President Donald Trump may have stopped multiple wars around the globe, but he could be on the verge of starting another, this time in his own backyard.

That would be a war with Venezuela if dictator Nicolas Maduro, charged by the U.S. with narco terrorism as head of a major drug cartel, refuses to step down from the presidency and the people he stepped on. The U.S has a $50 million bounty on his head.

Maduro, in addition to flooding the U.S. with deadly drugs, also allegedly emptied his prisons of criminals who made their way to the U.S. through former President Joe Biden’s open borders.

Trump means business, which is why the forces he sent to the Caribbean have blown 22 suspected drug-carrying boats out of the water, killing 86 suspected narco terrorists.

And, despite the presence of the USS Gerald R. Ford, the biggest aircraft carrier the U.S. has, along with ten other fighting ships carrying attack helicopters and a boatload of Marines, it was not exactly the Battle of Midway.

Nobody fired back.

It would have been something of a challenge if the Venezuelan navy showed up. But it didn’t.

So, it was more like target practice.

And now Trump is promising to take his anti-drug offensive to mainland Venezuela, which means bombing suspected drug processing and storage facilities, drug land routes and even sending in the Marines.

He said, “You know, the land is much easier, and we know the routes. We know everything about them. We know where they live.”

Yes, but be careful. It could be a trap the way the Vietnam War was.

During that conflict the antiwar activists used to ask, “Who will be the last man to die in Vietnam?”

Now Trump opponents could ask,” Who will be the first Marine to die in Venezuela?”

Back then many politicians, pundits and even some military experts thought Vietnam would be a pushover. All our South Vietnamese ally needed to ward off a North Vietnamese communist takeover was American military help.

It was essentially a civil war, though, which doomsday politicians wrongly claimed that a North Vietnamese victory would have a domino effect on surrounding countries. Critics called that nonsense.

Nevertheless, on March 8, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had, like Trump, been itching for a fight, ordered the landing of 3,500 Marines from the Ninth Marine Expeditionary Force aboard ships to the beaches of South Vietnam. Congress had approved it.

It was the beginning of a 10 year-long nightmare. It destroyed Johnson. It almost wrecked the U.S.

The troop count blossomed to 500,000 at its peak. By the time the U.S threw in the towel and left the country to the North Vietnamese a total of 58,156 young Americans, many of them draftees, had been killed.

I remember Peter Arnett, the veteran Associated Press reporter from New Zealand who had covered the war from its beginning. We were in the field outside of Saigon one day in March 1967. He said, “Mate, you’re losing the war.”

“How can you tell?” I, the newcomer, asked.

“I count the body bags,” he said.

At that time 20,000 Americas had been killed. Thirty-five thousand more would also be killed before we left in 1975.

Venezuela is not Vietnam, of course. And the issue is drugs and criminal activity, not political ideology.

But like in Vietnam, there are thousands of combat-ready Marines aboard ships off Venezuela and more in nearby Trinidad and Tobago awaiting orders.

They are young and have no memory of Vietnam.

Be careful, it looks too easy, like Vietnam did.

Life is short, history is long.

Veteran political reporter Peter Lucas can be reached at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com

Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro gestures to supporters during a rally in Caracas, Venezuela, in February. (AP Photo/Cristian Hernandez)