On Sept. 2, U.S. President Donald Trump said the U.S. Navy had sunk a small boat in international waters and claimed that the 11 passengers on board were gang members transporting drugs. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio hailed the strike as a sign of the administration’s commitment to its fight against drugs entering the United States. But the operation violated traditional procedures in verifying and seizing the contents of the ship and detaining the personnel, duties typically performed by the US Guard, raising questions about the real mission of U.S. naval operations off the coast of Venezuela.
A few weeks earlier, a fleet of naval ships and a nuclear submarine were mobilized to the southern Caribbean. The buildup came after a secret directive from the president called on the military to use force against Latin American drug cartels. The administration asserts that one of those groups, Venezuela’s Cartel of the Suns, is headed by President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.
Sending a fleet of ships with 4,500 U.S. military personnel, including 2,200 expeditionary Marines, to take on an 11-person boat without verifying its contents seems like both overkill and a misallocation of U.S. military assets. And picking off individual boats of supposed gang members without any concrete timeline for the mission threatens to become an indefinite project with the risk of harming innocent civilians as well as the potential for broader conflict.
This almost predictable military phase of a failed and dangerous U.S. policy toward Venezuela was preceded by broad economic sanctions. Trump’s “maximum pressure” strategy in his first administration also involved recognizing the president of the National Assembly as the shadow interim president after Maduro’s likely fraudulent 2018 reelection; mobilizing governments in Europe and the Americas to do the same; and transferring some Venezuelan assets to finance the fictional government. Despite all these measures, Maduro survived.
But while Trump’s mobilization is a public (albeit quiet) admission of sanctions’ failure, it also represents a dangerous escalation. Soon the ramped-up U.S. fleet will be fully positioned off the coast of Venezuela. Together with a doubling of the U.S. bounty on Maduro to $50 million, the administration is making a bet that it can either rattle Maduro to surrender, or, more likely, trigger someone from within his inner circle to defect and remove him.
The gamble may even work, though a lack of accompanying diplomatic effort to create a post-Maduro interim government would shortly present a problem. The bigger and more immediate risk, though, is that, following the mobilization, nothing changes with Maduro. Will the naval fleet then simply pack up and head home? Or would the perception of a defeat, and the show of weakness, spur still more aggressive action?
Sanctions are an easy, relatively cost-free way of applying pressure. When Trump applied them to Venezuela in 2019, he was pressed to do so by the team of neoconservatives he had brought into his cabinet and aimed to appease conservative Venezuelan- and Cuban-American voters in South Florida. Trump hoped that strangling the nation’s economy and in particular its oil sector would quickly give him the result he wanted: Maduro buckling and surrendering to regime change and democracy.
This didn’t happen. Instead, U.S. sanctions came at a great cost to the country’s economic growth, worsened poverty rates, and contributed to the exodus of more than 7 million Venezuelans, including to the United States. The result should not have been a surprise to Washington. More than 70 years of historical record on sanctions intended to defend democracy and promote regime change against solidly autocratic regimes points to failure.
A recent Chatham House report demonstrated the faulty global record of sanctions in defending democracy in tough cases like Venezuela. The Chatham House database examined—among other things—the success rate of the more than 859 sanctions that countries and multilateral institutions imposed from 1950 to 2023 in the name of defending human rights and democracy or promoting regime destabilization.
According to our analysis, based in part on government and sanctioned entities’ own public statements, more than half of those sanctions have been successful in defending human rights and democracy.
Of those successful cases, the vast majority were with Western allies, semi-democracies, or countries already undergoing transitions.
Cases of when sanctions have failed or persist indefinitely (including the 1962 U.S. sanctions on Cuba) are concentrated in non-democratic and—more importantly, consolidated—corrupt regimes. Those cases included China, Belarus, Myanmar, and Cuba.
The reasons are obvious, though often lost on policymakers wishing to virtue-signal a commitment to freedom.
Autocratic regimes under broad economic sanctions—whether Cuba, Iran, Myanmar, or Venezuela—tend to redistribute the assets freed by Western retrenchment to their cronies. The effect is to crimp the space for independent economic activity and reward cronies of the regime in power, further consolidating their power and isolating them from the Western, global economic world.
