There is a real chance of a US-Venezuela war — so why does it feel fake?

The post-modern philosopher Jean Baudrillard infamously argued in 1991 that the Gulf War did not take place, by which he did not mean that no fighting had actually occurred, but that the real events were something entirely separate from the carefully choreographed presentation the world saw thanks to the novel phenomenon of 24-hour cable news.

It’s tempting to wonder what Baudrillard would have made of the current US military buildup targeting Venezuela, a campaign that often appears to be driven by narratives with only a tangential relationship to actual events taking place.

Take, for instance, President Donald Trump’s dramatic announcement on his Truth Social platform a little over a week ago: “To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.”

As Reuters reported, US officials “were surprised by Trump’s announcement and unaware of any ongoing U.S. military operations to enforce a closure of Venezuelan airspace.” The US not only took no actions to affect the “closure” of Venezuelan airspace; a migrant repatriation flight from the US landed in Venezuela just a few days later.

Or take Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s invocation of the “fog of war” to justify the deadly US strike in September, in which defenseless survivors of an initial strike were allegedly killed by a follow-up. “Fog of war” is a phrase that generally refers to uncertainty in the midst of combat, and it’s hard to understand how it would apply to a situation where the targets could not plausibly be a threat to those firing on them.

While there are Trump administration hawks who have wanted US action to force Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from office for years, the ostensible justification for the military buildup in the Caribbean and the related ongoing campaign of strikes against alleged drug boats is that the US is under siege from deadly narcotics pushed by the Venezuelan “narcoterrorists.”

Lawmakers have defended the deadly US strike in September, saying it “probably saved thousands of American lives.” This echoes Trump himself, who has claimed that “Every boat we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives.”

These numbers would make some sense if the drug in question were the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl: The Drug Enforcement Administration claims that one kilogram of fentanyl has the potential to kill 500,000 people. Trump has explicitly said on several instances that the boats were carrying “mostly fentanyl.”

But these boats are almost certainly not carrying fentanyl, which is almost entirely shipped into the US overland from Mexico, often by US citizens — not on speedboats from South America. Assuming these boats really are carrying drugs, which has been disputed in some cases, it’s almost certainly cocaine, which is hundreds of times less deadly. Cocaine also causes thousands of overdose deaths in the US every year, though most of what’s moving on these boats is likely headed for Europe.

This shouldn’t come as much surprise to Americans, including Trump supporters, given that the administration spent much of its early months blaming China, Mexico, and (less credibly) Canada for the fentanyl crisis.

In any event, Venezuela is a major transhipment point for narcotics, but it’s not a major producer of them. The idea that it’s the key to solving America’s drug crisis (fentanyl, cocaine, or any other drug) doesn’t make much sense.

If the case for military force is based on confusing and contradictory premises, that would make sense, given that it’s not always clear what the actual target is either.

Adding to the sense of a virtual buildup is the administration’s decision to designate Venezuela’s “Cartel de los Soles” as a foreign terrorist organization, naming Maduro itself as its leader. “Cartel de los Soles” is not actually a cartel or even really an organization. It’s a term used by Venezuelans to refer to the cadre of senior military officials involved in a range of criminal activities. But the designation appears to be part of an effort to build a political case for military action, though it actually conveys no such legal authority. The administration has also claimed, contradicting its own intelligence agencies, that Maduro is in control of the criminal gang Tren de Aragua.

Trump is not the only one contributing to a sense of unreality. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was criticized recently for amplifying baseless claims, repeated by Trump, that the Maduro government meddled in the 2020 US election.

With accusations of the manipulation of intelligence and growing momentum for regime change, the Venezuela situation has been compared to the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war. But there’s been far less effort to produce evidence for the Trump administration’s narrative around Venezuela than there was to sell evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction.

The other key difference is that even if the US ultimately does launch strikes inside Venezuela, or even seeks to oust Maduro, there’s little chance of a protracted Iraq-style ground invasion. The forces the US has deployed to the region simply aren’t set up for that. There’s still a strong possibility that the US will launch some demonstrative airstrikes against drug labs or rebel camps in Venezuela and then move on to the next issue. It feels less like Iraq war redux than the sort of thing an AI model trained on histories of the Iraq war era might produce.

The lives of the nearly 90 people killed so far in US boat strikes are real, as are the Venezuelan civilians and US service members who would be put at risk if strikes on land begin, as are the thousands of Americans killed by drug overdoses every year and those living under Maduro’s crumbling dictatorship. But in contrast to other recent military actions, there’s a sense of unreality about this buildup.