Here’s a little something to keep you up at night:
The United States hasn’t yet declared war on Venezuela—but it’s getting closer. This week, U.S. President Donald Trump issued a blockade on sanctioned ships in and out of Venezuela ports, a decision that led authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro to order his navy to escort other ships in the Caribbean. With a massive U.S. Navy presence nearby, it’s not difficult to imagine an unintended escalation.
What does the White House actually want in Venezuela? What could a war look like? And were Maduro to magically agree to leave the scene, what happens next? James Story, a former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela under both the Trump and Biden administrations, puts the likelihood of U.S. military action in Venezuela at 80 percent. Speaking on FP Live, he said this past week’s blockade “increases the odds of a mistake being made by either side.”
Story has gamed out a range of scenarios for U.S. involvement in Venezuela. What keeps him up at night? “What has kept me up at night, even when I ran counternarcotics in Colombia between 2010 and ’13 and for the Western Hemisphere from 2013 to ’15, is that the 5,000 man-portable shoulder fire and anti-aircraft missiles in the country could fall into the wrong hands and be utilized against commercial aviation. That’s something that really worries me.”
There are dozens of similar scenarios that could spark a shooting war.
Radio transmissions reviewed by CNN show that the pilots of a private jet narrowly avoided a collision with a United States Air Force refueling tanker near Venezuela on Saturday – one day after a similar incident nearby.
The pilots of a Falcon 900EX business jet flying from Aruba to Miami reported the near collision to air traffic controllers in Curaçao shortly after the incident Saturday afternoon, according to audio captured by LiveATC.net.
“They were really close,” one of the pilots told controllers of the encounter at approximately 26,000 feet. “We were climbing right into him,” the unidentified pilot said. “It was big, maybe a 777 or a (767).”
The incident marks the second reported near-collision near Venezuela in two days. On Friday, the pilots of JetBlue flight 1112 from Curaçao to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport radioed controllers that they were forced to abruptly stop their climb after a US Air Force aerial refueling tanker crossed directly in front of their flight path with its position-reporting transponder turned off.
I doubt very seriously that the Trump administration has taken into consideration any potential for mistakes or overreach because they are convinced that all Trump has to do is make threats and swing his stick around and Maduro will abdicate. Maybe that will work. But what comes next is a real conundrum. Let’s just say that they all aren’t going to greet America with flowers and tell them “welcome to our oil fields!”
This is a bubbling crisis that should have all of us very worried. Trump can’t find Venezuela on a map and Hegseth is champing at the bit to go to war. With Trump getting more and more desperate to change the subject I think there’s a very good chance that this is going to happen.
Happy Hollandaise, everyone.