U.S. President Donald Trump held a meeting at the White House on Monday to discuss next steps against Venezuela, just days after warning that the U.S. military is planning to expand its counternarcotics operation onto land “very soon.”
Until now, Washington’s military campaign has been limited to the sea. Since early September, the U.S. military has carried out 21 strikes on suspected Venezuela-linked drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing at least 83 people.
U.S. President Donald Trump held a meeting at the White House on Monday to discuss next steps against Venezuela, just days after warning that the U.S. military is planning to expand its counternarcotics operation onto land “very soon.”
Until now, Washington’s military campaign has been limited to the sea. Since early September, the U.S. military has carried out 21 strikes on suspected Venezuela-linked drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing at least 83 people.
Over the past several weeks, though, Trump has increasingly been signaling that direct military action against Venezuela may be coming. The Trump administration has amassed more than a dozen U.S. warships and some 15,000 U.S. troops in the region. In October, the White House notified Congress that the United States is in a “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations,” and in November, the United States formally designated Cartel de los Soles, which Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is accused of overseeing, as a foreign terrorist organization.
However, mounting anger from within Washington could curb the White House’s apparent regime-change ambitions. Over the weekend, lawmakers in the House and Senate Armed Services committees signaled their support for bipartisan congressional reviews of the boat strikes. The inquiries follow a Washington Post report, published on Friday, that accused U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of ordering U.S. forces to leave no survivors after a Sept. 2 strike on a boat in the Caribbean initially left two people alive.
Hegseth has denied the report, calling it “fake news” in a post on X and maintaining that “current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both U.S. and international law”—a claim that many legal experts reject.
Read more in today’s World Brief: Trump Intensifies Pressure Campaign on Venezuela.
This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage of the Trump administration. Follow along here.
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