Round-up: Caribbean military buildup. Military provocation in CA. Young Republican Nazis.

Analysis of the week's events

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Caribbean military buildup

Things have been moving quickly in the Caribbean, where it is becoming increasingly clear that the Trump regime is aiming for regime change in Venezuela.

Here’s how the situation stands:

• The U.S. has surged about 10,000 troops into the area, including a large contingent of fighter jets and drones;

• The U.S. has carried out further strikes on civilian boats in waters near Venezuela, and the Navy has captured two survivors from one of the strikes;

• The CIA has been authorized to conduct covert action in Venezuela (although, given that this has been publicly announced, it won’t actually be very “covert”);

• U.S. B-52 bombers carried out a “show of force” Wednesday near Venezuelan airspace;

• The Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (“the Night Stalkers”), whose main mission is providing transportation for Special Forces raids, has been “training” in the airspace around Venezuela;

• Trump regime officials are privately briefing that their ultimate goal is regime change;

• Admiral Alvin Holsey, the commander of Southern Command, the U.S. military command which covers Latin America, has announced that he will retire at the end of this year after clashing with Trump officials about their Venezuela policy.

I have a few thoughts about all of this.

The first is that, if Trump really is aiming for regime change in Venezuela, then that’s a remarkably standard - even though stupid and criminal - Republican foreign policy goal.

Trump began his second term by talking about annexing Greenland and the Panama Canal. That agenda implied something new in this century - a U.S. administration that wanted to expand its territory and didn’t care if doing so came at the expense of historic allies. It was less neoconservatism and more neo-colonialism.

Aiming for regime change in a country that you barely understand and without any plan for what happens the day after, meanwhile, is vintage Cheney and Rumsfeld.

It’s also what Donald Trump is supposedly against. He’s the guy who puts “America First” by staying out of costly and misguided interventions abroad. Isn’t he?

But there are a few reasons why Trump might depart from that line in Venezuela.

The first is that Trump has settled on a story in which overthrowing Maduro actually does serve a narrow definition of the American national interest. In Trump’s telling, the Venezuelan government has declared war on the United States by sending the Tren de Aragua gang to its shores, where they are committing acts of violence and selling narcotics. This presents a threat to the American people, and so it must be dealt with.

(The Trump regime recently fired Mike Collins, the former head of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, which found that Tren de Aragua’s activities are not coordinated by the Maduro regime).

The second is that overthrowing the government in Caracas is the long-term goal of a more neocon-aligned faction which still retains influence within the Trump regime. More than anything else, America’s current Venezuela policy is a victory for Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has managed to bring Trump around to his point of view.

Rubio might now be pushing the idea that Tren de Aragua are “narco-terrorists” who are “worse than Al-Qaeda”, but he was pushing for the overthrow of the regime in Caracas since before Trump came down the golden escalator. His real goal is transforming the country’s political system, not stopping a flow of drugs which amounts to little more than 10% of the cocaine on the U.S. market and zero of the fentanyl.

The third reason is that military pressure on Venezuela is in keeping with other aspects of the Trump regime’s broader political strategy. Trump and the people around him are good at boxing their opponents into defending politically unappealing targets.

Just as Democrats find it politically difficult to make a full-throated defense of either foreign aid or undocumented immigrants, the regime is betting they will also find it hard to publicly shed many tears for Maduro. And if they do, the next step - already begun - will be to paint them as sympathetic towards Communists and drug dealers.

I’d also be surprised if at least someone in the regime isn’t making the argument that aggression towards Venezuela will be good for the GOP’s standing with Hispanic voters, many of whom have become more open to listening to the party in recent years. Exiles from the leftist governments of Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela - plus their families - make up a portion of Hispanic voters, and many others disdain those same governments. But if strikes in Venezuela kill civilians - or even if they’re just seen as imperialist - I think the politics of this will turn out to be more complicated than the White House would like.

So now we wait. It still seems hard to imagine Trump ordering the Airborne to take Caracas, but something is coming. At first, it will probably be an air strike within Venezuela itself, and perhaps Special Forces raids. From there, escalation will begin - ending who knows where.

Military provocation in California

Today, the U.S. Marine Corps is celebrating its 250th anniversary with a series of exercises and demonstrations at Camp Pendleton, just north of San Diego. Various dignitaries will attend, and they will be treated to Marines firing live ammunition over motorists on the I-5 freeway.

Wait, what?

It happens that I know this stretch of freeway pretty well, because my wife used to live in San Diego (in fact, we got married there) and we would often make the trip north to Ventura County. You drive north out of San Diego and eventually the freeway passes through Camp Pendleton, with a narrow strip of it between you and the ocean on the west and the main expanse of the base on the east. The plan, as far as I can tell, is to shoot live ammunition over the freeway from warships in the ocean and have them impact on an exercise ground somewhere on the base.

You can see I-5 as a brown line near the ocean on the west part of the base

This immediately raises a number of questions, such as why would they do this and what are they thinking?