“There’s only one person who can stop this crazy train, and it’s Donald Trump, and I don’t know if he has it in him.”
Over the past few months, senior figures within the Trump administration, particularly US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have been furiously spinning a narrative on the need for military action against Venezuela. To help oil the wheels of the narrative machine, the chosen post-regime change replacement, Maria Corina Machado, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
But even that apparently wasn’t enough to sell the US public on the merits of another regime change operation, this time in the US’ own “backyard”. According to a new poll by YouGov, most US citizens are unpersuaded by Trump and Rubio’s regime change narrative:
“Only 15% of Americans — including 5% of Democrats and 29% of Republicans — view the situation in Venezuela as a ‘national emergency’ for the U.S.; 50% think it is not a national emergency and 34% are unsure.”
“Opposition outweighs support for the US using military force to overthrow Maduro: 45% are opposed to the U.S. overthrowing Maduro while only 17% are in favor of doing so. Many (38%) are unsure.”
Notably, only 34% of Republican voters said they supported using military force while 22% are opposed. They presumably include members of Trump’s MAGA base who are leary about neo-cons like Rubio and Linsdey Graham sucking Trump into another forever war.
The breakdown by party allegiance:
The survey’s findings come out at a delicate moment for the Trump administration. Trump faces his worst ever approval ratings as the political fallout from the Epstein scandal, the US’ weak economic performance, and Trump’s unwavering support for Israel mounts. According to The Economist, no recent president has fallen so quickly.
Not that President Trump seems overly concerned — at least in public. In his latest grandiose act of delusional grandeur, the president claimed he would beat a double bill of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln by 25 points.
Trump: “I met with two pollsters the day before I got the news about covid because we were starting to think about the next election. They said, ‘Sir, if George Washington and Abraham Lincoln came back from the dead and they aligned, you’d be beating them by 25 points.'” pic.twitter.com/TP79ZaAboY
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 19, 2025
Meanwhile, Trump continues to ramp up the pressure on Venezuela. On the one hand, he has authorised back-channel negotiations with the Maduro government while at the same time signing off on CIA plans for covert measures inside Venezuela. As the New York Times reports, these could be meant to prepare a battlefield for further action:
It is not clear what the covert actions might be or when any of them might be carried out. Mr. Trump has not yet authorized combat forces on the ground in Venezuela, so the next phase of the administration’s escalating pressure campaign on the Maduro government could be sabotage or some sort of cyber, psychological or information operations.
The CIA’s sabotage operations already appear to be bearing fruit:
A massive fire erupted at the Petrocedeño crude oil upgrader project in Venezuela’s eastern region on Wednesday, November 19, 2025, after reports of an explosion near the distillation tower. This is the second major incident at a Venezuelan oil facility in November 2025 alone.… pic.twitter.com/brItYl6P6g
— MintPress News (@MintPressNews) November 20, 2025
Back to the Times piece:
The president has not made a decision about the broader course of action to pursue in Venezuela, nor publicly articulated his ultimate goal beyond stemming the flow of drugs from the region. And military and C.I.A. planners have prepared multiple options for different contingencies.
Military planners have prepared lists of potential drug facilities that could be struck. The Pentagon is also planning for strikes on military units close to Mr. Maduro. Mr. Trump held two meetings in the White House Situation Room last week to discuss Venezuela and review options with his senior advisers.
Will Trump be willing to green light a military intervention knowing it will almost certainly exacerbate his haemorrhaging of public support, especially with the mid-terms less than a year away?
Many previous US wars have tended to begin with relatively strong levels of public support only to end in total infamy. As TIME magazine notes, the “war on terror” narrative helped generate strong initial support for US involvement in Afghanistan (88% in 2001) and Iraq (70% in 2003). Both wars ended up being universally abhorred.
Imagine what could happen with a conflict that is already broadly opposed by the US public from day one, especially if said conflict ends up dragging on as the costs spiral?
The Risk of Losing Face
If Trump does get cold feet in classic TACO fashion, he will face an almost impossible dilemma: how to walk away from a fight with a much weaker adversary, that he himself picked and that has involved the mobilisation of an entire battle fleet, without losing face?
