Last week, President Trump ordered an aircraft carrier strike group into the waters off Venezuela. The deployment of the USS Gerald R. Ford, the Navy’s most advanced aircraft carrier, and all the warships that accompany it is the strongest sign yet that the Trump administration intends to escalate its operations in the region.
It comes after US forces struck at least ten boats the administration claims were smuggling drugs from Venezuela, and after the president authorized covert CIA operations against the Venezuelan government run by President Nicolas Maduro.
Publicly, this mobilization of US forces is solely an effort to disrupt the flow of deadly drugs into the United States. Trump and his team have cited the ongoing fentanyl epidemic to justify the airstrikes on those alleged drug boats. As the administration frames it, the men on these boats are terrorists who are, in essence, attacking Americans by flooding this country with fentanyl—an extremely potent synthetic opioid. And, therefore, the airstrikes that took them out were straightforward acts of self-defense.
However, this excuse completely falls apart with even the slightest look into how American users are getting their fentanyl.
It turns out, it’s not much of a mystery. Fentanyl is synthetic, meaning it’s produced in a lab rather than being derived from a plant like heroin or cocaine. Most of the black-market fentanyl Americans are consuming is being made in clandestine labs in Mexico with chemicals shipped from China or India. In fact, those precursor chemicals are often shipped to Canada or the US and then smuggled into Mexico, to obscure their origin, where they’re then used to produce fentanyl that is smuggled back into the US.
And how is it smuggled into the US? According to the DEA and data from CBP and the US Sentencing Commission, the vast majority of illicit fentanyl entering the country is hidden in vehicles being driven across the southern border at legal ports of entry, mainly by young men with US citizenship.
That makes a lot of sense. Because fentanyl is so potent, a lot of demand can be met from a comparatively small stash that is relatively easy to hide in vehicles. And it is easier to conceal a small stash of drugs on a legal traveler or in a cache of legal goods than it is to hide an entire group of smugglers attempting to cross the border illegally.
So, again, according to the DEA, most of the illicit fentanyl Americans are consuming is being produced in Mexico and then driven over the border at legal crossings, mainly into Arizona and California, where it is then transported by car to dealers across the country.
Nowhere in the DEA’s eighty-page 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment, detailing the current state of the illicit drug trade, are maritime smuggling routes off the coast of Venezuela even mentioned. Because that is not how drugs like fentanyl are getting to the US.
That doesn’t necessarily mean these were innocent fishing vessels. These boats were operating along known drug smuggling routes. But, specifically, the waters and islands off of Venezuela’s coast are mainly used to smuggle cocaine from Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru to Europe—not the US.
Meaning, if Trump and his team were truly trying to disrupt the flow of fentanyl into the US, they would not be focusing on Venezuela.
The counter-narcotic veneer is likely being trotted out, not because it’s true, but because the administration has determined that it is the most effective way to garner enough public support for the moves it wants to make against the Venezuelan regime.
So what are the real reasons?
As with most things the federal government does, it’s best not to think of a single group bringing this about but of a coalition of interest groups rallying around a policy because it benefits them all in different ways. And there are certainly groups that stand to benefit from a war and/or a regime change in Venezuela.
One clear part of the coalition is ExxonMobil. The energy company has been lobbying hard for the American government to get more aggressive against the current Venezuelan regime since it discovered and began drilling a massive oil deposit in the waters off a disputed region of Guyana that Venezuela claims. Not only would the installation of a US-friendly regime in Caracas secure Exxon’s access to this offshore oil field, it could also result in the company regaining access to Venezuela—the most oil-rich country on Earth—eighteen years after new regulations drove Exxon to pull out of the country entirely.
The Venezuelan opposition, which is set to take power if the current regime falls, has also gone to great lengths to court other well-connected American companies, promising lucrative opportunities to access Venezuela’s consumers and extensive natural resources if Maduro were to fall.
Within the government, there are war hawks who have been trying to bring about regime change in Venezuela for decades. These days, these types have found their champion in Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has helped make confronting Maduro a centerpiece of Trump’s foreign policy and worked hard to push the official US position that the current Venezuelan regime is illegitimate.
Finally, there are the usual suspects at weapons companies and in the various agencies making up the so-called national security state who want to protect their revenue and jobs as Trump tries to wind down the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
All of these motivations for attacking Venezuela or pursuing regime change in Caracas are a lot more coherent and believable than the official explanation that this recent escalation is meant to stop fentanyl smuggling that’s mostly happening three thousand miles away.
If the Trump administration truly believes that attempting another regime change is in the interest of the American people, then they should actually make that case. If they continue to hide behind an obvious lie, it means they know that it isn’t.
