by Juan P. Villasmil
September 8, 2025
First the boat, then the buzz.
Last week, an American strike in the Caribbean shredded a vessel ferrying narcotics out of Venezuela, killing eleven alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang — which Caracas, strategically, dismissed as an AI hallucination.
Two days later, Nicolás Maduro tried his own spectacle, dispatching a pair of F-16s to roar over the USS Jason Dunham, one of the U.S. destroyers recently sent on a counter-narcotics patrol off Venezuela’s coast.
The maneuvers — and the steady drumbeat of pressure that preceded them — have regime-changers daydreaming about intervention and restrainers losing sleep. But before mistaking the noise for reality, it’s worth asking: what is Washington trying to achieve?
Those who prefer tidy binaries — including many of the journalists covering this beat — often misread what President Donald Trump’s administration is doing. One week, the president is cast as Liz Cheney’s hawk; the next, he is said to have sent Special Envoy Richard Grenell on a mission to befriend Marxists. The trick is not taking the headlines at face value, but tracing the pattern of moves rather than the noise of actions.
Though often caricatured as a schizophrenic strategy, the picture — despite all the buzz — is entirely coherent. Here’s why.
