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By Tom O'ConnorShareNewsweek is a Trust Project memberAs President Donald Trump ramps up diplomatic efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war, a steady stream of reports indicate the White House may be planning its own form of "special military operation," as Moscow refers to the conflict, to quickly topple Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
And while analysts believe that Maduro's position, undermined by accusations of election rigging and complicity in transnational drug trafficking, may prove less resilient in the face of foreign hostilities than that of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, observers also suggest that even his swift ousting may be followed by a prolonged period of insurgency and other measures waged by loyalists and armed allies.
Such a campaign could serve as a potentially even greater test to Washington and a nascent partner attempting to establish itself in Caracas.
"The Venezuelan security forces have been training since the [former President Hugo] Chávez years for asymmetrical warfare, knowing that they cannot hope to hold off a conventional attack by the U.S. for more than a few days at best," Phil Gunson, Caracas-based senior analyst for the Andes region at the International Crisis Group think tank, told Newsweek. "The idea is to deter an intervention with a credible threat of long-term instability, including guerrilla-type attacks and sabotage."
"How many of them would really engage in this type of thing, and for how long, is hard to assess," he said. "But it doesn't take a very large insurgent group to inflict considerable damage, especially if the incoming government is already struggling to stabilize the economy, dominate the bureaucracy and manage the high expectations of its supporters."
...'Every Element of American Power'
Washington and Caracas have been at odds since the rise of Maduro's predecessor, Chávez, who came to power in 1999 and led a "Bolivarian Revolution" of socialist reforms and opposition to U.S. influence in the region.
Following an election in 2018 in which Maduro claimed victory, the U.S., then under the first Trump administration, severed ties and instead recognized then-National Assembly leader Juan Guaidó as the country's leader.
Guaidó attempted to seize power in April 2019 in a failed uprising that saw much of Maduro's inner circle and security forces remain loyal to his administration.
Maduro, meanwhile, remained in power and attempts by the U.S. to empower opposition factions through dialogue repeatedly unraveled.
When new elections were held in July of last year, Maduro again declared victory, prompting a new wave of condemnations from the U.S. and a number of Latin American and European countries, who instead named his rival, Edmundo González, as the true winner. González later fled to Spain as the Maduro administration sought his arrest.
When Trump returned to office earlier this year, he pursued a dual strategy of raising pressure and pursuing diplomatic inroads with Maduro. This, too failed to produce results and tensions between the two nations have since escalated rapidly in recent months.
The U.S. has amassed a formidable fleet of war-fighting assets in the Caribbean, including the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group, and has reactivated bases in Panama and Puerto Rico, boosting an already robust network of military installations in the region.
CNN and Reuters have cited unnamed U.S. officials who indicated that operations, including covert action, could be launched imminently on Venezuelan territory.
Trump administration officials have also publicly announced the U.S. would designate the Cartel of the Suns, or Cartel de los Soles, the alleged network of state-sponsored actors involved in narco-trafficking and other illicit activities, as a foreign terrorist organization, potentially opening new pathways for U.S. action in Venezuela.
These moves have been met with firm opposition from the Venezuelan government, which denies the existence of the Cartel of the Suns and any government connections to the various criminal or militant organizations active in the region. Meanwhile, Maduro has claimed to have mobilized up to 4.5 million militia members to aid the approximately 100,000-strong armed forces in the event of a conflict and repeatedly appealed for peace.
Newsweek has reached out to representatives of the Venezuelan government for comment.
Contacted for comment, a senior U.S. administration official told Newsweek that "President Trump has been clear in his message to Maduro: stop sending drugs and criminals to our country."
"President Trump is prepared to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding the Caribbean," the official added.
Shock and Awe in the Caribbean
Few anticipate the kind of large-scale U.S. invasion witnessed in Iraq in March 2003, given the disparity between the number of U.S. forces currently operating in the region and the size of Venezuela and its armed forces. Yet some feel that even limited action could prompt a major collapse in the defenders' ranks, not unlike the "shock and awe" campaign that decimated the Iraq military resistance more than two decades ago and much further from U.S. soil.
Evan Ellis, research professor of Latin American studies at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, argued that most Venezuelan military personnel would "probably initially keep their heads down to avoid unnecessarily dying for a leader they know is not legitimate," significantly limiting traditional risks faced by U.S. forces in the opening phases of a conflict to just a few notable factors.
