Blowing up innocent fisherman to provoke retaliation, that will be used as justification for invasion.
The same military used a 6 figure missile to shoot down a children's balloon https://www.npr.org/2023/02/18/1158048921/pico-balloon-k9yo
Know what Venezuela has a shit-ton of though? Oil. Guess who loves the oil, gas, and coal industries? If your answer involves someone orange you'd be right. Guess who got kicked out of Venezuela when Chavaz took over? If you said large multinational oil corporations you'd be correct.
On top of that donnie gets to look tough against a country that largely has no serious regional allies in fact I believe a lot of them are pissed, China has ties but they aren't going to ratchet up the trade fiasco over Maduro, russia is a bit busy punching itself in the balls and last I check Venezuelans aren't big fans of Maduro so donnie is basically riskless save domestically.
Also given the size of those boats I'd wager a solid amount on the total lost amount would be equivalent to taking out 8 McDonald's store shipments and claiming you've dealt a serious blow to McDonald's bottom line.
Venezuela’s oil production is a single digit percentage of US oil production and the quality of their crude is famously poor. The US neither needs it nor wants it except to the extent they pay the US to refine it for them because they don’t have that ability.
Pinning this action on a desire for oil is a lazy argument far past its expiration date.
Also did you think I was suggesting the U.S. govt wants it? Donnie's friends in the oil industry want it, single digit, double digit, doesn't matter to them greed knows no bounds with that crowd and this isn't Iraq in 2004 under Bush which I never believed had anything to do with oil.
The US has always had significant control over Venezuelan oil production because the US runs some of the only refineries that can process that type of low-quality crude. If the US banned Chevron from refining Venezuelan oil in the US, Venezuela has few other options. The US already captures much of the value of Venezuelan oil production because of the refinery monopsony. There is little margin in the rest of it. They’ve been profit-maxxing Venezuelan crude for decades.
Your argument could have been reasonable a few decades ago in a “big picture” geopolitical sense but we don’t live a few decades ago. OPEC no longer controls oil prices and the US is the uncontested oil producing superpower. No one saw that coming. Pretending all of this history never happened isn’t going to lead to rational conclusions.
The US used to expend a lot of power ensuring its oil supply. It hasn’t needed to do that for a while. Now it expends power to control oil supplies to other countries. None of this applies to Venezuela though because Venezuelan oil has a dependency on US refineries that other oil producing countries don’t have.
Your argument, then, is the GP has a more recent and up to date grasp of geoplotics than the current POTUS?
The same POTUS with a 1930s grasp of tariffs?
What reason exists for the US to "bail out" Argentina? Was that as simple as extending time for those who contributed to the Presidential library fund to claw back their money from Argentina?
Modern geopolitics is all very well and good, but it falls well short of explaining some of blatently century old banana republic stuff going on in the current US administration.
There's also speculation that it may have lithium deposits because of it's location.