It would be a colossal mistake for the president to glide into a war in South America for which he sought no public support or congressional buy-in.
It would be a colossal mistake for the president to glide into a war in South America for which he sought no public support or congressional buy-in.
W hatever we attribute it to, voters seem genuinely surprised by and apprehensive toward the leveling of the White House’s East Wing to make room for the ballroom the president has been discussing and promoting for months. Even Donald Trump’s allies are expressing palpable trepidation over the political risks he’s invited.
If that’s how the public has responded to something as banal as a construction project on the White House’s grounds, imagine how they would react to a real, protracted war in the Western Hemisphere — one that could culminate in the functional equivalent of a regime-change operation? That’s what the president casually advertised in an aside to reporters on Thursday.
“I don’t think we’re necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war,” Trump mused after warning that “land action” against Nicolas Maduro’s regime in Venezuela was all but imminent. “I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. We’re going to kill them. They’re going to be, like, dead.”
When asked by a reporter about the military necessity of his administration’s strikes on what the Pentagon claims are “drug boats,” the president dismissed the journalist’s skepticism. “We’ve been capturing them the years, and it’s not like, ‘Gee, let’s capture one,’” he said. “We’ve been capturing these boats for years, and they get back into the system, and they do it again and again and again, and they don’t fear that.”
This is a predictable escalation. At the outset of the administration’s decision to police drug traffic in the Caribbean through the application of kinetic military force, I anticipated that the logic of the campaign would lead target selectors to edge closer and closer to regime assets. After all, the drug boats’ operators were only intermediaries — couriers, criminal gangs, or even civilians extorted into the business of drug trafficking. If the problem posed by the Maduro regime is as the administration describes it, a military campaign aimed at ending that trade rather than interdicting and arresting its traffickers would eventually look to the source of the problem. That looks like what we’re witnessing.
The president flatly denied reports that the United States dispatched two B-1 bombers to the Venezuelan coast, calling the claim simply “false.” But those bombers’ course was easily tracked and confirmed by reporters via flight radar, and they approached to within 50 miles of the Venezuelan coast before performing a U-turn and disappearing. “Analysts speculate the U.S. military flights may have been assessing the state of Venezuelan radars for future targeting,” CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr observed.
Indeed, this display of force seems akin to one the Air Force and Marines executed last week, when B-52 bombers and F-35B fighter jets were dispatched over an island that Venezuelan forces use for training exercises. “The Pentagon described the flights as an ‘attack demonstration,’” the Wall Street Journal reported.
There is a cogent strategic rationale for executing military strikes against the anti-American regime in Venezuela, even if the drug traffic that has previously been construed as a problem for law enforcement is a dubious one. Without question, the Western Hemisphere would be a safer place if the Maduro regime — to say nothing of its sponsors in places like Havana and Moscow — was no more. And even limited strikes on regime targets have the potential to spark a domino effect that results in the collapse of the illegitimate and little-loved regime in Caracas.
It would, however, be a colossal mistake for the president to glide listlessly into a war in South America for which he sought no public support or congressional buy-in.
There is no legal basis for such an operation in the absence of an attack on U.S. assets or personnel. Despite the claims from Trump administration figures that it is executing strikes on terrorists, it is hard to imagine even a tendentious reading of either of the post-9/11 Authorizations for Use of Military Force that would find in them legal justification for treating either Venezuelan gangs or the regime’s agents as though they were al-Qaeda militants.
Failing to seek an authorization for a sustained campaign against the elements of the Venezuelan regime that facilitate the export of narcotics — elements the Trump administration claims go all the way to the top — would invite scandal. Sidelining an already pliant Congress on matters as constitutionally weighty as war and peace isn’t just civically contemptuous. It would provide the president’s opposition with a comprehensible and possibly quite popular cause around which to rally.
That war — and it would be a war — would ignite demonstrations in the streets which, though they provide Republicans with an unlovely foil, make life for the rest of us quite fraught. And those demonstrations could prove far more politically popular than the spectacle that Israel’s detractors made of themselves over the last two years. After all, the administration’s campaign against drug boats has been a messy one.
The Colombian government has already accused the Trump administration of summarily murdering its citizens in a botched strike on what were believed to be Venezuelan drug boats. In a separate strike, two of its survivors were captured and repatriated to Colombia and Ecuador, respectively — an indication that the U.S. lacked the evidence to prosecute them in court or even to keep them in military custody. In addition, a significant amount of American naval firepower is being brought to bear in the Caribbean, diverting those platforms from forward positions near hot spots further afield and giving America’s adversaries in the Middle East and the Pacific the opportunity to exploit their absence.
Right now, the executive branch alone owns these headaches, but they will prove modest irritations compared with those that will result from a broader military campaign against the Venezuelan regime.
And those are only the domestic political concerns such an operation could unleash. A more extensive air campaign, to say nothing of a vague “land action,” would put U.S. troops in harm’s way. It is no small thing to inaugurate combat operations in which American troops could be injured or killed. And sustained hostilities between the U.S. and Venezuela will contribute to a refugee crisis in the region — the scale of which is all that would be in dispute.
And what if the administration’s push on the rotten edifice of the Maduro regime succeeds in tearing the thing down? What would succeed the regime in Caracas? Is it the alternative governments for which Venezuelans have voted in years past? Would a U.S.-backed government enjoy local and regional legitimacy given America’s military intervention on its behalf? How much ownership would Washington take of the transition? Would that involve troop deployments, a provisional authority with America’s imprimatur, a U.S.-financed reconstruction program?
All these questions deserve to be considered today. And in a democratic society, the public gets a say in a national project as ambitious as the one Donald Trump so blithely contemplates. The president and his allies should not presume as they did in advance of the White House’s renovations that the public will glean his arguments by osmosis. They must be articulated squarely and often.
That is, assuming the administration is serious about following the logic of its war on drugs and the regime’s trafficking of them to its natural conclusion. If it’s not, the president and his aides should stop using the military as though it was only a more muscular instrument of law enforcement. Either the administration will evince the courage of its own convictions, or the American public will force it to slink away from an outlook they never really owned in the first place.