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 initial 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.”
