The U.S. Might Be About to Enter a New Conflict—but Trump Won’t Say
After days of deliberations with high-ranking officials, President Donald Trump thinks he may have come to a decision about a major foreign policy issue.
He’s not quite sure, though, and he definitely isn’t sharing what his decision might be.
“I sort of have made up my mind,” Trump told CBS Friday on the topic of Venezuela, during a meeting with the press on Air Force One.
However, the president continued, “I can’t tell you what it is.” He added that they had “made a lot of progress with Venezuela in terms of stopping drugs from pouring in,” however.
As The New York Times reported Friday, Trump has been applying military pressure to the South American country, but it remains a mystery for what purpose or what end.
The U.S.’s biggest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, was moving into a position close enough to carry out strikes on the country, the Times reported, and the president was meeting with officials to review military options. He hadn’t ruled out direct action inside the country.
Trump has engaged in saber-rattling toward Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro for some time now, saying he’s allowing armed gangs to smuggle drugs in the U.S. Venezuela’s military is now on high alert, creating a pressure-cooker situation, though, as several outlets have reported, Trump officials and aides have said contradictory things about the purpose of these moves.
The U.S. military has also engaged in numerous strikes over the past few months on more than 20 boats it claims were moving drugs from South America to the U.S. While the legality of these strikes are questionable, they’ve killed dozens of people in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea, and have created a surge of anger and displeasure among the international community, and Americans—and even Trump’s base.
As The Wall Street Journal reported Friday, a secret leaked memo from the DOJ showed that the administration was linking the boat strikes to fentanyl and stating that they were a chemical weapons threat, a claim that hasn’t been substantiated.