The arrival of the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford in the US Southern Command area of operations has sparked a new wave of rumors that the president Donald Trump I would be about to order an invasion of Venezuela.
However, although a lightning airstrike is very possible, a US military invasion is less likely today than it was two weeks ago.
The reason? American domestic politics. Trump’s Republican Party’s crushing defeat in the Nov. 4 state and local elections will force the president to focus more on domestic issues, and to shelve any plans to become involved in a potentially protracted foreign conflict.
The resounding Democratic victories in the gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, as well as other national races, were a blow to Trump’s party. The candidates he supported not only lost some elections, but practically all of them.
Trump himself admitted that it was a bad night for the Republican Party. Exit polls showed that it was a vote to punish the president for the increase in the cost of living.
Now, even key figures in Trump’s own MAGA movement are demanding that the president devote less time to foreign policy, and more to solve problems at home.
Donald Trump salutes during a Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.
Reuters
“The White House is going to focus more on domestic policy,” declared Trump’s former strategist. Steve Bannonto the portal Politico a few hours after the November 4 elections. Bannon said that “spending so much time in the Middle East, spending so much time in Ukraine” hurt the president politically.
Which brings us back to Venezuela. There is no doubt that the arrival of the USS Ford aircraft carrier closer to Venezuela means an escalation in Trump’s military pressure on the drug cartels and the Venezuelan dictator. Nicolas Madurowhom the US Government has officially declared a “narcoterrorist.”
The aircraft carrier will join a flotilla of at least eight warships and more than 10,000 troops that Trump has sent to the Caribbean. The US naval force has already sunk at least 19 vessels belonging to suspected drug traffickers, causing the deaths of 76 people, according to the Department of Defense.
Such a military deployment is already too large (and costly) for Trump to back down without firing a single shot at a target in Venezuela, US military experts tell me.
But the most likely scenario is not a large-scale ground invasion to topple Maduro (like the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama that toppled the late dictator Manuel A. Noriega), but a lightning airstrike against a drug laboratory or a military installation.
Former head of US Southern Command, retired admiral James Stavridistold me in an extensive interview that internal American factors, such as the anti-Trump vote in the November 4 elections, have significantly reduced his expectations of a massive invasion of Venezuela.
Nicolás Maduro in Caracas during a march.
Reuters
“The internal instability here in the United States is diverting attention from the situation in the south,” he told me. Stavridis added that the longer the USS Ford remains in the Caribbean without seeing action, the greater the likelihood that you will be redirected to another part of the world.
“We only have eleven carriers of this type in the entire US Navy, and a third of them are usually in maintenance,” Stavridis told me. “It’s a very valuable resource. If you’re not going to use it, you move it somewhere else.”
Ultimately, the arrival of the USS Ford has increased the chances of an American attack.
But after the defeat of Trump’s party in the November 4 elections, it will most likely be a rapid attack with drones or Tomahawk missiles such as the recent US bombing of the Fordo uranium enrichment base in Iran.
In other words, a lightning airstrike that Trump could try to sell as a show of force, tweet about it, and move on to something else.