By Michelle Goldberg / The New York Times Company
On Monday, the United States formally designated Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his allies in government as members of a foreign terrorist organization called Cartel de los Soles, a group that doesn’t exist.
“There’s no such thing as the cartel,” Phil Gunson, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, said by phone from Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, on Monday. Cartel de los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns, is a pejorative Venezuelan term for corrupt figures in the armed forces who take money from drug traffickers; the name is a reference to the sun insignia on their uniforms. It was coined more than 30 years ago, Gunson said, as journalistic shorthand, “and it hung around as a kind of jokey label.” It’s as if President Donald Trump classified the “deep state” as a criminal gang.
Declaring this fake cartel a terrorist organization could have real-world consequences. “I think it’s intended to send the message to Maduro that you are now considered a terrorist, and therefore, you might suffer the same fate as Osama bin Laden,” Gunson said. It’s at once a threat and a rationale for a possible regime change operation, a military adventure that would be utterly preposterous but also looks increasingly likely.
No one knows if we’re about to start bombing Venezuela, but the administration’s demagogy about the Cartel de los Soles is just one of many alarming signs. For months now, the United States has been committing extrajudicial killings of suspected drug runners, many from Venezuela, in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean. As The New York Times reported, the administration is justifying these strikes by claiming that America is in a state of armed conflict with drug cartels. Now the administration seems ready to expand this armed conflict into Venezuela.
The Navy’s largest aircraft carrier recently arrived in the region, part of the biggest military buildup in the Caribbean since the Cuban missile crisis. Last week, the Times reported, Trump authorized plans for covert CIA action in Venezuela. Airlines are canceling flights because of a Federal Aviation Administration warning of a “worsening security situation.”
Yet the United States doesn’t feel at all like a country marching into war. Venezuela barely registers in our public discussions. In a recent CBS News/YouGov poll, only 1 in 5 Americans reported having heard or read a lot about the military buildup in the area. The administration’s cursory explanations for possible military action make the case for the Iraq War look rigorous. It’s as if the White House is so heedless of public opinion that it doesn’t even feel the need to mount a proper propaganda campaign.
To hear the administration tell it, our hostilities with Venezuela are largely about the country’s role in drug trafficking. But fentanyl, the drug at the center of America’s addiction crisis, neither originates nor passes through Venezuela. The country is a transit hub for cocaine trafficking, but mostly to Europe. So the administration’s drug war rhetoric seems like a pretext. But a pretext for what?
“My sense of it is that there’s a kind of unstable coalition in the administration behind this,” Gunson said. Marco Rubio, who serves as both secretary of state and acting national security adviser, is driving the White House’s Venezuela policy. He’s an ardent anti-communist who seems to believe that taking down Maduro could help bring down the regime in Cuba, where Rubio’s parents were born. Others, said Gunson, wish they could bomb narco-traffickers in Mexico, where most American fentanyl originates, and hope that an attack on Venezuela will at least send a message.
Trump is also reportedly taken with the 19th-century idea of dividing the world into spheres of influence dominated by major powers; ousting Maduro could be a way to exert command in the Western Hemisphere. And, of course, Venezuela has the world’s largest known oil reserves. Speaking to Fox News’ Laura Ingraham last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that “if something happens down in Venezuela,” then “we could really see oil prices go down.”
The fact that we can only speculate about why the administration is menacing Venezuela underscores how weird its policy is. Americans certainly aren’t spoiling for a fight; in the CBS News/YouGov poll, 70 percent of respondents opposed military action there. Trump ran against pointless wars in the 2024 election, and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has predicted that strikes on Venezuela could fracture the MAGA movement. Maybe that’s why there’s been relatively little public debate; bombing Venezuela makes so little sense, most people can’t believe it could happen.
As Gunson sees it, the Trump camp hoped its pressure campaign would lead to Maduro fleeing or being overthrown, which was always unrealistic. “Short of actual military expansion, I don’t think there’s a point at which Maduro would suddenly conclude, ‘Oh, yes, they’re not bluffing,’” he said. If Gunson is right, Trump could still cut a deal with Maduro, or just declare victory and go home.
But Gunson fears that’s not the most likely outcome. “My sense is that they essentially created this phony war,” he said, “and they’ve gone so far down the road with it that they now kind of have to have a real one.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.
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