Ominously, Elliot Abrams, who has presided over previous coups in Venezuela including the Guaidó debacle, has come out of the wordwork to propose the deployment of US special forces against key Venezuelan targets in an article for Foreign Affairs:
[H]erein lies the danger for Trump and his administration: that after a great deal of chest-thumping and a show of naval force aimed at Maduro, they will leave him in place. In that scenario, Maduro would emerge as the survivor who bested Trump and showed that American influence in the Western Hemisphere is limited at best.
Removing Maduro, on the other hand, would advance Washington’s interests, protect U.S. national security, and benefit Venezuelans and their neighbors. Regime change would result in reduced migration to the United States, less drug trafficking, more freedom and prosperity in Venezuela, and an end to the country’s cooperation with China, Cuba, Iran, and Russia, which gives countries hostile to U.S. interests a base of operations on the South American mainland.
The use of American military force to overthrow Maduro would not be without risk. It could fail to end the Maduro regime and could incite demonstrations against the United States. But regime change would not require any ground deployments of U.S. forces except, at most, Special Forces raids against regime figures who have already been indicted for narcoterrorism by U.S. law enforcement. The potential gain for the United States from the collapse of the Maduro regime far outweighs the risk, because it would end a brutal dictatorship that relies on drug trafficking to stay afloat and would open the door to Venezuelan economic recovery. That would end the mass migration of Venezuelans and reduce the role of Venezuela in cocaine flows to the United States.
With people like Abrams, Rubio and Graham whispering in Trump’s ear and Minister of War Pete Hegseth flexing his muscles in the background, the signs are not good for a peaceful resolution.
Media’s Tepid Support
There are, of course, many reasons why the US public would overwhelmingly oppose a military intervention in Venezuela, including, perhaps most importantly, general war weariness. The US empire has been at war on multiple fronts since the second year of this century. As a report by the Watson School of International Public Affairs warns, the financial costs are mounting:
“From late 2001 through fiscal year 2022, the U.S. appropriated and is obligated to spend an estimated $8 trillion for the post-9/11 wars — an estimated $5.8 trillion in appropriations, plus an additional minimum of $2.2 trillion for obligations to care for the veterans of these wars through the next several decades.”
The report also notes that post-9/11 wars have primarily been funded through debt, as opposed to increased taxes or the sale of war bonds, like U.S. wars of the past:
The use of debt rather than increased taxes makes war more invisible to taxpayers, obscuring the true costs of war by pushing financial obligations to future generations. Moreover, increased public debt results in higher interest rates economy-wide, which can hamper business investments and make life more expensive for individuals and families.
Another possible reason for the public’s lacklustre support for military intervention in Venezuela is that the case for war has been so poorly constructed, even by recent standards. Also, US legacy media have not been selling the war quite as enthusiastically as they traditionally do. In fact, at times they have even challenged the very case for war.
As we reported a month ago, Western media outlets had finally begun admitting what was glaringly obvious from the get-go: Trump’s mobilisation of forces against Venezuela had nothing to do with the war on drugs, and everything to do with regime change. Okay, it took them two months to finally admit this truth, but normally that happens after war has begun — or ended!
A couple of days ago, CNN asked whether the US is targeting a Venezuelan cartel (the so-called “Cartel de los Soles”) “that may not technically exist” (as we pointed out over two months ago). Given this is CNN doing the reporting, it’s hard not to pinch oneself while reading:
“They’re designating a non-thing that is not a terror organization as a terrorist organization,” … Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who specializes in war powers issues [told CNN].
Another former senior US government official said Cartel de los Soles was “a made-up name used to describe an ad hoc group of Venezuelan officials involved in the trafficking of drugs through Venezuela. It doesn’t have the hierarchy or command-and-control structure of a traditional cartel.”
The official said the Trump administration’s assertions are based on “bad intel” likely from the Defense Intelligence Agency or the Drug Enforcement Administration that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny before the greater intelligence community, or that “it is purely political.”
What no US media report will ever admit is the fact that the Cartel de los Soles was essentially a CIA creation, as Mike Wallace uncovered in a 1993 episode of 60 Minutes.
Back when Mike Wallace was alive, 60 Minutes exposed the role of the CIA and DEA in creating the Cartel of the Suns, the now-defunct cartel which the Agency used to ship tons of cocaine into US cities – and which was revived to justify attacking Venezuela https://t.co/9PNVKB6Wn2
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) October 27, 2025
At least this time, however, the media is questioning some the Trump administration’s justifications for war. Yesterday, reports surfaced of how the senior military lawyer for US Southern Command, which oversees the operations against alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, had disagreed that the strikes were legal and was overruled.
