Trump and Rubio's Splendid Little War
The Caribbean is the new Gulf of Tonkin
November 3, 2025
By Marc Cooper
In the world of global drug trafficking, there are three types of countries. Drug producers. Transit point countries, and countries that are major consumer markets. Some play dual roles. Mexico both produces illicit drugs and transports them to the U.S. which is the largest dope consumer market in the world.
The U.S. is also a major transit point funneling and transporting illegal drugs from third countries into Canada.
By the current logic of the Trump administration, the Royal Canadian Navy and Air Force would be fully justified in bombing any U.S. sea vessels off the cost of Maine or British Columbia, even small motor boats, and incinerating everybody on board. Canada would also be justified in launching air strikes on U.S. ground facilities like drug warehouses and airports and airstrips used by American smugglers to transport drugs northward across the border.
This is exactly what the Trump administration is doing now to Venezuela. No question that Venezuela’s president is an authoritarian brute who was fraudulently elected. But Venezuela is only a small if not insignificant player as a minor transit point for drugs produced elsewhere to be transported into the U.S.
The current “war” Trump and his Secretary of State Rubi are waging against Venezuela is based on a grotesque falsification of reality. Neither cocaine nor fentanyl is produced in any meaningful quantity in Venezuela. Colombia and Mexico have the corner on that production process and Mexico dominates transport via its network of vast criminal cartels. Peru and Bolivia also produce significant chunks of cocaine that enter the U.S. across the Mexican border.
And lurking behind all fentanyl production are our sometimes friends in China who produce and supply the near totality of the mandatory precursor chemicals. If you wanted to bomb your way out of the voracious fentanyl crisis in the U.S. you would have to go to the root and start nuking targets in China. And it might be a good idea to dampen the consumer market in the U.S. by doing something about the de-industrialization of the heartland and the plague of poverty and hopelessness in rotting urban centers on which these hard dugs feed.
But that would take a lot of political will, work, determination and domestic spending. It’s a lot easier to target small speed boats and use the most powerful navy on the seas to obliterate them with deadly drones launched from miles away. A full 20% of the U.S. Navy is now cruising the coasts of Venezuela while more than 10,000 combat troops - so far- are stationed nearby. This while the press has revealed and the administration has confirmed that covert CIA teams have been combing Venezuela identifying “land targets” that would be the focus of further U.S. air strikes and possible land invasions.
The entire narrative coming from the White House is one big fabrication and reeks of the same sort of mendacity and outright lying that sparked the war in Vietnam when the Johnson administration claimed American ships were under attack from Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. A total bullshit story that took years and thousands of lives to reveal as a fairy tale.
Over the last two months, the U.S. Navy has killed some 65 unidentified people by blowing up 15 small speed boats off the Venezuelan coast without any confirmation of who the victims were, where the boats were going and what exactly they were carrying. And absolutely no evidence has been presented that these were, in fact, drug transports. We are just supposed to believe what we are told by an administration that emits dozens of lies every day of the week.
And even if the allegation that these small boats — like ants to elephants compared to the massive American warships from which the lethal drones are launched— were in fact loaded with fentanyl and coke, their elimination would have about zero impact on the gargantuan consumption of of these drugs in the United States. Even if true, since when has being a drug mule get you a summary death sentence with no judicial intervention?
The only laws we know FOR SURE that are bing broken here are U.S. domestic law and the international law of the seas by the Trump administration who is willy nilly killing dozens of people without any proof of anything.
Let’s be clear, if the U.S. really wanted to know what was going on with the small speed boats, it certainly has the technical capacity to interdict them and inspect them. Sixty years ago the U.S. Navy had the firepower to peacefully interdict mammoth Russian freighters headed to Cuba carrying supplies for nuclear missiles and turn them back.. Six decades later the mighty American Navy is now incapable of intercepting a handful of 25 foot speedboats? Come on, guys, you can lie better than that.
Or maybe the U.S. doesn’t really want to know what’s on board….it’s easier to just say they are carrying drugs and everyone on board is subject to summary execution. Who knows what they would find: fentanyl, fish or the missing weapons of mass destruction (remember those)?
There is no reason to take the administration at its word, unless you caught a load of shrapnel in your head and were left as addled as Mad King Trump and his loathsome Prince Marco.
If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, unprovoked war is the last refuge of the patriotic. Especially war against Venezuela which has a corrupt government but has never represented a threat to the U.S. nor been any more than a bit player is the U.S. drug epidemic. Yet, with its regime first under former Army officer Hugo Chavez and now under his hand picked successor Nicolas Maduro boasting that they represent some sort of socialism (not true) and with their heated anti-American populist rhetoric, they have been demonized in the popular consciousness for the last two decades.
The last year has seen s sharp escalation of this rhetoric from Washington, claiming, falsely, that the current persecution of Latino immigrants is somehow aimed at the “terrorist” Tren de Aragua” gang that Trump —- again falsely— claims in a formal arm of the Maduro regime.
Similar concoctions were manufactured by Washington to justify the Indochinese War and the backing of death squad forces and dictatorial governments in Central America in the 1980’s.
So here we are back to the good old days of Gunboat Diplomacy, the days of an imperial Washington whose manifold interventions in Latin America over the last century or so have failed and often created bloody backfires.
It’s obvious that this budding U.S. intervention in Venezuela has nothing to do with drugs nor building democracy but is rather aimed at overthrowing the regime and bringing back the severed head of Nicolas Maduro for Trump to parade around with as a trophy. Perhaps that would give small float to his sinking favorability ratings.
Topping it all off, this week the addled president is mumbling about sending U.S. troops to Nigeria to “defend Christians” against Islamist groups. This all makes Dixk Nixon sound like a sober, grounded statesman.
In the current scenario, the Venezuelan adventure seems to be spearheaded by Little Marco Rubio, son of a Cuban exile family and long time antagonist of the radical —and failed— Venezuelan regimes. It seems unlikely that the Mad King thought all this up on his own. It looks more like Rubio trying to grab a brass ring to succeed Trump once the Old Man has one cheeseburger too many,
The clearly impaired and dazed president is being manipulated by his closest advisors to sign off and back their own pet projects. Stephen Miller is running the deportation nightmare. Russel Vought is steamrolling the federal government, and General Rubio is reliving the proxy wars in Latin America of forty years ago. Just hustle Trump a bit, tell him how smart he is and what to say and get him to sign off on your favorite atrocity before he falls back asleep.
Venezuela is no Grenada nor even a Cuba of 1898. It is a fairly developed country of almost 30 million people (not counting the 8 million who have fled the Chavez-Maduro autocracy) and it is highly unlikely this intervention would be a cakewalk as Iraq was supposed to be.
We have our own autocratic regime to deal with and one on the precipice of waging yet another war under false pretenses and ignoring the hard lessons we should have learned from prior international imperial adventures.
Almost as a P.S. I will refer to congress, who under the post-Vietnam War Powers Act, must give or deny permission to the president to carry out warfare on his own beyond 60 days. And that time period just elapsed. But no problem, the Department of Justice, now staffed by Donald Trump’s former criminal defense lawyers, informed whoever is still left in congress that the War Powers Act does not apply to the ongoing obliteration of the Venezuelan motor boats because no U.S. military personnel are at risk, so fire away! +++