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.
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.
