With Venezuela intervention, President Trump's lawlessness goes global
Attempting to clothe himself in the glory of military conquest while openly scheming to steal another country's oil, the president once again betrays his oath of office
This weekend, by order of President Trump, the United States conducted an unprovoked and illegal attack on Venezuela, seizing its president and asserting illicit control over its natural resources. At a press conference detailing these actions, Trump stated that the U.S. would “run” Venezuela for an unspecified period of time, while making clear that his primary interest lies in securing that country’s vast oil reserves (“We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground”). Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others in the administration indicated an intention to coerce the Venezuelan government into making oil concessions massively favorable to U.S. energy companies. This coercion is not only diplomatic but at the barrel of a gun, as Rubio stated that U.S. forces would maintain a blockade on oil tankers leaving Venezuela until the government acceded to U.S. demands.
To be totally clear: the Trump administration is threatening the use of military force to compel another country — one that has not attacked us, and with which we are not at war — to surrender to us their natural resources. This is the mindset of bloodthirsty imperialism, not of a democracy.
And even if we were to take the administration’s official rationale at face value — that the attack and arrest of President Nicolas Maduro were justified by an interest in stopping the flow of illegal drugs and weapons into our country — the idea that the U.S. is free to invade any nation whose governing officials have been accused of crimes is virtually indistinguishable from asserting that the United States may attack any nation at will.
So while it will take some time to establish the precise mix of motivations for this invasion, we already know enough to understand that the U.S. assault on Venezuela is a fundamentally corrupt and criminal betrayal of American ideals and the rule of law. It is a betrayal of our country, a reckless endangerment of our national security, a waste of resources, and an act of reckless criminality by a president who has already engaged in unprecedented lawlessness within U.S. borders. It is also an exercise in neo-imperialism that resurrects a discredited history of U.S gunboat diplomacy and complicity in mass political violence across Latin America, extending it into our dark era of 21st century MAGA authoritarianism.
Absent strong and effective domestic pushback, the Trump administration’s actions will implicate all Americans in a violent, rapacious foreign policy that will alienate allies, embolden enemies, and inevitably backfire on our society and economy in deeply pernicious ways. In fact, the president is already threatening multiple other countries with similar assaults; this past weekend, he suggested the possibility of military action against Mexico and Columbia, and reiterated his interest in annexing Greenland.
The political counter-attack should be decisive and immediate. Democrats and other opponents of President Trump should not get suckered into fruitless discussions about congressional authorization for the attack, as if more informative briefings or even a vote of approval could somehow bless this mayhem. Even if the Republican-controlled Congress were to retroactively approve this assault, it would remain an affront to our common values, illicit in spirit if not in letter, with the U.S. acting in a manner akin to Russia with its invasion of Ukraine — asserting the “right” of the powerful to lord it over the weak.
And while there are enormous foreign policy dangers posed by this U.S. intervention (more on this below), opponents should for now prioritize tying it to Trump’s many domestic catastrophes, rather than engaging in overly abstract appeals to international law as a primary line of attack. This is not just because any hope for a sane foreign policy rests on Trump and MAGA’s defeat, but also because Trump very likely has domestic benefits top of mind: the attack and the attempts to strong-arm the Venezuelan government are ways to seem powerful at home in the face of his cratering popularity, and to engage in corruption on a grand scale to benefit himself and his allies.
In this vein, opponents should seek to deny Trump any such benefit, and instead link the attacks to Trump’s lawless tariffs, dismantling of federal agencies and state capacity, endorsement of murderous anti-vaccine policies, tyrannical military deployments in U.S. cities, and gutting of health care for millions of Americans. It is more of the same, only now on a global canvas: more chaos, more lying, more lawlessness, more disregard for what really makes America powerful. Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy was heading in the right direction when he noted that, “Clearly this is wildly illegal. This is a president who has been operating illegally since he was sworn in -- stealing from the American people, seizing spending power, now dragging America into a war overseas ... Donald Trump’s entire foreign policy is corrupt.”