In Venezuela, Trump’s maximum-pressure sanctions designed to cut off U.S. and international interests from investing in the petrostate or conducting commerce with state-owned enterprises—especially Caracas’s energy company, PDVSA—instead opened the field to Chinese, Iranian, and Russian investment.
There is also the emerging challenge of autocratic regimes in China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela collaborating to evade U.S. sanctions and, in some cases, as with China and Russia, creating parallel global economies to the West. While none of these governments has shown any willingness—or, in the case of Russia, capacity—to underwrite the profligate, corrupt Maduro regime, they have stood by as global allies. China imports Venezuelan oil and Iran supplies diluents to Venezuela to help it refine its heavy crude. After Maduro stole the 2024 presidential election, according to international election monitors, and democratic governments around the world refused to recognize the results, China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia all congratulated him on his “victory.”
Yet even as its sanctions against Venezuela failed, the Trump administration has not let up its condemnations of Maduro and the illegitimacy of his presidency. Cue the second round of efforts to induce regime change—this time with martial muscle. After the Pentagon recently leaked it will authorize military action to attack those designated to be narco-terrorists, including the Cartel of the Suns, the Trump administration now has the authority and the public license to take out high-level members of the Maduro government.
Given the size of Venezuela and its topography—jungle, mountains, and multiple urban centers—a full-on U.S. invasion is unlikely, and certainly unwise. But can the initial mobilization spark defections? Rumors that the military is on the brink of defecting from Maduro have been a common refrain for years now. Famously, after a popular uprising in 2019 failed to trigger a military uprising, then-U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton compared Maduro’s inner circle to “scorpions in a bottle,” erroneously promising betrayal was inevitable if not imminent.
Even if the defections don’t materialize, U.S. guided-missile ships could take out a few key military installations. And with the license to be able to take out designated leaders, the Pentagon may consider a targeted force to snatch Maduro and bring him to the U.S. for trial, or potentially even assassinate him.
But any U.S. action inside Venezuela, whether an unlikely invasion or a more likely targeting of key assets—infrastructure and human—will provoke condemnation by Venezuela’s neighbors. The Maduro government’s economic failures, the waves of migrants they generated, and the regime’s illicit activities have become headaches across the region from Chile to Panama. And governments in Argentina, Ecuador, and Paraguay have endorsed the U.S. designation of the Cartel of the Suns as a narco-terrorist group. Yet even those states would struggle to embrace a U.S. intervention that took out members of the Venezuelan government. After all, regional solidarity in defense of national sovereignty remains a central tenet of Latin American diplomacy.
For governments from the Americas to Europe, isolating and hastening the exit from power of the shamelessly autocratic Maduro regime should remain a central goal. But if sanctions didn’t work, and gunboat diplomacy has an even worse track record, what will?
One hope is that the Trump administration is engaging in parallel diplomatic negotiations. Such efforts could potentially produce a better exit strategy and plan for renewal should Maduro and his corrupt generals decide to seek an exit ramp. That should revolve around back-channel negotiations to leverage diplomatic recognition, including reestablishing a U.S. embassy in Caracas, and carrots rather than just sticks to encourage defections, including offers of safe passage out of the country and the removal of bounties on the heads of key officials as well as potential limited amnesty for those accused of minor offenses.
At the same time, a more modest and less performative show of force should remain in the Caribbean to interdict drug traffickers leaving Venezuelan territory. Doing so would help deny the regime a critical source of revenue that it uses to reward corrupt allies. A stripped-down military presence could also attract support from U.S. allies, including Europe—another major destination for Venezuelan transshipped cocaine. This would avoid the prospect of a fleet of boats and a submarine off the Venezuelan coast picking off small boats allegedly smuggling drugs—or worse, humans—indefinitely.
In the end, the martial chest-thumping may finally spark those defections the Trump administration and its policy supporters have been trumpeting for seven years now. But if it doesn’t, what comes next may be worse than the status quo.