Trump should present to the voters and Congress his case for war without euphemism or evasion.
Trump should present to the voters and Congress his case for war without euphemism or evasion.
I n a February 1854 debate in the House of Lords six weeks before Britain and France entered the Crimean War, British Foreign Minister Lord Clarendon explained his government’s policy in a way that was in equal parts candid and evasive: “The question has been asked whether we are at peace or war. It is one that is very difficult to answer distinctly. We are not at war, because war is not declared; we are not strictly at peace with Russia. Consider that we are in the intermediate state; that our desire for peace is just as sincere as ever; but then I must say that our hopes of maintaining it are gradually dwindling away, and that we are drifting towards war.” The lords laughed, and the leader of the Conservative opposition, Lord Derby, shot back: “My noble friend has given us a new phrase in Parliamentary or diplomatic language; we are not at war, nor at peace, and we are not neutral, but we are drifting towards war.”
Today, it seems that this is the state of American policy toward Venezuela. We are not at war, but we most certainly are not at peace. We are blowing drug-smuggling boats out of the water under the aegis of a presidential directive branding cartels as terrorist agents of the Venezuelan state. President Trump has gone on social media to declare that airspace over Venezuela will be closed — something we can ensure only by force. He has reportedly told Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to pack up his family and leave the country, with a not very subtly implied “or else.”
Trump’s subordinates and allies are speaking in the sorts of terms one uses to justify war. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth referred to the drug boat strikes as hitting “narco-terrorists,” a term previously used by Trump and by Vice President JD Vance. Senator Lindsey Graham spoke of Venezuela as part of “the drug caliphate”: “For over a decade, Maduro has controlled a narcoterrorist state that is poisoning America and he has created alliances with international terrorist organizations like Hezbollah.”
Drifting is no way to take Americans to war. As a matter not only of law but of politics and national leadership, the president himself should look the nation in the eye and explain what he’s doing, and why it should be done.
Legally, Article I of the Constitution reserves to Congress, and only Congress, the power “to declare War.” The president has long had the inherent authority as commander in chief to use force in fast-moving situations, but Congress is supposed to authorize in advance a major deployment aimed at, say, removing a foreign government. That’s war, and neither Article I nor Article II anticipates that we will simply drift into one without declaring it. Only Congress, for example, may “grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal,” a device commonly used at the Founding to authorize American privateers to exercise de facto war powers on the high seas. Naval combat and war with irregular combatants were to be handled by the president, but under preexisting rules set by Congress, which was empowered “to define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations” and to “make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.”
As in so many areas, modern practice has drifted away from the constitutional design. George H. W. Bush overthrew the government of Panama without advance permission from Congress, and Barack Obama did the same to the government of Libya. Nonetheless, even though formal declarations of war have gone out of style, it has more commonly still been the practice to get Congress on board, as Lyndon Johnson did in Vietnam with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, and as George W. Bush did with authorizations to use military force in Afghanistan and Iraq.
There are sound reasons of popular and congressional politics, not just law, in doing so. If things get complicated or more protracted than expected, a president who has made the case to voters and obtained the support of Congress has more political cover. That won’t last forever if things truly go wrong (ask W or LBJ), but in each case, the president was able to weather a few years of difficult news before really starting to lose the voters. For Bush, that meant getting reelected with significant Republican coattails in 2004. It also meant that even at the darkest hours of the war, he was able to get Congress to keep funding the mission. And it also put his opponents on record in ways that tied them in knots for years. A war that goes well after being publicly authorized can put the political opposition in a tight spot, as happened after the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the Spanish-American War.
War with Venezuela presents a number of different collateral issues: not just military funding but matters of immigration, detention, and postwar reconstruction. Sooner or later, it will be helpful for the executive branch to get Congress on its side.
It’s also a matter of leadership. Getting the president on the air to tell the American people what their government is doing and why — especially when sending young men and women into harm’s way — is what leaders do. Trump may not be very good at leading public sentiment when addressing a pandemic or hard economic times, but conflict with a foreign tyrant is much more in his wheelhouse. It would have been better for the case for supporting Ukraine if Joe Biden had made a serious effort to lay out early and repeat often what our war aims were, and why it was an important interest of the United States.
And yes, politically, for Republicans heading into a difficult midterm, it’s probably better to ventilate the arguments for doing this before charging into it, so people have some idea of what is persuasive, and what is not. There are arguments to be made in favor of toppling the Venezuelan regime — Joshua Treviño and Melissa Ford made several of them in our pages yesterday. But there’s also no substitute for hearing it from the people making the war.
In so doing, Trump should try honesty. Progressives have a long habit of trying to win arguments by just changing the meaning of words. That rarely works for our side, and we shouldn’t encourage the practice. If you wish to make the moral and practical argument that drug traffickers are equivalent to terrorists, or the factual case that they are tied to terrorists, do that; don’t just throw around words like “narco-terrorist” and “drug caliphate.” Maduro is an election-stealing socialist dictator, and that matters, but that alone is unlikely to persuade most Americans to commit force to toppling him. Most Americans are up for a vigorous response to foreign states flooding us with refugees and with drugs that are more lethal than in the past, but if you want them to follow you to war over that, you need to trust them by asking them. One of Trump’s underrated strengths as a candidate for office is that he was never shy about asking for support. He’s not shy now about making those requests to foreign governments, even dubious ones. He shouldn’t be afraid to lay out his case to our people, either, and ask them for their support.