US President Donald Trump remains, as ever, a bundle of contradictions. His latest pronouncements on Venezuela illustrate this sharply. He has ordered the airspace and surrounding seas of Venezuela to be “closed in their entirety”, effectively blockading the country in what can only be described as a hostile confrontation short of open war. His language suggests that an armed showdown is not far from the horizon. What has provoked this fury is President Nicolás Maduro Moros and his alleged links with drug cartels. True, Maduro inspires little confidence. He is an autocratic leader who has used state power to cling to his chair. His popularity has dwindled, as was evident during elections that favoured the present leader of the Opposition, Maria Corina Machado. In fact, he had lost the poll and should have gracefully handed power to her. The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to her was, in many ways, a resounding censure of Maduro’s political conduct.
Maduro’s continuance in office is certainly untenable. But the larger question remains: what right does the United States have to blockade an entire nation and threaten military action? Is Trump not skating on thin ice? The enormous naval build-up in the Caribbean raises more questions than answers. Is this really needed to tackle drug traffickers? Is this not akin to using a sledgehammer to crush a mosquito? If Trump hoped to project himself as a no-nonsense crusader against narcotics, that claim evaporated with his own actions. Barely hours before he tightened the noose around Venezuela, he announced a full pardon for Juan Orlando Hernández, the former President of Honduras. He had been convicted by US prosecutors for trafficking cocaine worth billions of dollars into the United States—crimes described as “unfathomable destruction”. Yet Trump, at the urging of “many friends”, chose to pardon him.
The dissonance is staggering. On the one hand, Trump declares Maduro a “narcoterrorist” and orders a near-military intervention. His anti-drug stance rings hollow when political convenience dictates who is punished and who is absolved. US Senator Tim Kaine called the pardon “unconscionable”, noting that it completely undercuts Trump’s claim of being serious about narcotics. Indeed, the administration has struggled to articulate why such a massive military presence is needed in the Caribbean. Meanwhile, reports indicate that US strikes in the region have killed over 80 people, with no clear public evidence that all were drug traffickers. As critics point out, unknown fishermen may have been mistaken for cartel operatives. In contrast, Hernández—convicted of trafficking 400 tonnes of cocaine—walks free. Ultimately, Trump’s Venezuela policy appears less about combating drugs and more about political opportunism. It leaves the US strategy looking incoherent, morally compromised, and driven not by principle but by expediency.
