Senior military officials on Wednesday presented President Trump with options for potential military operations in Venezuela, including strikes on land, CBS News reported on Thursday.
The report, which cited White House officials familiar with the meeting, said that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine were involved in the briefing that presented potential options for the “coming days,” though no final decision was made.
The report comes after signs that the president was cooling on the idea of launching a war with Venezuela, though a US aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, and three US Navy destroyers, just arrived in the region, significantly bolstering US forces in the Caribbean.
The leaks to CBS about the briefing could be part of the psychological operation against Maduro aimed at pressuring him to voluntarily step down from power, though that’s unlikely to happen. The Wall Street Journal reported on November 5 that the president expressed reservations about attacking Venezuela and that he was content with slowly building up US forces in the region and continuing the illegal bombing campaign against alleged drug-running boats in the region.
The push toward a regime change war in Venezuela is being driven by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as Trump’s national security advisor. Reports have said that Stephen Miller, the president’s senior domestic policy advisor, also favors war, but there are concerns within the administration that taking out Maduro could plunge Venezuela into chaos and lead to another migrant crisis, akin to what happened in Libya after Muammar Gaddafi was brutally killed during a US and NATO bombing campaign.
Rubio has previously directly compared ousting Maduro with the killing of Gaddafi. Back in 2019, when the first Trump administration attempted to unseat Maduro, Rubio posted a photo on Twitter of Gaddafi in the moments before he was killed as a threat to the Venezuelan leader.
Last week, ahead of a Senate vote on a bill to block Trump from starting a war with Venezuela without congressional authorization, Trump officials told lawmakers that they didn’t currently have plans to bomb the country and that they lacked the legal authorization to do so. But the administration also conveyed that they planned on getting a legal opinion from the Department of Justice to justify strikes in Venezuela, which would still be illegal without approval from Congress, per the Constitution.
