Hours after Wednesday’s White House announcement of a big military deployment to Latin America, ostensibly to stop drugs, I got together (virtually) with Geoff Ramsey and David Smilde from WOLA’s Venezuela program. We came up with a list of questions, then started typing what we know, and what we need to know, into a Google Doc.

The result is a memo where we come up with some fact-filled, and pretty skeptical, answers to the following questions. Read the memo here. It’s a good read, I promise.

• Is President Trump’s announcement of new deployments actually “new?”
• Is this tied to the coronavirus outbreak?
• Is this deployment linked to Venezuela’s crisis?
• How important is Venezuela to the transnational drug trade?
• How have other countries reacted to the news of the U.S. deployment?
• How is geopolitics involved?
• Is the U.S. government preparing for an invasion like in Panama 1989?
• What are the risks associated with this policy?