What’s at stake in Trump’s Oval Office meeting on Venezuela today?
‘Curb or eliminate the expansion of communism in the Western hemisphere’
President Donald Trump is set to convene a meeting at the White House Monday at 5 p.m. ET to discuss the next steps regarding Venezuela.
Key members of Trump’s cabinet and national security team are expected to attend, including War Secretary Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Additionally, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller will be present.
President Donald Trump indicated Thursday night that the U.S. might “very soon” start targeting alleged Venezuelan drug traffickers on land. This would expand operations that have primarily concentrated on the Caribbean Sea. Trump and Hegseth have confronted the threat directly in recent months by conducting military airstrikes against them in the Caribbean.
What are others saying? WorldNetDaily spoke to national security expert and retired Army Lt. Col. Darin Gaub, who agreed: “I support military action to curb or eliminate the expansion of communism in the Western hemisphere.” For Gaub, “all such action must be taken within the bounds of the U.S. Constitution.”
While he shares Trump’s and Hegseth’s serious concerns about drug trafficking, viewing it as major threat to the people of the United States, he also expresses a less frequently discussed concern: Venezuela is “an ideological launchpad for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and other aligned nations and people who seek to attack the United States’ soft underbelly,” explained Gaub.
The national security expert said Venezuela has long been utilized to disseminate communist influence throughout the Western hemisphere, leveraging all of South America and Central America as a way to further undermine America’s stability. “Beyond the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),” he said, “terrorist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah, who work in concert with the CCP and sympathetic organizations and people, also target the United States.”
“This is why the election results in Argentina and now Chile are concerning to the CCP, Russia and Iran,” he said. With potential leaders who are not sympathetic to their agenda, he added, “their foothold gets a little smaller.”
Gaub also pointed out that the threats to the U.S. extend beyond communist influence and include more than just the drug cartels operating from Venezuela. “They are also the primary sources of violent criminals who were mass released from prison and escorted across our Southern border and vulnerable waterways,” he explained.
To that end, drug-affiliated gangs like Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua have been implicated in crimes in over a dozen states, including sex trafficking in Tennessee, ATM theft in New York, a contract killing in Florida, low-level arms dealing in Colorado and many more.
Gaub contends that various countries in South America and the Caribbean have similarly dispatched tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of criminals to the United States throughout the years.
“All of this explains why the United States is focusing so much on our own backyard and will demonstrate military and political resolve in the Eastern Pacific and the Caribbean,” Gaub concluded. “It is folly to think we should focus on wars in Europe and elsewhere when our enemies are so close to our shores” – and while, he added, there are also “ideological supporters within our own government.”
