When Donald Trump started sending warships, marines and reaper drones to the Caribbean in August to torment Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s president, the US’s former ambassador in Caracas, James Story, suspected the deployment was largely for show: a spectacular flexing of military muscle supposed to force the authoritarian leader from power.
But in recent days, as the world’s largest aircraft carrier and its strike group powered towards the region and the US president continued to order deadly airstrikes on alleged narco-boats, the diplomat’s thinking has shifted.
“Facts on the ground have changed tremendously,” Story said as the USS Gerald R Ford headed west amid the US’ largest military buildup in Latin America in decades.
Two months ago Story, who was Washington’s top diplomat for Venezuela from 2018 to 2023, saw only a 10% chance of some kind of US attack on Venezuelan soil and an 80% chance that Trump’s gambit would come to nothing. Now, he said he is 80% sure things would evolve into some kind of military action and sees only a 20% chance the status quo would hold.
“I’d say [something is] imminent, without a doubt,” Story predicted as observers in Venezuela and around the world battled to forecast what the unpredictable US president’s next move might be.
Maduro, a strongman political survivor who has overcome a torrent of dramatic crises and challenges since being elected in 2013, has tried to put a brave face on Trump’s maneuver, which has rekindled memories of the 1989 US invasion of Panama to topple its dictator, Manuel Noriega.
“I’m more famous than Taylor Swift … I’m more famous than Bad Bunny! I even feel like recording an album!” Hugo Chávez’s 62-year-old heir joked last week.
But those who know the former union leader believe he is undoubtedly feeling the heat despite previously weathering assassination attempts, mass protests, an economic meltdown and punishing sanctions.
“I think he is nervous … None of [the top leaders] are relaxed … They see a real threat to their lives … Maduro is probably sleeping in one of those bunkers that Chávez built,” said Andrés Izarra, a former Chávez minister who now lives in exile.
Few believe a Panama-style US invasion of Venezuela will happen, despite the massive display of military might, which includes the deployment of the same special forces helicopter unit used to ferry Noriega into US custody nearly four decades ago. Many experts still suspect Trump’s deployment is a negotiating tactic to force Maduro to make economic concessions or relinquish power.
“We are both on the verge of war and on the verge of total normalisation of diplomatic ties. You would almost never say that about any conflict,” said Benjamin Gedan, the director of the Latin America programme at the Stimson centre in Washington.
After returning to power in January, Trump sent his special envoy, Ric Grenell, to meet Maduro in Caracas prompting speculation about a rapprochement – and back-channel negotiations are widely believed to have continued, despite some reports to the contrary.
Gedan, who was the South America director at the national security council during the Obama administration, thought it possible that “the whole thing is a psyop … designed to spook Maduro into resignation and exile or provoke a palace coup, a military uprising [or] some sort of transition without ever having to fire shot on Venezuelan territory”.
But Gedan could also not rule out that the US might stumble into war or launch military attacks, with highly unpredictable results. “[On one hand you have] a country that you so seriously disagree with, that you are tempted to attack. And then at the same time your alternative policy is full normalisation. But I really think that’s what we’re pivoting on right now … Those are the options.”
Many observers believe the most likely next phase of Trump’s campaign – which, officially, has been ordered to fight a “narco-terrorist” drug cartel the US accuses Maduro of running – will be some kind of air strike, perhaps targeting a military installation or guerrilla base.
Story said he believed one of the best ways to force Maduro from power would be by targeting one of the Venezuelan’s closest and most “malevolent” political allies with “a Soleimani-style attack” similar to the 2020 US drone strike that killed Iran’s second-most powerful man.
Another option was a devastating aerial blitz. “In just a couple of hours we could take out their air force, their navy, their surface-to-air missile systems and we could decapitate the government very quickly with what we [have] in theatre,” Story said.
The prospect of a US military intervention in South America’s fifth most populous nation has delighted some of Maduro’s political enemies, who consider it the only way of breaking his 12-year grip on power. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, the opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who has lived in hiding since Maduro was accused of stealing last year’s presidential election from her movement, said her team had made plans for what to do after his fall. “We are ready to take over government. We have the teams, we have the plans – the first 100 hours, the first 100 days,” she said.
But there are also profound fears about the possible consequences of overthrowing Maduro’s regime and further destabilizing an already impoverished, politically divided and often lawless country.
Elías Ferrer, the founder of the Venezuela-focused advisory firm Orinoco Research, said one concern was the potential for a “Libya scenario”, recalling how the North African country slipped into civil war in the years after the 2011 killing of its leader, Muammar Gaddafi.
Neighbouring Colombia, which has spent decades battling guerrilla groups, offers another cautionary tale. Those Colombian insurgents were never strong enough to seize control of major cities such as Bogotá, Cali or Medellín. “But you can’t get rid of them either. They just keep lurking around,” Ferrer said, warning that, post-Maduro, a similar conflict could grip Venezuela, where many regions already resembled “the wild west”.
Gedan believed that while some Venezuela hawks were rooting for a repeat of the 1989 invasion of Panama, they would be better served studying the US’s 20-year quagmire in Afghanistan. “The reality is that [Venezuela] has a lot more in common with Afghanistan than with Panama.”
Toppling Maduro would not be a simple task, Gedan warned. “And it certainly would be enormously complex to put Venezuela back together.”
