""If you had asked me two months ago," Story said, "I would have said it's equally likely that we reopen the Embassy and restore some kind of relation as it is that we would bomb them.""
""To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America, please be warned that we will blow you out of existence," Trump said at the United Nations last month. "Each boat that we sink carries drugs that would kill more than twenty-five thousand Americans.""
The Trump Administration attacked seven boats off Venezuela's coast since September 2, killing at least thirty-two people, on the grounds that the vessels were drug traffickers transporting contraband to the United States. The President framed the strikes as acts of national self-defense and asserted, without evidence, that regional drugs caused three hundred thousand U.S. deaths last year. The United States closed its embassy in Venezuela six years earlier in protest of Nicolás Maduro's authoritarian rule. Efforts to dislodge Maduro have spanned administrations, with past attempts at overthrowing and later approaches emphasizing compromise because of large Venezuelan migrant flows. James Story assessed reopening the embassy and military escalation as both possible outcomes.
Read at The New Yorker
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