” adding that, “First, we thought that getting Guaidó to declare himself president would be enough to topple the regime. Then we thought putting aid on the border would be enough. Then we tried to sort of construct a kind of coup in April of last year, and it blew up in our face when all the generals that were supposed to break with Maduro decided to stick with him in the end”.

After years of funding opposition figures, coup attempts, and barbaric sanctions have failed to achieve the United States’ regime change goal in Venezuela, the Trump administration is apparently planning a military invasion in order to achieve the neo-cons’ long-time wish for regime change.

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