Expert: Global concerns driving US troop build-up in Caribbean

The issue explained: What is happening in Venezuela?

The build-up of US forces off the coast of Venezuela now represents the biggest commitment of American troops in the region since the invasion of Panama.

Tensions in the western Caribbean have been rising since September amid an escalating series of attacks from the US on so-called narco trafficking boats.

At least 83 people have been killed in air strikes, which the US has sought to justify as part of the “war on drugs”, but the United Nations has condemned as “extra judicial killings”.

Now the arrival of aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford in the region and the warning from US aviation regulators of “heightened military activity” in the region has ramped up tensions further.

“We’re all trying to get a clearer sense of what exactly is happening, besides the obvious massing of US military forces, the likes of which we have not seen in the Caribbean, probably since the 1980s when the US invaded Panama in 1989,” John Sitilides, National Security Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told Compass TV.

“From the presence of the USS aircraft carrier, Gerald Ford, a number of frigates and other naval vessels, fighter jets, submarines. It looks like there is a major military operation that is coming Venezuela’s way.”

Despite that analysis, he does not believe that invasion is necessarily imminent.

“We also don’t know to what extent this is part of a coercive diplomacy strategy on the part of the Trump administration,” he said.

He added that the aim could be to put pressure on Venezuela’s despotic president Nicolás Maduro to change the regime’s behaviour, which he said is destabilising parts of South America and the Caribbean.

Sitilides acknowledged there was likely anxiety across the region right now about the “sheer massing of military might” by the US in the region.

He added, “The White House has not really put forward a coherent policy perspective or statement or address on what exactly the end game is here, which leaves everyone guessing.”

He believes the wider goal is to use military threat as a “coercive diplomacy” strategy that “is sending a larger message from the United States under the Trump administration throughout the Western Hemisphere, and that is that the plan for American primacy to be restored is very much under way.”

He said Venezuela had been a destabilising influence in the region because of narco-trafficking, as well as links to global powers antagonistic towards the US. And he listed a series of potential threats that US policymakers are concerned about.

“The People’s Republic of China is providing riot control and digital surveillance equipment to Maduro to be able to more effectively repress his citizenry,” he said. “Vladimir Putin and the Russian government are sending major arms systems and military trainers to bolster Venezuela’s military as well as investing in energy infrastructure.

“We also have Iran, which has dispatched its terrorist proxy Hezbollah from Lebanon to establish facilities in Venezuela to provide for narcotics trafficking, money laundering and actual training camps for Hezbollah terrorists on Venezuelan soil.”

In that context, he believes the build-up of troops may be a message to the world.

“I think what the US is looking to do here is to signal to China, to Russia, to Iran, that these types of illicit activities in Venezuela and in the western hemisphere are no longer going to be allowed to continue unabated.”