Now-former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was a brutal dictator whose dreadful politics and policies, largely inherited from his equally autocratic predecessor Hugo Chavez, ran his country into the ground. The U.S. military operation that captured Maduro once again demonstrated the tactical and operational proficiency of the American armed forces. But neither Maduro’s autocratic governance nor the audacity and skill of the U.S. military in executing assigned tasks are the primary issue at hand here: at the whim of one man and with no real explanation or apparent rationale, the United States has launched an unwise and illegitimate military intervention that only undermines American interests and international security. 

Here are five reasons why:

A clear and overt act of war. President Trump’s kidnapping of Maduro represents unprovoked aggression against a nation that has not declared war against the United States nor engaged in hostilities against it. Maduro and his regime may be corrupt, repressive, and possess relatively minor ties to international cocaine trafficking, but in no real sense could the United States be said to have been in armed conflict with Venezuela before last weekend’s raid. President George H.W. Bush’s 1989 invasion of Panama, Operation Just Cause, does not offer a parallel: Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega declared a state of war existed between his nation and the United States five days before the invasion; the next day, an American serviceman was killed by Panamanian military personnel. 

In short, President Trump ordered the sort of aggressive action American statesmen have sought, however imperfectly, to banish from the conduct of international affairs since at least the days of Woodrow Wilson.

Illegitimate at home and abroad. Neither consulting nor seeking support from Congress at home or relevant nations and international organizations overseas, President Trump’s Venezuela raid lacks basic domestic and international legitimacy. 

• Unlike President George W. Bush in Iraq in 2002, he has neither sought nor received authorization from Congress to use military force against Venezuela. 
• Unlike President Barack Obama in Libya in 2011, he has not received authorization from the United Nations Security Council for military operations in Venezuela. 
• Unlike President Bill Clinton in Kosovo in 1999, he does not have the support of a relevant regional organization (NATO, in the Kosovo case) for his intervention. 
• And unlike President Obama’s intervention against ISIS in Iraq and Syria in 2014, he does not have the support of Venezuela’s immediate neighbors for military operations against the Maduro regime — indeed, Trump already appears to be threatening similar interventions against neighboring Colombia and other nations in the Western Hemisphere. 

The lack of any sort of domestic or international authorization for Trump’s act of war against Venezuela isn’t just a matter of legality — though it is, of course, that as well. Neither Trump nor his administration have offered either the American public or the rest of the world much in the way of explanation or rationale for their use of force in Venezuela. (By contrast, the Bush administration spent months making a case for the invasion of Iraq to both the American people and the world.) Instead, they have displayed contempt for the principle of democracy at home and what the Declaration of Independence called “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” abroad. 

Taking America to war on a personal whim. As with his other domestic and foreign policies — most notably tariffs — Trump has taken the United States to war on little more than his own personal whim, whittling the notion of “national security” down to meaninglessness in the process. He has, as noted, refused to make a clear or compelling case for this act of war against Venezuela to either the American people or the world, and has gone on to threaten the sovereignty of America’s ally, Denmark, and its longtime security partner, Colombia, as well as neighboring Mexico and Cuba. Trump clearly believes the U.S. military can be deployed anywhere at his own personal whim without providing any justification to anyone — he kept Congressional Democrats in the dark, for instance, about the Venezuela operation before agreeing to a briefing several days after the fact.

These are the actions and attitudes of an aspiring strongman with no respect for America’s republican principles, not a responsible political leader in a democracy. 

No plan for what’s next. The Trump administration has no apparent plan for what it aims to achieve in a post-Maduro Venezuela, making the Bush administration’s negligent post-war planning for Iraq in 2002 and 2003 look like a masterpiece of advanced preparation by comparison. Though the U.S. military had only snatched Maduro and left the “Chavista” regime that has ruled the country since 1999 largely intact, Trump proclaimed that the United States would now “run” Venezuela despite the fact that the Trump administration lacks a foreign policy apparatus beyond a few critical personnel like Secretary of State-slash-National Security Adviser Marco Rubio and peripatetic presidential special envoy Steve Witkoff. Trump himself dismissed Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel laureate María Corina Machado as a potential Maduro successor because, according to anonymous White House officials, she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize that Trump imagines is his due.

