Trump Vetoes Military Attack on Venezuela
Dec. 27—Sources close to the White House say that President Donald Trump has resisted the urgings of insane neo-cons and his gusano Secretary of State Marco Rubio and has vetoed any military attack or invasion of Venezuela. Instead, these sources say, the massed American forces have been instructed to focus on enforcing a quarantine of Venezuelan oil exports for at least the next two months.
Trump believes that the use of military force to impose economic restrictions will lay the basis for the end of regime of Nicolas Maduro, which the White House claims, without any real evidence, is the head of a drug cartel that traffics its wares to the United States.
“While military options still exist, the focus is to first use economic pressure by enforcing sanctions to reach the outcome the White House is looking [for],” a U.S. official told Reuters Dec. 24, confirming the source reports. “The efforts so far have put tremendous pressure on Maduro, and the belief is that, by late January, Venezuela will be facing an economic calamity unless it agrees to make significant concessions to the U.S.,” the official said.
These sources say that which Trump has ruled out putting American boots on the ground, he has not excluded strikes on cartel facilities in the country or its drug shipping infrastructure, which has seen U.S. forces take out more than a dozen smaller vessels that it says are involved in drug trafficking.
One source pointed out that Maduro has already expressed a willingness to negotiate his exit and exile, as well as the opening up of the country to U.S. investment, including in its oil industry. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world.
Trump, the source said, did not act on the offer to negotiate, in part because he and his team felt overextended with negotiations on Gaza as well as the war in Ukraine. The source said that Trump's Special Envoy to the region, former intelligence official Richard Grenell, has offered to take on such talks as the President's emissary. Grenell, who Trump appointed to head the Trump-Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. had under Trump's instruction conducted successful negotiations with Maduro to free Americans held prisoner in Venezuela.
Meanwhile, this and other sources say that Rubio's real target in this is the government of his former homeland, Cuba. If Venezuela's oil exports can be quarantined, then it will remove Cuba's main source of oil supplies. U.S. actions have already reportedly reduced this vital flow. But Cuba has other sources of supply, including Russia, and just this week Mexico, as that country said it was prepared to make up gaps in Cuba's oil supply caused by U.S. actions against Venezuela, prompting Rubio to threaten Mexico and its President, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, with sanctions. The source said Trump is not "willing to follow his hothead Secretary of State down that rabbit hole."
For Rubio, the source said, Cuba and its allies in the region and globally "are a personal matter. If you are for Cuba, you are Rubio's enemy. He has never forgiven the Cubans for the humiliating expulsion of his family, along with others, whom Castro labelled 'gusanos' or bird shit. Trump needs to stay aware of this, which becomes a Don Quixote like obsession with a now non-existent 'communist' threat to the hemisphere. So far, Trump has avoided the worst—an American invasion of the "socialist" Venezuela, which would ruin U.S. relations in its own backyard for decades to come, and do nothing to stop the flow of drugs into the United States, of which Venezuela is a small part of a very large problem."