"For airstrikes and subsequent fixed-wing aircraft missions from the Ford, from Puerto Rico, or from the continental United States, accessing targets in the interior of Venezuela would require a few minutes of additional flight time," Ellis told Newsweek. "For operations to seize particular objectives in the interior, the transit of Marines or special operators via helicopter or V-22 would be longer, with some possible vulnerabilities to man-portable anti-aircraft missiles if those vehicles were flying low." The V-22 is a tilt-rotor military transport and cargo aircraft.
"For rapid initial operations, the distances might make 'driving in' unrealistic, particularly in the Orinoco basin, as in Colombian and the Amazon, riverine operations, which the Marines and U.S. special operators have significant talent in, might be a larger factor than it has been in U.S. deployments elsewhere in the world," he said. "In jungle terrain, opportunities for concealment of enemy forces from UAVs [uncrewed aerial vehicles] would be greater than it has been in places like the Ukraine, but this is a matter for different kinds of UAVs with different sensors."
Overall, Ellis, who previously served as a member of the State Department's planning staff on Latin America and the Caribbean, argued that the capabilities of Venezuela's armed forces have been largely overstated in media reports, with minor threats being limited to Russia-supplied anti-air platforms such as the long-range S-300, the shorter-range Pantsir S-1 and Buk-M2E and shoulder-held Igla-S. He felt enemy warplanes such as Russia's Su-30 and a batch of U.S. F-16s sold to Venezuela in the 1980s would prove severely outmatched should they attempt to deploy.
José Colina, a retired Venezuelan military officer who serves as president of the Miami-based Political Persecuted Venezuelans in Exile dissident group, similarly felt the country's armed forces were in no state to take on the U.S. in a conventional confrontation.
"The Venezuelan military has no real capability to react militarily against the United States; it lacks both the equipment and the proper training," Colina told Newsweek. "Most of its weaponry, which is primarily Russian, Chinese, and Iranian, is highly outdated, and the only thing they can somewhat rely on are the Iranian drones. However, due to the lack of training in their use, these are not very useful either."
"The army is not even capable of fighting the internal paramilitary groups operating within the country," he said, "much less the best-equipped military in the world."
...A Jungle Insurgency
Ellis and Colina also pointed to the presence of paramilitary groups as a potentially complicating factor for long-term efforts to stabilize the country should Maduro be pushed out of power with the help of U.S. force.
The primary entities they saw as capable of aiding Maduro loyalist efforts against the legitimacy of the new administration were far-left Colombian militias such as the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), both of which are known to have established a presence in Venezuela.
"I am absolutely convinced that in the event of a U.S. attack—which I do not see as very likely—the Venezuelan military would not defend Nicolás Maduro, and the most radical ones would flee the country," Colina said. "What will happen is that the military personnel who oppose Maduro would take control and focus on trying to neutralize the foreign groups within Venezuela, such as the ELN and the FARC, who would surely seek to defend Maduro."
"If this conflict drags on over time," he added, "it could lead to more Venezuelans fleeing to other countries to escape the conflict, which would continue the instability in the region."
Ellis, for his part, envisioned a possible scenario that would involve such non-state forces, in partnership with a "radicalized Bolivarian Guard, militia and other elements who had 'gone to ground' per the Cuban-style military doctrine implemented since the time of Hugo Chávez, plus 'instigators,' probably mostly Cuban and Russian, seeking to wreak chaos by sabotaging refineries and other infrastructure, to block consolidation of the democratic regime with rule of law, and deny its ability to reactivate the economy, particularly through access to the country's enormous oil and mining resources."
The U.S. has had success in aiding counterinsurgency operations in the region, namely through backing former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe's efforts to combat the ELN, FARC and other militias. But both Venezuela's geography and its weak security institutions may also frustrate attempts to quickly and efficiently establish robust governance capable of countering the presence of dug-in adversarial forces.
"Venezuela is twice the size of Iraq, for example," Gunson, the Crisis Group expert, said. "It's a very highly urbanized country, with most of the population crammed into the north-central coastal belt. There's a good network of roads across the northern half—that's to say, north of the Orinoco river—but south of that you have huge stretches of rainforest and savannah. The west is dominated by the north-eastern spur of the Andes, which rise to over 15,000 feet near the city of Merida."
