The strange thing about the new American drug war in the Caribbean is how little it resembles a drug war. If you listen to the White House, Venezuela has somehow become the fentanyl capital of the Western Hemisphere and every wooden fishing skiff is a floating Sinaloa superlab. None of it is true, and they know it’s not true. In 2024 the DEA’s own National Drug Threat Assessment ranked Venezuela fourteenth among cocaine transit countries, behind the Dominican Republic, behind Jamaica, behind freighters flying flags nobody can pronounce. Fentanyl was mentioned exactly zero times in connection with Venezuela. Fentanyl comes from Chinese laboratories and Mexican production lines. Cocaine is overwhelmingly Colombian. Venezuela is a minor transit country at best. Yet here we are, firing missiles at boats and pretending these skiffs were hours away from poisoning American teenagers. The storyline is so flimsy it falls apart under its own syntax, but it soldiers on because it has to. It is the fig leaf that keeps the public from seeing what this operation is actually about.

To understand that, you have to go back almost twenty years, to the moment the world’s largest oil reserves slipped out of American hands. In 2007 Venezuela forced foreign operators into minority positions in its Orinoco Belt projects. Most companies accepted the new terms. Exxon and ConocoPhillips refused. They walked out, their assets were nationalized, and their claims were annihilated in international arbitration. It was one of the largest expropriations in the history of the modern energy sector. The bitterness lingers beneath everything Washington does in the region. It is the quiet resentment of a superpower that believes it was robbed and has spent nearly two decades waiting for the moment to claw back what it considers its rightful domain.

Even today, even battered and mismanaged, Venezuela runs on oil revenue. Ninety-five percent of its export income comes from the wells. The country is a petrostate by chemistry, not ideology. And while Americans debate fentanyl seizures at the border, the Gulf Coast refinery system is starving for the exact heavy crude Venezuela used to supply. China is sinking capital into the Orinoco. Russia is offering security guarantees. Iran is rebuilding refineries and pipelines. PDVSA is stumbling back toward partial recovery. If you’re an American administration desperate for cheap fuel optics and terrified of Beijing building a Western Hemisphere anchor, you don’t leave that situation alone. You poke it. You provoke it. You look for a justification to treat Venezuela’s coastline the way you treated Iraq’s airspace in 2003. You manufacture a threat where no threat exists.

That is what the boat strikes were. The first publicly acknowledged attack killed eleven people outright — passengers aboard a wooden vessel the Pentagon immediately labeled a “narco-smuggling boat.” Yet the details collapsed under scrutiny. And then, on November 14 and again on November 21, 2025, U.S. Navy MH-60R Seahawks fired Hellfires into two more wooden boats off Venezuela’s coast, killing additional civilians. The Pentagon called them narco-subs. Satellite imagery showed nothing of the sort. What appeared instead was what every Caribbean coastal resident recognizes instantly: long open fiberglass peñeros with outboard Yamahas, the working boats of the region.

And here’s the part they hope no one understands. Boats like that cannot reach the United States. At planing speed those triple-outboard rigs burn one hundred gallons an hour. They would need to refuel four or five times just to cross the Caribbean, or else carry so much fuel there would be no room left for anything else. These vessels aren’t designed for long transits. They are built for life along the archipelago. Gasoline in Venezuela is so cheap it’s practically a public utility, which is why peñeros are everywhere — ferrying families, fishermen, groceries, tools, workers, whatever the day requires.

And that matters because the first strike didn’t kill a cartel crew. It killed eleven people in a peñero. That is not a smuggling configuration. That is a ferry run — workers, relatives, or market-goers moving between coastal towns and islands the way they have for generations. These boats carry plantains to Grenada, cousins to Margarita, fishermen to the banks at dawn. They are the backbone of civilian life across the Lesser Antilles. Calling them narco-subs is not a misidentification. It is a lie crafted for people who have never lived near the Caribbean Sea.

The first missile was reckless. The second was deliberate. Survivors in the water don’t pose a national security threat, but they do pose a political one, because survivors talk. The point wasn’t interdiction. The point was messaging. It was the United States marking the Caribbean littoral as a zone of unilateral enforcement. A shadow blockade without naming it. A hint to Caracas that its shipping lanes, its export routes, and its access to world markets were now contingent on American pleasure. That is not drug policy. That is resource leverage dressed in tactical camouflage.

And now comes the talk of airspace. People underestimate how serious that step is. Closing another nation’s airspace isn’t a diplomatic reprimand. It is a confession that you no longer recognize that nation’s sovereignty. Every major conflict of the last fifty years began with some version of that move. Kosovo. Iraq. Gaza. You close the skies when you are preparing to strike targets beneath them. You close the skies when you want to control who enters and who leaves. You close the skies when you believe the next phase is military and you want the legal fiction on your side. If Trump and Hegseth close Venezuelan airspace, that is war in every meaningful sense, whether Congress debates it or not.

The drug narrative collapses on contact. Fentanyl is almost entirely a China-to-Mexico-to-border pipeline. Cocaine is overwhelmingly Colombian. None of that travels in peñeros. Yet here we are, bombing the only country in the region with minimal narcotics production but maximal petroleum wealth. You don’t need paranoia to notice the contradiction. You only need a map and a memory.

This is the old American story in a new costume. Iraq was sold as a WMD crisis that happened to sit on top of massive oil reserves. Afghanistan was counterterrorism layered atop mineral corridors and pipeline dreams. And now Venezuela, the country with the most oil on Earth, is being framed as the beating heart of the fentanyl crisis. It’s too neat. Too convenient. Too familiar. The policy makes no sense until you invert it. Pretend the oil is the point and the drugs are the excuse. Suddenly the entire puzzle locks into place.

The danger is where this leads. If Washington keeps escalating, if the rhetoric hardens and the airspace closes and the shadow blockade becomes a declared one, we may stumble into a war no one voted for and no one truthfully explained. A war sold as a narcotics crackdown but understood privately as an attempt to claw back lost resource dominance. A war born not of fentanyl flowing through Caribbean waters but of Exxon losing an arbitration case eighteen years ago and American power refusing to swallow the insult.

The truth is simple. Venezuela does not have a fentanyl problem. It does not have a cocaine empire. It has oil. A lot of it. More than anyone. Enough to make superpowers lie with conviction. Enough to make men like Hegseth imagine themselves as historical actors. Enough to make a peñero look like a threat worthy of missiles. When the story is this crooked, the motive is always straight.

Annotated Sources

DEA National Drug Threat Assessment 2024 — Venezuela ranked 14th among cocaine transit countries; no fentanyl link Source: U.S. DEA, NDTA 2024 report https://www.dea.gov/.../2024-national-drug-threat-assessment

U.S. Strikes and Casualty Count — first strike killed 11; U.S. justification disputed Source: AP News, CBS News reporting on Sept–Nov 2025 incidents https://apnews.com/

https://cbsnews.com/

Venezuela boat type misidentification — peñeros identified via satellite analysis Source: Reuters regional reporting & maritime imagery reviews https://reuters.com/

Orinoco Belt nationalization & Exxon/Conoco arbitration history Source: ICSID arbitration records + Financial Times coverage https://icsid.worldbank.org/

https://ft.com/

Venezuela oil dependency (90–95% of export revenue) Source: OPEC & World Bank indicators https://opec.org/

https://worldbank.org/