A prospect as weighty as war should be handled by the administration with the sobriety and earnestness it deserves.
A prospect as weighty as war should be handled by the administration with the sobriety and earnestness it deserves.
Y ou haven’t heard Trump administration officials present the public with its case for war against the regime in Venezuela. You have, however, probably seen how the administration is prosecuting its strategic grievances with the gangsters in Caracas.
Perhaps you were privy to the administration’s efforts to argue (unsuccessfully) before the courts that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua is functionally an arm of Nicolás Maduro’s regime — a “foreign arm of the Venezuelan government,” in Attorney General Pam Bondi’s words, which has “invaded our country.” The argument — an attempt to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act in its efforts to sideline due process protections for Venezuelan deportation targets — didn’t satisfy the courts. It did, however, establish a predicate for hostilities with Caracas.
That predicate reinforced the logic that led the administration to build up the U.S. military presence in the Caribbean, culminating in a military campaign against what the administration alleges are “drug boats” emanating from Venezuela. Those strikes want for legal authority. Indeed, the fact that the Trump administration has repatriated survivors of those attacks rather than prosecute them or even detain them as unlawful combatants suggests the campaign’s targets are in desperate need of refinement.
The administration’s contempt for Congress’s role as the arbiter of what are and are not lawful “lethal kinetic strikes” could haunt this presidency as it ambles into what seems destined to (predictably) end in a conventional military operation against Venezuelan regime targets. Late Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio revealed that the State Department would soon designate Cartel de los Soles a Foreign Terrorist Organization. That criminal network is led by Maduro himself, Rubio observed, and it is “responsible for terrorist violence conducted by and with other designated FTOs as well as for trafficking drugs into the United States and Europe.”
If the administration intends to retroactively identify the legal authority for its strikes on Venezuelan targets in the 2001 AUMF against al-Qaeda and its abettors by slapping the label “terrorist” on the Maduro regime, that would be a stretch. Still, the maneuver represents the most serious effort yet to square the administration’s military objectives in Latin America with the law and, by extension, inform the broader public of those objectives via their congressional representatives. And yet, the White House has still not made the case to the public as to why a military operation against Venezuela is necessary. That’s a tragedy, too, because the case can be made.
Maduro’s criminal regime has been a hostile presence in the Western Hemisphere ever since his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, came to power in the late 1990s. It plays host to Russian military personnel and naval assets. The Chinese provide the regime with diplomatic cover in multilateral institutions like the U.N., and the Maduro regime relies on Beijing for both cheap governmental loans and the propaganda upon which it relies for domestic and international legitimacy. The communist Cubans take an active role in crushing domestic dissent against their socialist brothers in Caracas. The Iranians and the Venezuelans trade their sanctioned petroleum products, and Colombian intelligence indicates that Venezuela has taken an interest in importing Iranian rockets and armed drones.
As analysts with the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted after Venezuelan authorities unveiled a small memorial to the slain head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani, the ties that bind these two regimes is their shared anti-Westernism and their understanding that the United States is the primary threat to their respective regimes.
In addition to its unsavory taste in allies, the Maduro regime is responsible for one of the largest and longest sustained refugee crises on the planet. The northward exodus it has created is not the result of run-of-the-mill socialist maladministration alone. Some keen international security observers believe “the Venezuelan government is deliberately causing the crisis and exporting insecurity.” In addition to exporting its gangs as well as the politically persecuted and economically displaced, Caracas destabilizes its neighbors and advances the interests of America’s foreign foes. Its support for money launderers and drug smugglers — an incontestable fact — threatens to undermine U.S. interests in the Caribbean by undermining the integrity of nearby Colombia, which only recently emerged from a decades-long civil war fueled by the narcotics trade. These are direct threats to U.S. national security.
The U.S. drone strikes on “drug boats” and the naval buildup off the Venezuelan coast may be a prelude to a military operation against the regime or even a regime-change campaign. Or they may be part of a signaling campaign aimed at communicating to the regime as well as those in its orbit that it’s time for Maduro to seek out a comfortable exile alongside Bashar al-Assad in Moscow. Whatever the logic for the Trump administration’s actions, it has not communicated its rationale to the public.
In the absence of clear tactical and strategic objectives, the Trump administration is giving space to the conspiracists for whom American military action is only ever a sordid enterprise. Indeed, the usual suspects are already busying themselves with alternative explanations for the Trump administration’s actions.
You’ve heard it all before. The Trump White House is shot through with industrialists and financiers, all salivating over the prospect of liberating Venezuela’s hydrocarbon deposits and capturing those assets for themselves. Trump’s secretary of state is of Cuban extraction, and this campaign is an expression of his irrational hatred for Latin American socialism. The military-industrial complex could use an economic shot in the arm, and a tidy little war in South America would justify the Pentagon’s growing budget. And so on.
This warmed-over paranoia seems to satisfy those who do not demand originality from their conspiracy theorists. But these theories do at least purport to explain the administration’s behavior when the administration itself is acting cagey. At a time when the American public is clearly impatient with the administration, it would be a profound mistake for the White House to assume that the public would welcome a conflict with Venezuela before it had made the case for one.
Wars are easy to get into, and hard to get out of, and they never go precisely as planned. The voting public would tire of a prolonged fight quickly — particularly one they didn’t vote for and were not consulted on in advance — and their hostility toward it may be exacerbated by their frustrations with the president’s failure to contain the rising cost of consumer goods. The war would have nothing to do with the economy, health care and utilities costs, immigration raids, or the Epstein files, but it could fast become the nucleus around which those who are frustrated with all of the above might accrete.
There is a case to be made in favor of the president’s confrontational approach to relations with Venezuela. The administration should make it, and not only through Trump’s subordinates in passing asides on the Sunday shows. A prospect as weighty as war should be handled by the administration with the sobriety and earnestness it deserves. If the administration shies away from its duty to seek public support for this endeavor for fear that it undermines its political position, either with the broader public or the quasi-isolationists who are vying to take control of the Republican Party, it will inspire a broad backlash.