American jets and drones are now blowing up small boats in the Caribbean—vessels Washington labels “drug-trafficking boats,” though Venezuelan officials argue many are fishing or migrant vessels. What is certain is that people are dying at sea without trial, sometimes without identification, in the name of a new phase of the war on drugs. The central issue, however, is not narcotics. It is the reshaping of power in the Western Hemisphere.

President Trump’s campaign against Nicolás Maduro shows how the war on drugs functions as a political technology: it strips targets of their humanity, narrows political options to military coercion, and provides moral cover for restructuring a country’s political economy around U.S. interests. Europe, China, and Russia matter in this drama, but primarily as contextual actors.

The administration publicly frames its actions as tough law enforcement—intercepting “narco-boats,” dismantling cartels, and preventing drugs from reaching American shores. Yet on the water and in the air, it looks unmistakably like war. Carrier groups, amphibious ships, and thousands of personnel have transformed parts of the Caribbean into a low-visibility theater where suspected smugglers are treated not as criminal suspects but as wartime combatants.

The legal framing reinforces this shift: by designating Venezuelan gangs and alleged state-linked networks as entities akin to terrorists, the U.S. moves them from the realm of crime into the arena of national security. Once that boundary collapses, sanctions, extraterritorial prosecutions, and lethal force can be justified without the evidentiary burden and procedural constraints of criminal law.

This fusion of drug policy and counterterrorism erases the threshold for extraordinary measures. Maritime killings become “precision strikes.” Planning for potential operations inside Venezuela becomes, in official language, a logical extension of a defensive campaign. And as the language shifts, so does the political reality: the U.S. is steadily normalizing militarized interventions in a region long shaped by its power.

Much of this is tied to structural stakes. Venezuela possesses the world’s largest proven oil reserves, and for more than a century, U.S. dominance in the hemisphere has rested on control over energy markets and investment regimes. Governments that challenge U.S. preferences on ownership, pricing, or geopolitical alignment often face pressure packaged in the language of democracy, stability, or anti-communism. The current strategy fits that tradition. Negotiations once sought to exchange limited sanctions relief for electoral reforms and a recalibration of Caracas’s partnerships with Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran. When those talks stalled, Washington escalated both military pressure and economic sanctions on oil and finance.

In this context, the war on drugs performs invaluable ideological labor: it recasts a resource and power struggle as a moral crusade. Instead of openly arguing that the U.S. prefers a government committed to privatization and alignment with American strategic priorities, officials describe Maduro’s state as a criminal enterprise. The deeper goal is to reanchor Venezuela in a U.S.-centered economic and security order and to signal that defiance will be disciplined.

This is one reason María Corina Machado—courageous in her opposition to authoritarian abuses—has become Washington’s preferred successor. Her program centers explicitly on sweeping privatization, deep liberalization, and a nearly total geopolitical pivot toward the U.S. and away from China and Russia. For years, she has advocated dismantling the existing economic model through expansive privatization of PDVSA, the sale or closure of state enterprises, reentry into global financial markets, and a foreign-policy realignment that places Venezuela squarely within the American orbit. In presentations to U.S. officials and business audiences, she frames a post-Maduro Venezuela as an unparalleled opportunity for foreign capital—contingent on sanctions relief and swift execution of her reform agenda.

The war on drugs helps pave the ideological ground for that transition. By depicting the current state as a criminal syndicate, it makes rejection of the entire political-economic model appear morally imperative. By elevating a pro-market, pro-U.S. reformer as the face of democracy, it fuses political liberalization with a profoundly unequal economic overhaul. The script is familiar: criminalize the incumbent regime, sanctify a U.S.-friendly alternative, and deploy sanctions and military pressure to make that pathway appear inevitable.

Europe, China, and Russia form the surrounding chorus rather than the driving force. European governments denounce Venezuela’s elections as neither free nor fair and impose targeted sanctions, even as their energy companies quietly anticipate future openings. Their public posture combines human-rights rhetoric with pragmatic hedging.

China and Russia operate from an even more pragmatic calculus. Beijing has shifted from large oil-backed loans to cautious joint ventures and technology contracts; Moscow, constrained by the war in Ukraine, offers limited military and diplomatic support. Both oppose U.S.-led regime change in principle but appear prepared to adapt to any government that protects their contracts and interests. In this landscape, the war on drugs allows Washington to claim a unique moral legitimacy, casting itself as the actor willing to “fight crime” while presenting Russian and Chinese engagement as opportunistic or malign.

But beneath all of this lies a darker, more enduring logic. In decades of global drug-war research, the pattern is consistent: once drug policy is militarized, it becomes a tool of dehumanization. It reclassifies entire populations as less than fully human—urban poor in Manila, coca farmers in Colombia, small-boat crews in the Caribbean. Once labeled “drug traffickers” in a war context, individuals lose the protections that should attach to personhood. Extrajudicial killings can be rationalized as a necessary force. Disappearances become unfortunate but acceptable incidents in a righteous campaign. And the erosion never stays confined to those first targeted; it radiates outward, ensnaring protesters, migrants, and anyone cast as a threat to order.

Layer this logic atop Venezuela’s own repressive apparatus, and the picture becomes even more fraught. Maduro’s government holds political prisoners and has documented cases of serious abuses by security forces. Injecting U.S.-led militarized counternarcotics into this environment risks trapping ordinary Venezuelans between two systems of coercion—one domestic, one foreign.

Rejecting Maduro’s authoritarianism does not require embracing Trump’s march toward militarization or Machado’s rapid-fire vision of neoliberal transition. A different path begins by discarding the war-on-drugs framework altogether. Combating narcotics is legitimate, but not through secret kill lists, maritime executions, or military operations disguised as law enforcement. These practices should end, and preparations for ground operations should be taken off the table. Sanctions and diplomacy should instead be anchored in human rights: targeted measures against those responsible for abuses and corruption, humanitarian carve-outs robust enough to prevent mass suffering, and support for domestic democratic actors who seek change without external domination.

Any transition labeled “democratic” must place social and economic rights at its core. Elections alone cannot legitimize a transformation that deepens inequality or hands the country’s resources to foreign investors at fire-sale prices. A Venezuela rebuilt as an unequal petro-state under external guidance would merely seed the next authoritarian cycle.

Trump’s Venezuela strategy is not about drugs. It is about disciplining a disobedient state, reallocating control over strategic resources, and reasserting American primacy in a region Washington still treats as its sphere of influence. The war on drugs supplies the language that makes this project appear moral. Any serious debate must cut through that narrative and center the rights, agency, and dignity of Venezuelans themselves.