US President Donald Trump has been applying more and more pressure on the Venezuelan President, President Nicolás Maduro. On 29 December, US President Trump announced that US military forces attacked a docking facility used by alleged drug-carrying vessels belonging to Venezuela without specifying the exact location of the military strike.
If so, it would mark a drastic escalation of the Trump administration’s efforts to pressure the Maduro regime in Venezuela, which it says is pouring drugs and gunmen into America.
This is happening while a fleet of warships from the US has deployed close to the South American country, and dozens of people have died from US bombings of boats that were purported to be laden with drugs.
Who is Nicolás Maduro and how did he rise to power?
Nicolás Maduro first gained prominence under the left-wing presidency of Hugo Chávez and his United Socialist Party of Venezuela. Maduro, a former bus driver and union leader, succeeded Chávez in 2013, having been vice president under him since 2012.
Since Chávez and Maduro took power 26 years ago, their party steadily secured key institutions, such as the National Assembly, much of the judiciary, and the electoral council. In 2024, Maduro was declared the winner of the presidential vote amid obvious violations, even though the voting tallies collected by the opposition showed its candidate, Edmundo González, had won in a landslide.
She replaced the leading opposition candidate, María Corina Machado, who had been disqualified from running in the election. She was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in October “for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” Despite the travel ban imposed upon her, Machado managed to travel to Oslo in December to receive the prize.
She stated that she intends to return to Venezuela, which will expose her to the risk of arrest by the Venezuelan Government, which has labeled her a “fugitive.”
Why is Trump focusing on Venezuela?
Trump holds Maduro responsible for the appearance of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants in the US. They are some of the approximately eight million Venezuelans believed to have fled the economic meltdown and persecution in Venezuela since 2013. Trump has accused Maduro of “emptying his prisons and insane asylums” and “forcing” its residents to move to the US without any evidence.
Democracy is on trial in the coming Elections in the beautiful country of Honduras on November 30th. Will Maduro and his Narcoterrorists take over another country like they have taken over Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela? The man who is standing up for Democracy, and fighting…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 28, 2025
Another problem Trump has been addressing is fighting the tide of drugs, particularly fentanyl and cocaine, that are flooding the US. Two Venezuelan criminal gangs, Tren de Aragua and Cartel de los Soles, have been declared Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) by Trump, and one of them, Cartel de los Soles, is led by President Maduro himself, according to Trump.
President Trump has been clear: the blockade of sanctioned oil tankers departing from, or bound for, Venezuela will remain in full force until Maduro’s criminal enterprise returns every stolen American asset.
— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) December 20, 2025
The @DeptofWar, with our partners at @USCG, will unflinchingly… https://t.co/2NuUTYon05
Analysts have also pointed out that the ‘Cartel de los Soles’ is not an organized crime group but is only the name given to the corrupt Venezuelan officials who have allowed cocaine to flow through the country. Trump has also doubled the reward for information leading to the capture of Maduro and has announced that he would designate the Maduro government as an FTO.
Maduro has explicitly denied that he is a leader of the cartels and has accused the US of using their “war on drugs” as an excuse for attempting to overthrow him and obtain Venezuela’s huge oil reserves.
How are US warships deployed in the Caribbean impacting Maduro?
The US has also deployed 15,000 soldiers and various aircraft carriers, guided-missile destroyers, and amphibious assault ships to the Caribbean. The mission of the deployment, which has been the largest in the Caribbean since the US invasion of Panama in 1989, is to halt the flow of fentanyl and cocaine into the US.
“Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before — Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the… pic.twitter.com/WWQwJfcplD
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) December 17, 2025
Besides attacking ships they suspect of smuggling illicit narcotics, the American military has also been instrumental in the naval blockade led by Trump against all sanctioned oil ships entering and leaving Venezuela. The US naval convoy includes the USS Gerald Ford, which is the largest aircraft carrier globally.
US helicopters are said to have taken off from it prior to the seizure of an oil tanker by US forces on 10 December off the coast of Venezuela.
The US described the vessel as one which had “been used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran.” The Venezuelan government has now branded this act of “international piracy.”
How has the US justified military strikes on Venezuelan vessels?
Recently, US troops have conducted strikes against more than two dozen boats in international waters that were believed to be ferrying drugs. Over 100 people have been killed in these operations. According to this argument from the Trump administration, they are in a non-international conflict with the suspected narcotics traffickers who are engaged in irregular warfare against the US.
The US has also referred to people on board as “narco terrorists”, although lawyers claim that the missile strikes are not aimed at “lawful military targets”. The first attack, which took place on 2 September, has received special attention, as there were two attacks, and people who survived the first strike were killed in the second.
A former chief prosecutor at the ICC said, “The US military offensive in particular can best be described as a kind of planned and systematic attack on civilians in a time of peace.”
In reaction to this, the White House indicated it had responded to the matter in accordance with the laws of armed conflict to safeguard America from cartels who were seeking to deliver “poison to our shores. destroy American lives”.
Could the US carry out land strikes inside Venezuela next?
Trump stated on 29 December that the US had conducted an attack on a “dock area,” which caused a “major explosion where they load the boats up with drugs.” The US President failed to state whether or not the attack took place on Venezuelan soil.
However, he has long warned that his administration would go after drug traffickers “on land” next.
He had admitted last October that he had given the CIA permission to carry out covert operations within Venezuela.
Trump’s press secretary has not excluded either the scenario that American troops will be on the ground in Venezuela, explaining that “there’s options at the president’s disposal that are on the table.” She did not elaborate on the options at all, but military observers have been commenting on the fact that the presence of US forces in the Caribbean is several orders of magnitude larger than necessary for a counternarcotic assignment.
How significant is Venezuela in the global drug trade?
Counternarcotic experts described Venezuela as a relatively minor player in global drug trafficking, acting as a transit country where drugs produced elsewhere were smuggled through.
The neighbouring country of Colombia is the world’s biggest producer of cocaine, but most of it is thought to enter the US by routes other than via Venezuela.
A 2020 report by the US DEA estimates that nearly three quarters of the cocaine reaching the US is trafficked via the Pacific, with just a small percentage via fast boats across the Caribbean. While most of the early strikes the US has carried out were in the Caribbean, more recent ones have focused on the Pacific.
In September,Trump told US military leaders, “The boats they’re stacked up with bags of white powder that’s mostly fentanyl and other drugs, too,” Fentanyl is an artificial opiate, 50 times stronger than heroin, and it is primarily responsible for the rise in US overdose fatalities from narcotics.
Trump signed the executive order on the 15th of December, classifying fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction”, as it was “closer to a chemical weapon than to a narcotic.”
However, fentanyl has been predominantly manufactured in Mexico. It has been smuggled into the US through the southern border overland. Venezuela has not been cited as one of the countries from which fentanyl smuggled into the US has been originating, according to the 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment by the DEA.
What role does oil play in Venezuela’s economy and US strategy?
Oil is the principal foreign source of funds for the Maduro government, and through profits generated, it funds more than half of the country’s budget. It now exports 900,000 barrels of oil per day, but it is entirely consumed by China. Still, despite an assessment conducted by the US, Venezuela boasts of it possessing the largest proven oil reserves, though it does very little with it.
Venezuela accounts for just 0.8% of worldwide crude oil production in 2023, as per data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) because of technical and financial issues. Prior to announcing his country’s first seizure of an oil tanker off Venezuela’s coastline, Trump said, “I assume we’re going to keep the oil.” Prior, the US disputed Venezuela’s claim of gaining Venezuelan oil reserves through actions against Maduro’s administration.
