Trump-Maduro face-off: Will the US launch a land operation in Venezuelan territory?

US President Donald Trump has ramped up his rhetoric against the Venezuelan government, threatening to scale up his strikes on alleged drug boats into a possible land operation in the Latin American nation, which could lead to a potential head-to-head confrontation with President Nicolas Maduro. 

Unlike his desire to end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine through negotiations with the warring sides, the Trump administration’s take on Venezuela is very different: an open call to oust Maduro’s socialist government, which has survived since the late 1990s in a country known for one of the biggest oil reserves in the world. 

Trump has recently designated Maduro and his government heads as members of a drug-running gang, the Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns), which the White House has termed a foreign terrorist organisation. Caracas has rejected the accusation, even disputing the existence of Cartel de los Soles. 

While Trump suggested last week that a land operation would “start very soon” and said that the Venezuelan airspace should be considered “closed”, he has not moved on his threat yet. He, however, did hold a phone call with the Venezuelan president in which the American leader allegedly rejected Maduro’s requests. 

But is there a serious possibility that the US will launch a land operation against Venezuela? 

“The likelihood of a Panama or Afghanistan-style operation taking place is low, primarily because Venezuelan territory is extensive and such an intervention would require strategic military support from Colombia,” says Lorena Erazo Patino, a professor of Global Studies at the University of La Salle in Bogota, referring to the US operations in Central America and Asia. 

Patino draws attention to the fact that US relations with Venezuela’s neighbour Colombia, which also has a socialist president in Gustavo Petro, are not currently strong as the Trump administration has recently sanctioned him, adding him to its Office of Foreign Assets Control list. 

As a result, the US can not expect Colombian support for its operations, she says. 

Under current circumstances, the US will probably not launch a “Normandy-style landing”, but rather engage in tightening its naval cordon and the possibility of localised, surgical operations under its controversial counter-narcotics doctrine, according to Patino. 

“This is a strategy of aggressive containment, not territorial invasion,” she tells TRT World. 

The Normandy landings – codenamed Operation Overlord - by Allied troops in 1944 were the decisive point that led to the fall of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II.

In recent days, the US has increased its naval presence in the Caribbean Sea by sending the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, to the region while three B-52 bombers flew near the Venezuelan coast. 

‘A strategic suicide’? 

The US has long seen Latin America as its own backyard since the days of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which advocated American dominance across the region, leading to several military interventions in countries from Mexico to Cuba, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and others. 

But experts see another military engagement in the Latin American region as a very risky move in a time when the world is moving from a unipolar world order under the US to a multipolar global system in which great power competition between Washington, Moscow and Beijing has increased across different continents. 

“It must be noted that a full-scale invasion would be a strategic suicide: it would fracture the continent, unleash a prolonged conflict, and further erode the United States’ already diminished international legitimacy,” warns Alfonso Insuasty Rodriguez, coordinator of the Inter-University Network for Peace and director of the GIDPAD research group at the University of San Buenaventura, Medellin. 

“Everything suggests that a massive invasion of Venezuela would be neither clean, nor swift, nor cheap. The country’s size, its complex geography, and a defence structure with both military and popular components would turn the territory into a theatre of prolonged attrition,” Rodriguez tells TRT World. 

In 1961, the US and its Cuban allies failed in their disastrous Bay of Pigs operation, aiming to oust anti-American Fidel Castro's communist government in Cuba, which has survived till now. Cuba is a staunch supporter of the Maduro government. 

Due to the lingering legacy of past unpopular US interventions, many Latin Americans are not fond of any American presence in their territories as various insurgent groups with particular socialist leanings continue to exist across the region.  

If the US really goes for a land operation in Venezuela territory, these insurgent forces with a long tradition of armed struggle can come into the picture on the side of the Maduro government against American military forces and its allies, according to Rodriguez. 

Psychological warfare 

From this perspective, Rodriguez sees Trump’s threats through the lens of a psychological war against the Maduro government, not as a sign of an imminent invasion of Venezuela. He says that Trump is trying to sow fear, division and internal fractures to weaken the country’s socialist political structure and justify new sanctions on the oil-rich state. 

Other experts also believe that a thorough assessment of Trump’s behavioural history from Gaza to Ukraine and his short trade war with China indicates that he is not willing to engage in “forever wars” as he described during his campaign trail. 

Through his pressure campaign on Maduro, Trump seeks an institutional fracture of the Venezuelan military, motivating generals to launch a palace coup to oust the socialist leader, says Patino, the Bogota-based professor.   

By placing the military option on the table within the US hemisphere, Trump also wants to send a deterrent “global geopolitical message” towards Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran in an attempt at “21st-century reaffirmation of the Monroe Doctrine”, she says. 

Experts also point out a US domestic political factor for Trump’s anti-Maduro and anti-narcotrafficking campaign, which aims to consolidate both conservative base and Hispanic votes whose support in key electoral constituencies in states like Florida is crucial for Republican success in both presidential and congressional elections. 

“The discourse of ‘narcoterrorism’ fulfils the same role once played by anti-communism or the fictitious weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: constructing the moral legitimacy for intervention,” says Rodriguez. 

A land operation threat is “a tool of coercion, regional disciplining and hegemonic reactivation”, aiming not merely to topple Maduro, but to prevent Latin America from consolidating its own horizon in a world moving beyond US unipolar dominance, according to the professor. 

Can Maduro survive Trump’s salvos? 

Since 2013, Maduro, a former bus driver and trade union leader, has survived many sanctions, developing strong relations with Russia, China and other American adversaries like Iran. 

Despite many allegations against him, including election fraud, Maduro continues to enjoy significant support from Venezuela’s middle and lower classes.

Because Venezuela can not win a conventional war against the US, the country has adopted an official doctrine called the ‘Prolonged Popular War’, inspired by Vietnam and Cuba since 2005. 

“In practice, elite units and commanders would likely retreat into difficult terrain such as the Guayana region or the dense border jungle or into highly populated urban centres like Caracas. From there, they could blend into civilian areas and wage an asymmetric campaign,” Patino says. 

The most plausible scenario is a prolonged, decentralised resistance that would make the country extremely hard to govern, she says, adding that a possible intervention might lead to a social panic but not a popular uprising. 

“Civilians would be caught in the crossfire, potentially triggering a new mass displacement similar to the Syrian crisis.”

Maduro has described the US Caribbean deployment, which has not been seen in decades, as “the gravest continental threat in a century”, signalling preparation for a sustained confrontation. 

According to Rodriguez, the Maduro government will bring together different anti-American forces from militias to territorial networks in play, utilising asymmetric warfare tactics, popular mobilisation and its international allies against US forces. 

“This combination would turn Venezuela into a scenario of extended resistance, comparable to what has been seen in Yemen or Iraq, but with greater material capacities and diplomatic backing,” he observes. 

Rodriguez sees Maduro’s survival as safeguarding the regional integration project and the right of peoples to determine their own destiny. 

“To intervene in Venezuela is to attack the very possibility of a sovereign Latin America, with its own voice and multipolar relations.”