First the boat, then the buzz. On Tuesday, 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?
