For many Venezuelans, this is a disorienting moment. For a quarter century, our government has been using the threat of an American military attack to justify more and more authoritarian control over the country. Venezuelans got accustomed to dismissing it all as noise, just a pretext the dictatorship employed to stamp out civil rights. Suddenly, it’s not just noise. President Donald Trump is very visibly preparing to do what Nicolás Maduro spent decades swearing the Americans would one day do: use military power to put an end to Venezuela’s socialist revolution.
The United States has been bombing Venezuelan fast boats, which it alleges are ferrying drugs north, while massing naval forces in the Caribbean. Trump has vacillated between hinting that air strikes inside Venezuela will be next and saying that he doubts the U.S. will go to war with Venezuela. The administration keeps portraying its actions as part of a counternarcotics operation—ostensibly the first such operation in history to require the use of an aircraft carrier. And yet, the White House doesn’t seem to have committed anything like the number of ground troops necessary to invade a country the size of Venezuela. Rather than an old-fashioned ground invasion, then, the U.S.
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