Comment: Can Trump stand down over Venezuela or is die cast?

Published 1:30 am Tuesday, November 25, 2025

By Andreas Kluth / Bloomberg Opinion

Say that Donald Trump has by now realized that attacking, or even invading, Venezuela might turn into a disaster. He wants to back down and redeploy the mighty American armada in the Caribbean to do something more useful elsewhere in the world. Could he?

Of course he could, technically. As president and commander-in-chief, he ordered those 15,000-odd troops and all that hardware, including the most sophisticated aircraft carrier in the world, to the region without even asking Congress. So he could issue another order to pull them out again, and send that aircraft carrier back to the Mediterranean, whence it came; or, better yet, to the Indo-Pacific, where it could signal to China that the U.S. intends to remain a major power even outside the western hemisphere.

In reality, though, simply standing down after putting on such a show is hard. That’s the lesson from history and international-relations scholarship, which has for decades delved into such concepts as path dependency, commitment traps and audience costs to explain why leaders so often follow up on bad escalatory decisions with even more escalation. As thespians might say, commanders who whimsically hang a pistol on the wall in the first act tend to feel in the second that they have no alternative but to fire it.

Path dependency can take many forms in international affairs. Sometimes it comes down to seemingly banal bureaucratic or logistical dynamics. In 1914, once Russia began mobilizing to be ready for a war with Austria-Hungary, Germany’s military plans “required” it to mobilize too, and to knock out France, which meant going through Belgium. Obviously, those were not good plans.

Other times, leaders feel overwhelmed by the potential loss of face as well as the sunk costs, in kit or blood, that they have already incurred. Successive U.S. administrations could have stopped at sending advisors and hardware to Vietnam and then discreetly withdrawn. Instead, for far too long, they doubled down, as the Soviets later did in Afghanistan, or the Americans again in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those latter two conflicts, of course, are among the “forever wars” that Trump promised his MAGA base to keep the U.S. out of.

Once leaders have signaled a commitment by sending troops, the theory goes, it becomes not just psychologically but politically more difficult to reverse course. In 1994, the scholar James Fearon gave this reputational damage of appearing to chicken out the label “audience costs.”

The audiences are both domestic, including voters and legislators, and international, including not just the target of the standoff — Venezuela in this case — but all adversaries, as well as allies.

One might think audience costs would be especially high for a president whose motto is “peace through strength” and whose unofficial psychological disposition relies on the “madman theory,” according to which he might bomb anything and anyone when crossed. If he pulls U.S. forces out of the Caribbean (they can’t just idle there forever, after all), China, Russia and North Korea may well conclude that he’s a chicken hawk.

I asked Fearon, that seminal theorist of audience costs, whether this means that Trump has already crossed the point of no return in Venezuela. “I don’t think the usual considerations apply in his case,” Fearon, who is at Stanford University, replied in an email.

What’s different, he told me, is that Trump “makes so many threats that he doesn’t follow through on, or actually reverses course on,” that domestic audiences might not even notice the about-face anymore. “The noise level is so high, both from captured media and frenetic bluster across so many dimensions,” Fearon adds, that Trump may feel immune to audience costs. And internationally, a president who already has little credibility to speak of may believe he has nothing left to lose.

Wondering what a climbdown might look like, I asked John Bolton, who was one of the national security advisors in Trump’s first term. The first thing to realize, Bolton told me, is that Trump never had a plan and is just “incoherent” in Venezuela. Does he want to stop drug-trafficking? Overthrow Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan dictator? Something else?

And because Trump hasn’t “thought it through from A to B to C,” Bolton told me, he’s only now thinking about the next step, in the second act. That rhymes with Trump’s comment the other day that he has “sort of made up [his] mind.”

Since it must have “dawned on him” that his own base does not want another war, Trump is probably looking for a way out, Bolton went on. (Bolton supports regime change in Venezuela, I should add, just as he has supported regime change in Iraq and other places in the past. What he criticizes is the lack of strategic deliberation in this Trump administration.) That glance toward an exit might explain why he’s authorized covert actions in Venezuela (doesn’t announcing them make them overt, though?) while simultaneously signaling that he’s open to talks with Maduro (even though he recently told a special envoy to break off negotiations that had already been going on for much of the year).

My guess is that Trump will soon grasp at anything that Maduro offers — more access to Venezuela’s oil, for example — as his excuse to ratchet down the Caribbean campaign down. “He’s so good at declaring victory even when he’s manifestly been defeated,” Bolton said, “it won’t matter if it’s true or not.” One analogy might be Trump’s brief bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen earlier this year, which he abruptly ended when it became too expensive and pointless, by declaring a victory that nobody outside his fan base could define or fathom.

In the Caribbean too, some such fake victory now seems the least bad outcome. In that scenario, America’s warriors can finally resume doing more important things, and the world can find other things to worry about.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.