The plan, such as it is, appears to be to threaten Venezuela’s new leadership with further military action if it does not give in to Trump’s unclear demands (which seem to include some sort of seizure of the nation’s considerable oil assets) — a gangster-style approach to foreign policy if there ever was one.

One giant leap toward a world where might makes right. Like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, President Trump clearly believes the world can and should be carved up into spheres of influence to be ruthlessly dominated by great powers as they see fit, with supposedly lesser nations forced to bow to the whims of more powerful ones. His special military operation in Venezuela and subsequent threats to other Caribbean nations (to say nothing of American ally Denmark) reflect this belief — and stand in direct contradiction to the sort of world American leaders have sought to create, however fitfully, for at least the past century. As Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and their successors understood, the law of the jungle does not make for a stable, secure, or prosperous world. 

Indeed, in Ukraine alone, the United States and its European allies have spent hundreds of billions of dollars — and some 50,000 Ukrainians have given their lives — to defend the notion of national sovereignty and the right of nations to choose their own destiny that Trump has blatantly violated in Venezuela. In effect, then, President Trump has given a green light to similar great power aggression around the world, from Putin’s war against Ukraine to a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan and beyond.  

With his Venezuela raid, Trump has swung open the door to a world run on the principles of gangsterism — and America will come to regret it.

This article originally appeared on Peter Juul’s personal Substack, The Dive.

We’re well beyond the point where we ought to take documents like the Trump administration’s just-released National Security Strategy seriously, at least on a practical level. It’s hard to put much stock in such an embarrassingly sycophantic policy document, especially when the administration itself appears to be little more than a pack of scheming viziers to an increasingly nominal president who himself regularly struggles to stay awake during public appearances.

But it’s beside the point to engage with this document as if it’s a matter of policy, programs, or even strategy. It does no good to point out its incoherence and incontinence, much less ponder how what’s proposed in it might play out in the real world or how, if you stand on your head and squint and read it backwards, it might contain worthwhile ideas. The product of ideologues who fancy themselves world-historical thinkers but evince no real understanding of America or its place in a world permanently changed by revolutions in science, technology, and industry dating back a century and a half now, this national security strategy both betrays American interests overseas and perverts America’s traditional liberal values both at home and abroad.

In short, this national security strategy amounts to nothing less than a declaration of moral bankruptcy — a statement of immoral principle that stands in direct opposition to what America ought to stand for and represent in the world. (As always, it’s the self-styled super-patriot who hates his country the most.) It doesn’t tell us much that we don’t already know about Trump’s foreign policy, but the document does effectively distill the Trump administration’s ongoing renunciation of any real American responsibility for global affairs and international security.

Indeed, it’s a foreign policy that Charles Lindbergh would have loved: a not-quite-explicit tripartite carve-up of the globe with dictators in Europe and Asia, with America selling out its allies in those two parts of the world while building a garrison state in the Western Hemisphere to bully our own neighbors the same way Putin and Xi do theirs. Add dollops of insulting illiberalism, crude dollar diplomacy, and thinly veiled racism, and voila: you’ve reinvented the original America First platform.

In the end, this national security strategy is little more than a manifesto for global gangsterism — or perhaps the longest geopolitical suicide note in history.

Let’s look at some of the specifics: the Trump administration promises to abandon America’s allies in Europe while meddling in their own domestic politics. It parrots the Kremlin’s line on NATO, characterizing the alliance as “perpetually expanding,” while seeking “strategic stability” with Moscow — presumably at the expense of Ukraine and other erstwhile American allies. Combined with a purported 2027 deadline for NATO nations to assume primary responsibility for the alliance’s conventional defenses, a reported lack of communication with key alliance militaries like Germany, and Trump’s own eagerness to sell out Ukraine, the Trump administration seems to be setting the stage for an effective American withdrawal from the Atlantic alliance.

