Vice President JD Vance offered a testy defense of President Donald Trump’s military action against Venezuela Sunday morning on X, claiming the operations were meant to combat “narcoterrorists” before admitting oil may actually be at the core of the conflict.
Vance began his post by dismissing the idea Venezuela “has nothing to do with drugs,” a criticism undermining the Trump administration’s reasoning for its aggression against the South American nation.
Back when the U.S. military began strikes on Venezuelan-manned boats in the Caribbean in September, Trump and his cabinet maintained the operations were meant to stop drug smuggling, particularly the import of fentanyl.
“First off, fentanyl isn’t the only drug in the world and there is still fentanyl coming from Venezuela (or at least there was),” Vance said, going on to claim that cocaine was the “main drug” being trafficked through Venezuela.
Calling cocaine the main “profit center for all of the Latin America cartels,” he wrote, “If you cut out the money from cocaine (or even reduce it) you substantially weaken the cartels overall.”
“Also, cocaine is bad too!” he added snidely.
Vance did concede that most fentanyl makes its way into the U.S. via Mexico, and said contending with that trafficking route “continues to be a focus of our policy in Mexico” and is “reason why President Trump shut the border on day one.”
A vast majority of fentanyl that ends up in the U.S. comes from Mexico using precursor chemicals from China. In fact, 96% of U.S.-bound fentanyl found by authorities is seized at the southern border between the U.S. and Mexico, according to Customs and Border Patrol numbers cited by BBC.
For his final point, the vice president turned to the sticky topic of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, something Trump admitted was a major motivator in his push for regime change.
Caylo Seals via Getty Images
During the president’s Saturday morning address regarding the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, he openly gloated about the “tremendous amount of wealth” America plans to seize through oil reserves.
In his post, Vance claimed Venezuela had unjustly usurped its oil assets from the U.S., saying, “About 20 years ago, Venezuela expropriated American oil property and until recently used that stolen property to get rich and fund their narcoterrorist activities.”
He was referring to how Venezuela’s former president, socialist revolutionary Hugo Chavez, nationalized the country’s oil industry in the 2000s, largely pushing out foreign companies to redirect profits toward social welfare programs.
Vance ended his post by addressing “anxiety over the use of military force,” asking readers, “Are we just supposed to allow a communist to steal our stuff in our hemisphere and do nothing?”
“Great powers don’t act like that,” he went on. “The United States, thanks to President Trump’s leadership, is a great power again. Everyone should take note.”
In a federal indictment filed in the Southern District Court of New York and made to the public on Saturday, Maduro is accused of sitting “atop a corrupt, illegitimate government that, for decades, has leveraged government power to protect and promote illegal activity, including drug trafficking.”