Guest Column: Venezuela Raid Shows Why Crisis Communication Must Match Strategy Not Tactics

The following guest column by Helio Fred Garcia was published in CommPro.biz on January 4, 2025.

The Venezuela raid can serve as a teachable moment for communicators about the difference between tactics and strategic outcomes, between means and ends.

By all accounts, the U.S. military’s tactical performance was brilliant in achieving its immediate objective. Reports described an operation designed to seize Venezuela’s president and first lady and move them into federal detention in New York.

The military had planned for months. Special forces reportedly rehearsed for weeks in a simulated presidential compound. Informers on the ground tracked the targets’ whereabouts. Military leaders coordinated resources to deliver maximum impact as quickly as possible. No Americans were reported killed in the raid. Early reporting suggests that dozens of Venezuelans were.

But, as the military strategist Carl von Clausewitz taught, war is the continuation of policy by other means. And means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes. I have taught this principle to my communication strategy and crisis management students for decades. What is the purpose the tactics are meant to achieve?

In Venezuela, the U.S. military’s tactical mastery stands in sharp contrast to the strategic confusion that emerged almost simultaneously with the early morning news of the raid, along with questions about whether the act itself may be illegal under American or international law, and unconstitutional.

Disinformation and deception

The U.S. has a record of using disinformation, and pretext, to justify invading other countries. The U.S. lied to the American public to get into Vietnam, in the first Gulf War, and in the 2003 Iraq War. Here, the pretext is in plain sight.

Starting in September, President Trump began laying the groundwork by painting Venezuela, falsely, as a major source of drugs entering the United States. The U.S. began to blow up Venezuelan boats, claiming without evidence that they were carrying first fentanyl and later cocaine. Even if they had been, extrajudicial killing on the high seas would violate U.S. and international law, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The top U.S. military commander in the region took early retirement in apparent protest of the killings. But with minimal resistance, Trump continued to normalize killing as drug interdiction.

The U.S. arrested President Nicolás Maduro Moros on, among other things, drug charges. But in the press conference and interviews about the raid, President Donald Trump talked mostly about Venezuela’s oil rather than about drugs.

He claimed, falsely, that Venezuela had stolen oil from U.S. companies. In fact, over decades Venezuela had nationalized oil operations, and most U.S. oil companies were no longer active in Venezuela. But the oil itself was always Venezuela’s.

He spoke as if taking the oil was the U.S. policy outcome. He said, “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”

Who is running the country?

It was also unclear who was running Venezuela. In the press conference Trump said, “We will run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.”

Trump said that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had spoken with Venezuela’s vice president Delcy Rodríguez, who told Rubio that she would do “whatever the U.S. asks.” Trump added that the vice president “was gracious, but she really doesn’t have a choice.”

In the meantime, Rodríguez assumed the title of interim president and made a public statement saying, “There is only one president in this country and his name is Nicolás Maduro Moro.” The next day, Trump threatened Rodríguez with a fate worse than Maduro’s.

This strategic confusion is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

Lessons for communicators

Like the U.S. military, professional communicators as a whole, especially those involved in crises, are tactically gifted. They can execute events and campaigns brilliantly. But these are means, and the strategic discipline is that means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes.

I teach my crisis students and clients, echoing Clausewitz, that communication is the continuation of business by other means, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes. Communication needs to directly support a clear business outcome, just as military force needs to support a clear policy outcome.

Crisis planning, like military planning, is less like a calendar or clock and more like a chessboard. What are the second-, third-, and fourth-order effects, and how do we anticipate, neutralize, and keep the upper hand? In the public policy arena, these questions deserve as much care and thoughtfulness as the initial tactical engagement. But in Venezuela, they seem to be absent.

In strategic and crisis communication, similarly, we need to think carefully well beyond our initial public communication. How do we use communication to secure a better ultimate outcome for the enterprise as a whole?