Distracting Us

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | Nov. 8, 2025

This is not how you win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Having apparently grown tired of unnecessarily deploying federal troops into American cities like Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Portland and threatening others, Donald Trump seems to have paused that nonsense. He seems done with Gaza, though bombing and killing continues intermittently, and gave up stopping Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (which he said he could stop in one day with a single phone call). Instead, President Trump has become more ambitious, now threatening Venezuela and Nigeria.

Venezuela has been a political mess since the days of Hugo Chavez, an incompetent Socialist first elected in 1999 and serving, with one short break, until 2013. His tenure was marked by economic instability and inflationary disasters not yet resolved. Inflation reached a staggering 337 percent in 2023 and was 175 percent in April of 2025, according to tradingeconomics.com.

Additionally, Venezuela has become involved in the illegal drug trafficking business, but they are not a primary source of illegal drugs entering the U.S. According to SaferWorld and our own Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), cocaine is mostly produced and trafficked by Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. The main source of fentanyl and its precursor chemicals is Mexico, with China growing as a source. Heroin/opium continues to be the main exported product of Afghanistan.

Venezuela has become involved because the government of Colombia cracked down on their cartels, so they moved some operations to Venezuela. The DEA says a Venezuela drug trafficking organization known as the Cartel of the Suns is alleged to include high ranking military and government individuals. Accusations have even been made that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Chavez’ hand-picked successor and a vocal critic of Donald Trump, is somehow part of the cartel.

What Venezuela is not is a threat to the U.S. They are not, by our own DEA’s accounting, a major supplier of illegal drugs. With a population of just 28 million, they don’t pose much of an economic threat. They have a puny military with 109,000 active and 220,000 paramilitary members, only 50 total naval assets and 42 fighter jets, and they’re the 50th largest military in the world according to Global Firepower. (By comparison, the U.S. has 11 aircraft carriers, each of which is capable of carrying 75-80 aircraft.)

Our current administration has claimed Venezuela is some sort of existential threat to our national security and has started blowing up boats we claim are drug-carrying cartel craft, though we offered no proof other than “fishing boats don’t go that fast.” Congressional committees that are supposed to be informed of such activity have been ignored, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has clamped down on the release of any information about what could be extra-legal attacks on Venezuelan citizens.

Since Venezuela poses no real threat, there might be a different reason our fossil-fuel addicted president wants to attack them—Venezuela controls the largest oil reserves on earth, with more than either Saudi Arabia or Iran. They pose no real threat, but there’s all that oil to covet.

We’ve made up a different excuse altogether to threaten Nigeria. With 238 million people, Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and the sixth most populous in the world. Our president says he “has been told” Christians are being “slaughtered” in Nigeria and we’ll intervene if it isn’t stopped. While it’s a pretty good bet our president could not find Nigeria on a map, our military certainly could.

Christians are being murdered, but the problem is so is everybody else. Nigeria is a remarkably violent place; their murder rate is five times that of the U.S. According to their own government National Bureau of Statistics, there were a stunning 615,000 murder cases investigated between April of 2023 and May of 2024. Of that number, about 7,000 were religion-specific, especially in northern areas controlled by radical Islamists.

However, according to the World Bank, Nigeria’s population is religiously divided with slightly more than 50 percent identifying as Muslim and about 46 percent, including many members of the government’s executive branch, as Christians. So this is not a case of a small group of persecuted Christians being “slaughtered” but collateral damage in violence caused by extremist groups, gangs, forced relocations, economic deprivation in many areas, government incompetence, police/military corruption, and old feuds between farmers and herders. The government’s continued efforts to quell the violence have been minimally successful.

Perhaps our sudden interest in the safety of the people of Nigeria is just a cover for something else. Nigeria, it turns out, is the largest oil producer in Africa and the 13th largest in the world, and they have substantial deposits of coal. What a coincidence.

Venezuela and Nigeria are no threat to us. But our threats against them serve to distract us from domestic problems like an incompetent Congress, unpopular president, and rising consumer prices.