"The other key point is that armed groups of various kinds hold sway in some parts, both urban and rural," he added. "Armed Chavista gangs are well entrenched in a number of urban barrios, Colombian guerrillas (especially the ELN) dominate the border regions and have a strong presence in the 'mining arc' (northern Bolivar state) and well-armed criminal groups are also likely to challenge any attempt to reintroduce the rule of law."
Even if Washington were to step up in support of a new government, he argued that neither "the U.S. nor anyone else is going to send troops to deal with internal security if the Maduro government falls," so "an incoming regime will be dependent on the current security forces, with all that that implies."
"They currently keep the peace through a combination of repression and complicity with non-state armed groups," Gunson said. "They are also deeply corrupt, poorly armed and trained and—to a degree—probably not particularly inclined to cooperate with a government led by [Venezuelan opposition leader María] Machado."
...Caracas in 72 Hours
The sheer scale of the challenges associated with such an intervention have drawn comparisons not only to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, where deadly insurgency persisted long after the fall of then-President Saddam Hussein, but also the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Mark Hertling, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general who served as a commander during the 2007-2009 troop surge in Iraq, outlined the analogy in a recent piece published in The Bulwark and shared with Newsweek.
"In February 2022, Russia attempted to topple the Ukrainian government with a rapid 'decapitation strike'—a blitz of missiles, air attacks, special-operations raids, and armored thrusts designed to seize Kyiv within days," Hertling wrote. "The Kremlin believed Ukraine would fold and their government could be replaced: regime change. Instead, Ukrainian command centers survived, air defenses adapted, political leadership rallied, and a nation mobilized to resist. Geography, resilience, and sheer determination turned a planned 72-hour operation into a multi-year war that continues and has cost Russia dearly."
"Venezuela’s geography and political structure offer the same kind of strategic depth to a defending regime—but on even more favorable terms," he added. "Venezuela is larger than Ukraine. It has a more varied terrain for dispersal and concealment. And like Ukraine, which is still fighting for its survival against a foreign invader that was perceived to be one of the strongest and largest armies in the world, Venezuela would be resisting an external assault by the world’s most powerful military—an attack almost guaranteed to produce nationalist backlash, irregular fighting, and regional outrage."
Though a number of Latin American nations have sided with Venezuelan's opposition over Maduro in the ongoing presidential crisis, key countries such as Brazil and Colombia have voiced opposition to military intervention. Mexico, which has spoken out against threats of potential U.S. strikes against cartels on its own soil, has also criticized the potential use of force against Venezuela.
Reid Smith, vice president of foreign policy at the Stand Together advocacy group, argued that U.S. intervention would only bolster Maduro's nationalist narrative, galvanizing local and regional support.
"Politically, the regime’s best weapon is nationalism. They’ll frame this as another chapter of U.S. gunboat diplomacy, rally their base, and dare regional governments to be seen as Trump’s accomplices," Reid told Newsweek. "Tensions are already spiked by the speedboat attacks [by Washington on alleged drug boats in the region] and it could become a cause célèbre for every irregular group in the hemisphere. Nothing cements support for an unpopular regime like getting bombed by los Yanquis."
"Even in a successful regime-change scenario, there is a serious risk of protracted instability," he said. "You’d have armed loyalists, criminal gangs, and guerrillas all competing for territory and resources. That’s a recipe for a chronic security problem that bleeds into Colombia, the Caribbean, and the U.S. through refugee flows and illicit trafficking."
Beyond the tactical pitfalls for the U.S. and its partners, which he argued could include clashes in sparsely populated territories south of the Orinoco and crowded, hilly urban centers that evoke past confrontations with militants in Iraqi cities like Mosul and Fallujah, he warned that serious questions surround the extent to which the White House would be committed to a new nation-building project—the likes of which Trump has often rallied against.
"U.S. planners can dominate the early phases (strikes on air defenses, command nodes, and regime units), but the real problem is political," Reid said. "Who governs the day after, how do you deal with pro-Maduro militias, criminal networks, and other entrepreneurial actors who just want to fight American interlopers?"
"And how long are Americans willing to own the consequences?" he added. "I don’t imagine you can just jump start a Jeffersonian republic that’s been hollowed out by 30 years Chavismo."
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