From NBC:
The lawyer, who serves as the senior judge advocate general, or JAG in military parlance, at U.S. Southern Command in Miami, raised his legal concerns in August before the strikes began in September, according to two senior U.S. officials, two senior congressional aides and two former senior U.S. officials…
The JAG at Southern Command specifically expressed concern that strikes against people on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean, whom administration officials call “narco-terrorists,” could amount to extrajudicial killings, the six sources said, and therefore legally expose service members involved in the operations.
The opinion of the top lawyer for the command overseeing a military operation is typically critical to whether or not the operation moves forward. While higher officials can overrule such lawyers, it is rare for operations to move forward without incorporating their advice.
As readers may recall, the commander overseeing US Southern Command, Admiral Adm. Alvin Holsey resigned in October, allegedly due to his concerns about the legality of the boat strikes. Also, a number of the US’s (vass)allies in Europe, including France and the UK, a fellow Five Eye member, have refused to share some intelligence with the US for its operations in the Caribbean, due to publicly aired concerns over their legality.
Former US Ambassador Chas Freeman, speaking with Judge Andrew Napolitano, described the UK’s decision to withhold intelligence as “quite remarkable”:
It’s a break with the 80-year long US-UK intelligence cooperation alliance which has gone through various phases over the course of those eight decades but which has always been intimate and special. And it is the core of the so-called Five Eyes international espionage machine (the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada).
Well, we’ve managed to alienate Canada, which has also stopped sharing intelligence on the Caribbean. The Dutch have done the same.
So what’s the reason behind this? MI6 and the British establishment understand and have said that these attacks are illegal. They would subject those who carry them out to prosecution. And they are war crimes and acts of piracy.
Curiously, the YouGov poll found that more US citizens approve (50%) than disapprove (39%) of the boat strikes, which is actually higher than in last month’s poll, suggesting US citizens may actually be warming to the practice.
However, this differs wildly from a similar poll by Reuters/Ipsos from last week, which found that 51% of respondents disapproved of the extrajudicial killings, almost double those who approved (29%). In both polls however, a large majority of Republicans supported the strikes.
Ultimately, however, it won’t be US citizens who get to decide what happens in Venezuela. As Max Blumenthal said on yesterday’s Judging Freedom, “there’s only one person who can stop this crazy train, and it’s Donald Trump, and I’m not sure he has it in him.”
Which brings us to one last question:
Did the US Just Invade Mexico?
This is apparently no joke. On Monday, men arrived in a boat at a beach in northeast Mexico, unfortunately called Playa Baghdad, and installed some signs signalling land that the US Department of Defense (sic) considers restricted. The signs read in English and Spanish, “Warning: Restricted Area.”
That’s right: US forces appear to be delimiting land on Mexico’s side of the Rio Bravo/Grande as if it belonged to the US. The beach in question is on the southern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, or what the Trump administration has taken to calling the Gulf of America. Note that the text on the signs cites the Department of War’s former name, the Department of Defense.
Did we actually invade Mexico? pic.twitter.com/uGrS3B9b1f
— Hoodlum 🇺🇸 (@NotHoodlum) November 21, 2025
Mexican marines began taking down the signs later on Monday. On Tuesday, President Claudia Sheinbaum announced that the International Boundary and Water Commission, a binational agency that determines the border between the two countries, was getting involved.
For its part, the US Embassy in Mexico, currently led by Ambassador and former CIA agent Ron Johnson, shared a comment from the Pentagon about the incident, confirming that contractors putting up signs to mark the “National Defense Area III” had placed signs at the mouth of the Rio Grande. From CBS:
“Changes in water depth and topography altered the perception of the international boundary’s location,” the statement said. “Government of Mexico personnel removed 6 signs based on their perception of the international boundary’s location.”
The incursion took place against a backdrop of rising tensions between the US and Mexico. On Monday, the day the signs were erected, Trump said he was willing to do whatever it takes to stop drugs entering the US, including intervening militarily in Mexico. On Tuesday, President Sheinbaum responded by ruling out allowing US strikes against cartels on Mexican soil.
The problem for Sheinbaum, and for any other left-leaning government on the American continent, is that the United States government does not, as John Mearsheimer puts it, “believe in sovereignty… It thinks it has the right, the responsibility and the capability to intervene in the domestic politics of every country on the planet.”
