Why Trump is at war with Venezuela | About That

September 2nd, a US drone fires a missile at this Venezuelan boat. 11

people on board, all killed. The White

House says these were terrorists smuggling drugs. Venezuela calls it a

smuggling drugs. Venezuela calls it a heinous crime. September 15th, a second

heinous crime. September 15th, a second Venezuelan boat is hit, three people killed. The US warning it is hunting

killed. The US warning it is hunting drug traffickers. September 19th, word

drug traffickers. September 19th, word of another strike, another three people dead. President Trump terminates narot

dead. President Trump terminates narot terrorists. Then a fourth strike on

terrorists. Then a fourth strike on October 3rd. Four people killed, more

October 3rd. Four people killed, more drug traffickers, says Trump's Secretary of War just off the coast of Venezuela.

And with a familiar warning, these strikes will continue until the attacks on the American people are over. In none

of these cases has the Trump administration provided any evidence that the people targeted were terrorists or that they were carrying out some kind of imminently threatening attack on the United States or even that there were

any drugs on board those boats at all.

But what is clear is the US military machine spinning up warships that for weeks have been mobilizing and moving towards Venezuela on and underwater.

Trump has explicitly threatened to attack Venezuela if provoked as Venezuela itself warns the US to stay away. But all told, the US has moved

away. But all told, the US has moved thousands of military members into the region. Their exact intention left

region. Their exact intention left unsaid and against which Venezuela says it is prepared to fight if necessary.

>> The Trump administration is ramping up its attacks on suspected drug smugglers.

Tensions are escalating between the US and Venezuela. While the Venezuelan army

and Venezuela. While the Venezuelan army has been training members of the public in the event of a US incursion, >> let's try to understand what threat the US sees and what explains Venezuela's

position that Trump is trying to start a war.

The stated reason for the Trump administration's repeated air strikes against civilian or they would say terrorist targets basically amounts to a self-defense argument. Venezuelan bad

self-defense argument. Venezuelan bad guys, they say, are trafficking illicit drugs to the US by boat. These drugs

kill people and the US has branded some of these drug cartels as terrorist organizations. Those two ideas combined,

organizations. Those two ideas combined, drugs are deadly and drug dealers are terrorists, make the people on board these boats, unlawful combatants engaged

in armed conflict, which from the White House point of view begins to sound more like war than like crime, right? And

that specific framing, that warlike language is important in international law because it forms the legal argument for how you kill drug traffickers

without due process and without it being murder.

>> In recent weeks, the Navy has supported our mission to blow the cartel terrorists the hell out of the water.

You see that?

>> The United States has long for many, many years established intelligence that allow us to interdict and stop drugs.

and we did that and it doesn't work.

What will stop them is when you blow them up. The way the president of the

them up. The way the president of the United States is going to wage war on narot terrorist organizations.

>> So this is not the first time that we've seen the Trump administration try to blur the lines between drug trafficking and illicit activities with um war. So

engaging in these strikes and calling them a wartime activity allows Trump to say that we're currently in armed conflict with Venezuela. But according

to the experts we spoke to, there are two problems with seeing this drug war as a literal war. The first has to do with whether this even really meets that bar at all.

>> These are non-combatants who were firing on uh US personnel. They weren't

attacking US territory. They were very far from US waters, >> right? Like is this really a war that

>> right? Like is this really a war that requires fighter jets, destroyers, and guided missiles? But the other problem

guided missiles? But the other problem has to do with whether these Venezuelan gangs are even the ones smuggling the deadliest drugs into the US in the first place.

>> Well, first of all, with fentinel, no.

There's absolutely no evidence of fentinol production or trade going through Venezuela in any relevant significant amounts.

>> The US Drug Enforcement Administration's own assessment singles out Mexico, not Venezuela, as the overwhelming supplier of fentinil to the United States.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, about 2th3 of the fentinel it seized in recent years comes from Mexico. So where does Venezuela fit in?

Mexico. So where does Venezuela fit in?

Well, according to the US Department of State, predominantly in the trafficking of cocaine, about 10 to 13% of the world supply, but worth pointing out, cocaine is not the number one overdose killer in

the United States. That would be fentinyl, which kills roughly 80,000 Americans each year. cocaine, less than half that amount. And again, only a small proportion of that attributable to

Venezuela, which brings us back to the original question.

>> It's the wrong location, wrong destination, wrong drugs. It really does raise a lot of questions of why is the administration doing this?

>> The US and Venezuela are not friends.

Trump has openly accused the Venezuelan government as being infiltrated by terrorist organizations to the point where effectively the head of state is the head of a terrorist organization.

Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro and indicted narot terrorist. The US

government even put a bounty on his head recently doubled to $50 million for any information leading to Maduro's capture.

We're not going to have a cartel operating or dis masquerading as a government operating in our own hemisphere.

>> Venezuela is in fact one of very few countries in the world whose leader the US doesn't even officially recognize.

Like I can think of only three examples.

The Taliban in Afghanistan, Alexander Lucenko in Bellarus, and then there's Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela. The US

believes he cheated to win the last election and allowing this and other kinds of criminality risks creating broader problems. >> There is a whole nexus of of other types

of illegality that really quite frankly affects not just not even particularly the United States but strengthens US enemies but also weakens regional

neighbors. Brazil, Gana, uh other

neighbors. Brazil, Gana, uh other countries are also affected by this uh illicit economy and commerce that has really grown up uh in Venezuela under the Nicolas Maduro government and

before.

