A New Cold Front: Washington, Caracas, and the Shadow War for Venezuela
In the space of several months, a slow-burn diplomatic standoff between the United States and Venezuela has edged toward something far sharper — a confrontation marked by covert intrigue, public posturing, and echoes of the Cold War refracted through the politics of drugs and migration.
The recent Associated Press investigation alleging that the CIA attempted to recruit Nicolás Maduro’s private pilot sounded almost cinematic. According to the report, U.S. operatives tried to persuade him to divert the president’s aircraft into a jurisdiction where he could legally be arrested — a plot reminiscent of the “Operation Condor” period. One can easily point to the CIA’s heavy presence in Latin America during the twentieth century: the ousting of Árbenz in Guatemala in 1954, years of covert pressure on Castro’s Cuba, covert operations preceding the coup against Allende in Chile in 1973, and the shadow campaigns in Nicaragua and elsewhere. Between 1963 and 1981 alone, at least 5 governments — in Ecuador, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, and Panama — fell to coups linked in varying degrees to U.S. intelligence and military influence.
The recent Associated Press investigation alleging that the CIA attempted to recruit Nicolás Maduro’s private pilot sounded almost cinematic. According to the report, U.S. operatives tried to persuade him to divert the president’s aircraft into a jurisdiction where he could legally be arrested — a plot reminiscent of the “Operation Condor” period. One can easily point to the CIA’s heavy presence in Latin America during the twentieth century: the ousting of Árbenz in Guatemala in 1954, years of covert pressure on Castro’s Cuba, covert operations preceding the coup against Allende in Chile in 1973, and the shadow campaigns in Nicaragua and elsewhere. Between 1963 and 1981 alone, at least 5 governments — in Ecuador, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, and Panama — fell to coups linked in varying degrees to U.S. intelligence and military influence.
Maduro, meanwhile, has clung to power since 2013, despite contested elections and widespread accusations of fraud. Independent tallies suggest the opposition won the most recent vote, though Maduro declared victory. More than 7.9 million Venezuelans have fled since 2014 — among the largest modern diasporas, second only to Syria in recent decades — with over 6.7 million settling across Latin America and the Caribbean. This constitutes nearly a quarter of the nation’s population. The socio-economic collapse at home, combined with the regime’s tightening authoritarianism, has hollowed the nation and reshaped regional migration politics.
What is striking in this latest episode is not its covert manoeuvring but the performative nature of Washington’s posture. The United States has deployed an aircraft carrier strike group, guided missile destroyers, fighter jets, and what officials quietly acknowledge is a nuclear-powered submarine to waters near the region. Pentagon briefings have emphasized counternarcotics and force-protection missions, but the message is obvious: pressure, deterrence, and domestic optics.
Venezuela has responded in kind, mobilizing some 25,000 troops near the Colombian border and conducting snap readiness exercises. Russian personnel are reported to be advising Venezuelan air-defence units, focusing on short-range anti-air and coastal systems. Iranian advisers have been spotted supporting drone programs, and Cuba — Caracas’s staunchest ally — has maintained deep intelligence and counterintelligence networks inside the Venezuelan state for more than a decade. However, even Venezuelan insiders quietly concede that these alliances are more symbolic than decisive; they would not likely save the regime against a determined, large-scale U.S. campaign.
But Washington does not need, nor likely want, conventional war. This is power projection of a different nature - increasingly overt and wrapped in political messaging. In a fractured American political environment, the administration is trying to project a toughness on migration, narcotics, and hostile foreign actors.
The military posturing is no mere theatre however. U.S. naval patrols have engaged in at least fourteen interdictions and lethal strikes on small boats allegedly linked to trafficking networks in recent months, killing dozens. The Pentagon insists the operations are defensive and legal under maritime law. Venezuelan officials claim violations of sovereignty and deliberate escalation.
Inside Venezuela, paranoia has intensified. Last month, Maduro announced security forces had thwarted a “false-flag” bombing plot at the U.S. embassy in Caracas — a claim Washington dismissed as fabrication. This tension underscored the central danger: reciprocal interference. Caracas has hinted it could respond to U.S. “aggression” in kind, raising fears — be they credible or outlandish — of Venezuelan-backed operations on U.S. soil or against regional partners.
A Diplomatic Future — or a Collision Course?
Maria Corina Machado, the prominent Venezuelan opposition figure recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, has aligned herself rhetorically with more conservative currents in Washington, including the Trump camp. Maduro has seized on that to argue that opposition movements are foreign-backed destabilization tools. Should tensions sharpen further, both sides may find themselves locked in mutually reinforcing narratives: the U.S. in a story about restoring democracy and crushing narcotrafficking, and Caracas in a tale of resisting imperial interference.
Several pathways now sit ahead. The optimistic scenario of tentative diplomatic negotiations demands a level of patience and subtlety that has hardly defined recent relations. The darker path involves retaliatory operations, aggressive maritime confrontations, targeted sanctions, and a propaganda war with occasional flashpoints. In the most extreme version, an incident, a downed aircraft, a naval collision, or a militia attack with unclear fingerprints, could drag both states into a short but sharp conflict neither can fully control.
Yet the most likely scenario lies somewhere in the grey zone - a hybrid confrontation, part intelligence duel, part media campaign, part naval policing, with migrant flows and drug-trade violence as the human collateral. For Venezuela’s exhausted population this geopolitical theatre offers little solace or asylum. Their exodus is not slowing. National politics remain frozen between repression and exile. And their country, once among the richest in Latin America, continues to serve as a stage where the ghosts of twentieth-century interventionism collide with twenty-first-century populism and geopolitics.
The new Cold Front in the Americas has arrived. It has no wall, no formal doctrines, no superpower parity, but rather a wounded petro-state, a divided superpower, and a continent learning once again how quickly history can repeat itself, albeit in new uniforms and under different slogans.
Image courtesy of Leonardo Fernández Viloria via Reuters, ©2025. Some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
