Venezuela: Does Trump want war?

Is President Trump “planning to overthrow Venezuela’s regime?” asked Edward Luce in the Financial Times. So far, he’s seemed content to blow up alleged Venezuelan drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean, destroying four vessels in a matter of weeks and killing more than 20 people. But the deployment of three U.S. destroyers, a nuclear-powered attack submarine, a squadron of F-35s, and a Marine expeditionary unit suggests that something much bigger than a “drugs seizure operation” is afoot. Back in the U.S., Trump last week squashed his special envoy Richard Grenell’s efforts to negotiate with President Nicolás Maduro, the “thuggish kleptocrat” Trump accuses with “little evidence” of being a drug cartel boss and of waging a narco-terrorism campaign against the U.S. Calling off those diplomatic overtures tips the scales toward the hawks in his administration, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House adviser Stephen Miller, who are “gunning for regime change.”

“The average American knows vanishingly little about what its government seeks to accomplish in this fight,” said W.J. Hennigan in The New York Times. Trump administration officials last week told Congress that Trump has determined the U.S. is in a “noninternational armed conflict” with “nonstate” drug-smuggling groups. But they didn’t say which specific groups they are seeking to destroy or “what legal authorities they are acting on.” That’s because there are no legal grounds, said Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review. By invoking nonstate actors, Trump is making “a specious analogy” to America’s war on al Qaida. But that post-9/11 conflict was approved by Congress, while Trump is claiming “unilateral war power.” And drug trafficking is not an act of terrorism under federal law—it’s a felony punishable by imprisonment, not drone strike.

So what is Trump “actually after here?” asked Jude Russo in The American Conservative. The idea that this military operation is about drugs is pure propaganda, because “Venezuela does not play an outsize role in the drug trade.” And while Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, the U.S. has “other, easier sources for hydrocarbons.” The “most plausible” reason, then, is that Trump is squaring up to Maduro because he can. “For all his peace rhetoric,” Trump enjoys “displays of American hard power,” and Venezuela, a failing socialist state that “nobody especially likes,” is an easy target for a “splendid little war.” Perhaps Trump’s instinct is right, and an attempt to topple the Maduro regime won’t devolve into a “guerrilla war” that sparks “regional chaos” and mass migration. But “is that a gamble you’d like to make?”