>> But even in all these regards, Venezuela itself is not unique. Corruption and

authoritarianism are not uniquely Venezuelan problems. So why single them out? Well, there's a number of

out? Well, there's a number of interpretations, and one of them, of course, has to do with uh its uh oil and mineral wealth.

>> Venezuela sits on the world's largest known oil reserves. Somewhere in the ballpark of 300 billion barrels of oil, mapped underground, and extractable. Not

even Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, has reserves this large.

>> It also has abundant reserves of gold and of other minerals, including rare earth minerals, which are quite important. There's a strategic element

important. There's a strategic element in controlling Venezuela and in not letting other superpowers such as China and Russia control Venezuela.

>> And this is where the Venezuela problem for the US potentially touches on a much bigger issue that isn't really about drugs or regime change at all.

There are two ways to think about this triangle of the United States, Venezuela, and a much larger competitor to the US like China. One is that

hurting Venezuela hurts China. Consider,

for example, that as the US continued to air strike Venezuelan boats, China picked a side, accusing the US of undermining peace and stability in Latin America and the Caribbean. What China

doesn't say in that statement is that the US is undermining the peace and stability China is trying to build.

Consider that almost all of what Venezuela exports is oil. And

Venezuela's biggest buyer of that oil, you guessed it, China. Chinese firms

have deep stakes in Venezuela's energy sector.

>> China imported 500,000 barrels of oil per day from Venezuela in February.

>> Beijing has also lent Maduro's government around $60 billion to help prop up the economy. It has tens of billions of dollars in investment broadly in loans, in infrastructure, and

so you can certainly make this argument that undermining Venezuela undermines China, but it could also do the opposite.

>> It's not clear that there is a strategy here. In fact, it's very clear there is

here. In fact, it's very clear there is no strategy in terms of a new Venezuela policy. Because if history has shown

policy. Because if history has shown anything at all, it's that decades of bad blood, sanctions, provocative posturing, bounties, criminal charges, maximum pressure. It hasn't come

maximum pressure. It hasn't come anywhere close to achieving what the US had hoped >> when these sanctions were applied.

Instead, what we saw was kind of a rallying around the mal government. And

the mal government took this as an opportunity to really consolidate its control over its own party and other state institutions.

>> It didn't work. Maduro's still there.

So, if this is a pretext for trying to take out Maduro, it's a really big gamble.

>> A gamble, too, because maybe hurting Venezuela doesn't hurt China at all. It

just pushes the two closer together. And

this has already happened. Beijing

recently upgrading its relationship with Venezuela to the highest possible level an all-weather strategic partnership which is basically besties an

unconditional enduring cooperation.

>> The mother government has become increasingly indebted to China in recent years because it has become so much more isolated from other countries due to economic sanctions.

>> Almost all Chinese arm sales to Latin America go straight to Venezuela.

planes, armored vehicles, artillery, anti-hship missiles, weapons flow in, oil flows out. And I'm not saying anything the US government hasn't

already figured out for itself. So,

let's consider one more reason which might explain why Venezuela.

[Music] If there's one uncontroversial thing to say about Donald Trump, it's that he understands the value of playing to a crowd.

>> It's more about performance than about politics. It's about what they're a

politics. It's about what they're a being able to convince their voters that they are doing and that they're being tough on the people that their voters want them to be tough on. An important

point I think almost all the experts we spoke to for this story underlined is how many Venezuelans live in the United States and primarily in the state of Florida, a major swing state where in

some cities almost half of the population is Venezuelan and overwhelmingly anti- Maduro. If you ask Americans what do you think of

Venezuela's president? Among the 50% who

Venezuela's president? Among the 50% who have an opinion, 44 out of 50 dislike him. Venezuela has plummeted into

him. Venezuela has plummeted into political and economic calamity following decades of corruption.

>> Nicolas Maduro is an indicted drug trafficker in the United States and he's a fugitive of American justice. Rubio

pushed for the maximum pressure strategy on Venuel in the first administration and I think that he really now wants to finish his job and he has a lot of power and authority himself uh in the administration

>> and you could extract many versions of this point as upsides to making a punching bag of Venezuela. Is it about exploiting the weakness of a socialist

state?

>> Comrade Kamla announced that she wants to institute socialist price controls.

you saw that never worked before, never ever worked. This is the Maduro plan.

ever worked. This is the Maduro plan.

>> Or is it about consolidating power in a way that helps achieve other parts of Trump's agenda?

>> Perhaps the most important related to recent challenges the government has faced using the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans in the United States.

But since he's faced multiple challenges in the courts, largely having to do with the fact that we are not in a military or war conflict with Venezuela. So

provoking or even just performing a military conflict off of Venezuela's coast could provide evidence for the Trump administration that we are at war with Venezuela when the Supreme Court picks up this case again. Right? So it

provides Trump another weapon in his arsenal to deport without due process.

>> But you can game those kinds of things out infinitely. A much simpler

out infinitely. A much simpler explanation for these American attacks on Venezuela is that they show strength applied with impunity.

That's a powerful message, a powerful deterrent, and a powerful example for anyone and everyone watching.

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