Worse, the Trump administration has made its intent to interfere in European politics on behalf of far-right political parties and, not incidentally, American tech oligarchs quite clear. It employs racist rhetoric to claim that the continent will be “unrecognizable in 20 years,” with certain states “majority non-European” and therefore somehow uncommitted to the NATO alliance. It goes on to assert that it must “regain its civilizational self-confidence,” primarily through the victory of illiberal far-right parties and politicians like Germany’s AfD party and Hungary’s Viktor Orban that the Trump administration views as “political allies” whose success it hopes to encourage.

Like Lindbergh and his original America First movement, this national security strategy focuses monomaniacally on the Western Hemisphere. It casts the challenges in this hemisphere—migration, narco-trafficking, and foreign (presumably Chinese) investment in critical industries — as all-important and all-consuming while tacitly dismissing traditional American strategic priorities in Europe and the Pacific as “peripheral or irrelevant to our own” interests. These priorities, the document heavily implies, were not the consequence of a careful consideration of American interests in a world transformed by science, technology, and industry, but rather the result of deceit by treacherous foreigners who have taken advantage of the United States to further their own interests at America’s expense.

Nor is it hard to see the crude, Putin-style sphere-of-influence logic behind the Trump team’s obsession with Latin America specifically and the Western Hemisphere more generally (at least beyond their obvious preoccupation with immigration). Given the language of this national security strategy, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Trump — or, more precisely, his perpetually scheming advisers — would like the United States to do in Latin America what Vladimir Putin wants to do in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. We’ve already tasted the rancid fruit of this impulse with Trump’s killing spree in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, where American special operators blow small boats allegedly running drugs out of the water and, in the first instance at least, massacre the survivors.

China, for its part, is seen primarily as a commercial competitor and not a strategic problem or geopolitical challenger. That’s hardly surprising considering the general emptiness of hawkish Republican rhetoric on China, and this strategy sends yet another signal that Trump talks tough but has no appetite for confrontation with Beijing — a message reinforced by his deep-seated antipathy toward American allies like Japan and South Korea.

It all adds up to a morally bankrupt vision of a world carved up between real and would-be dictators to suit their own whims and fantasies, one supremely hostile to America’s long-standing interests as well as its traditional liberal values. Put another way, the Trump administration now seeks precisely the nightmarish world that American presidents have desperately sought to avoid for more than a century.

On the bright side, it’s unlikely this strategy will ever be fully implemented; national security strategies rarely guide any administration’s foreign policy so much as they reflect it. Moreover, the Trump administration has so hollowed out America’s foreign policy and national security apparatus — his team, such as it is, remains confined to a small clique when not farmed out to one of Trump’s former real estate pals—that it remains a mystery as to how they’d execute any strategy the administration might come up with. Secretary of State Marco Rubio continues to serve as acting national security adviser, for instance, presiding over a National Security Council largely denuded of anything resembling real bureaucratic or subject-matter expertise, while America’s military and intelligence agencies have suffered rolling political purges that will likely reduce their own effectiveness over time.

Trump’s attempt to impose gangster rule at home and abroad will eventually, inevitably fail — though it will inflict enormous damage on America and the world along the way. The danger inherent in this national security strategy lies less with the potential that it might be implemented than in the indecent principles upon which it is based and seeks to advance. It exposes the moral rot at the heart of the Trump administration and its foreign policy for all to see, presenting us with yet another manifestation of our wider crisis of national virtue and integrity.

In that respect, however, it may paradoxically prove salutary: this strategy should cause a rededication to the basic moral propositions that make America a worthwhile endeavor, an experiment in liberty and self-government that’s more fragile and endangered now than at any point since World War II. Do we stand for freedom, equality, and democracy in the world? Do we keep faith with ourselves and our friends?

Though he could be quite unsentimental in private conversations, President Franklin D. Roosevelt rightly understood that American foreign policy requires a moral sensibility — a spirit that guides it and makes clear that America stands for more than the prerogatives of raw power and the amoral pursuit of national self-aggrandizement offered actual and aspiring dictators as well as self-proclaimed “realists” throughout recent history. As Roosevelt himself explained, “order among Nations presupposes something enduring—some system of justice under which individuals, over a long period of time, are willing to live. Humanity will never permanently accept a system imposed by conquest and based on slavery.”

