Trump Green-Lights ‘Operation Southern Spear,’ Mulls Direct Strikes Inside Venezuela

Washington has periodically used anti-drug rationales to justify force projection in Latin America—most famously the 1989 invasion of Panama, which, like today, began with maritime interdictions and carrier deployments before morphing into regime-change. The current build-up also echoes the 1895–1904 heyday of the Roosevelt Corollary, when the U.S. claimed a police power in the hemisphere; in both cases, the legal pretexts were contested abroad and at home. Long-term trends at play: (1) the militarization of counter-narcotics missions; (2) the re-assertion of the Monroe Doctrine against extra-regional actors such as Russia; and (3) the executive branch’s widening authority to wage undeclared, drone-heavy wars. If the U.S. strikes Venezuelan soil, it would further normalize targeted killings outside traditional battlefields, invite Russian counter-moves, and risk pushing fragile global oil and security systems into a new bipolar alignment—consequences that could reverberate, for better or worse, well into the 22nd century.