America may not be and may never have been the perfect embodiment of its professed liberal ideals of freedom and equality, but that’s both irrelevant and immaterial. But at its best, America has been the main champion of liberal values in a world where they have had few if any powerful defenders and many influential opponents, a standard to which the partisans of human liberty could repair when all else failed. In that regard, then, this national security strategy represents a deep and profound betrayal of America itself—one that must be repudiated in the clearest terms and replaced with a renewed moral vision that Roosevelt and his contemporaries would easily recognize.

There was an idea that was America, and it’s well past time to revive it.

If recent news reports are accurate, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth likely issued an illegal order to give no quarter in the first of what are now many likely illegal strikes against alleged narcotics trafficking boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific. Already manifestly unfit and unqualified for the job, focused primarily on fighting culture wars and politicizing, and having previously endangered American military personnel by discussing sensitive operational details over an off-the-books group chat, Hegseth may now be guilty of war crimes if not outright murder. 

Congress must now embark on a thorough investigation of these strikes and Hegseth’s potentially criminal role in ordering them. Ultimate responsibility for these immoral and likely illegal military actions rests with President Donald Trump, but Hegseth bears significant responsibility of his own for following and executing Trump’s directives. As secretary of defense, however, Hegseth has the right and duty to refuse manifestly illegal orders from the president — but he has chosen to follow them instead.

Indeed, Trump likely nominated Hegseth as secretary of defense in part because, like Trump, he possesses few if any qualms about ordering the American military to act in direct contravention of the laws of war. As a Fox News television personality during the first Trump term, for instance, Hegseth successfully lobbied President Trump to pardon Eddie Gallagher, a former Navy SEAL accused of war crimes by his fellow SEALs, and defended others charged with or alleged to have ordered similar crimes. His partisan polemics, moreover, seep with barely-concealed contempt for the laws and rules of war. In Hegseth’s telling, America fails to win wars because the U.S. military cannot act like its enemies and commit obvious war crimes with abandon — a morally reprehensible stance that drags America down and damages our standing in the world.

Hegseth also summoned the military’s highest-ranking officers back to the United States in September for a lecture that included, among other things, a promise that the military would no longer have to follow “stupid rules of engagement.” He also reportedly forced Adm. Alvin Holsey, head of U.S. Southern Command, to resign less than a year into his three-year appointment after Holsey expressed doubts about the legality of the Trump administration’s boat strikes — doubts buttressed by the command’s senior military lawyer, whose view that such strikes were illegal was overruled by the Trump administration’s lawyers. 

In a blatant attempt to intimidate critics, moreover, Hegseth has absurdly threatened Senator Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) — a retired Navy pilot and astronaut who flew 39 combat missions during the 1991 Gulf War and piloted four space shuttle missions from 2001 to 2011 — with a court-martial for recording a video with other Congressional Democrats that reminded American servicemembers of their right to refuse illegal orders. Hegseth has acted beneath the dignity of his office in other ways, such as active trolling on social media and provoking a Canadian children’s book publisher to condemn him for using one of their characters in a juvenile AI-generated meme.

Hegseth has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that he has no business holding his present office. In a normal political universe, he would never have been nominated as secretary of defense in the first place. But we live in abnormal times, and President Trump wants Hegseth as his secretary of defense because of their shared disdain for the laws of war and the notion of basic human dignity during armed conflict. Given its general subservience to Trump, this Congress will almost certainly not impeach and remove Hegseth — no matter how much he deserves to be dismissed from office. 

Assuming he remains Secretary of Defense and Democrats retake one or both houses of Congress in next year’s mid-term election, Hegseth’s impeachment and removal from office should be one of a new Democratic majority’s first orders of business. If successful, Hegseth’s impeachment and removal from office will be only the start of accountability for the Trump administration’s lawless and immoral war in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific — but a start must be made.