In particular, Democrats must blunt Trump’s attempts to wrap himself in the commander-in-chief mantle. Conceding him power in the artificially-separate area of “foreign affairs” will inevitably increase his domestic standing — as Josh Marshall has argued at Talking Points Memo, presidential power is unitary, so that a win or loss in one area will accrue to or detract from his overall power. Against Trump’s effort to convey martial greatness, the reality is that the president deployed the military illicitly, under false pretenses, and in a way that endangers service members for his personal political benefit, rather than the interests of the American people. So not only is there no need to defer to his authority, there is every reason and incentive to challenge it. Similarly, there is zero reason to try to appeal to the better judgment of Republican senators and representatives, who have largely closed ranks behind Trump. Instead, Democrats should unapologetically call this a Republican invasion, not an American one, and work to implicate the GOP in Trump’s warmongering and overseas corruption.
Democrats should also be judicious about calling the attack an attempt to “distract” from supposedly more pressing issues and hitting Trump for his neglect of those. Something as objectively serious as invading another country and treating its government as vassals could never just be a distraction, and Democrats risk losing sight of the seriousness and accompanying vulnerability to Trump due to his outlandish actions against Venezuela — a vulnerability they would less effectively exploit were they to downplay the outrageousness of what Trump has done. And while this invasion may well be partly meant to help draw attention from his areas of weakness, it also highlight the same failures found elsewhere in this administration — it is as much further evidence of his incompetence and authoritarianism as it is an act of misdirection.
Along the same lines, Democrats should be cautious in opposing Trump’s Venezuela policy by accusing him of neglecting “affordability” concerns. In a very real way, Donald Trump is offering an answer to those who argue for helping ordinary Americans with their cost of living — in this case, by setting up an argument that he is working to lower energy costs by literally seizing the oil of other nations. And this attempted act of expropriation is of a piece with a larger Trumpian economic vision, in which he pretends to help the citizenry while actually giving them the shaft and ensuring the redistribution of wealth to his family and their cronies. If Democrats want to talk about affordability in response to this invasion, they should do so while bringing in the larger context of Donald Trump’s false concern and fake solutions. They must resist the president’s efforts to implicate the American people in latter-day colonialism and violent exploitation as a supposed method for making our country wealthier.
Above all, they must free themselves of a default mindset, found in news coverage and even among many Democrats, that tacitly assumes Donald Trump’s actions in Venezuela are somehow for the benefit of the United States. This is a delusion. In this as in all realms, the president is only serving himself and his allies, not the greater good of the country or its majority.
Yet Donald Trump is nonetheless offering a vision of sorts for the United States in the world, channeling both his own inherent greed and the blinkered views of his far-right allies — it is just an incredibly destructive one that would diminish or even destroy our country. As Flux’s own Matthew Sheffield writes, the administration’s actions in Venezuela reflect a larger desire to abandon the U.S.’s commitment to a global community and to accede to a de facto partitioning of the world into great power zones of influence among countries like Russia and China. As he writes, “Trump and his staff are seeking to abdicate America’s status as the global guarantor of peace, returning to an older model of foreign policy in which the country has absolute power in the Western Hemisphere while retrenching dramatically elsewhere.”
It is no coincidence that the president referred to the Monroe Doctrine in his remarks this weekend — he and his MAGA allies have on multiple fronts beyond Venezuela displayed an interest in dominating and plundering countries in the western hemisphere. From his jaw-dropping talk of annexing Canada and Greenland, to his musing about sending drones to kill drug kingpins in Mexico, to the recent invasion and shakedown of Venezuela, we can see a vision of turning on allies and brutalizing enemies in a dangerous spiral of exploitation and violence. Given this dark undercurrent, Democrats have even more reason to attack Trump for his insane Venezuelan invasion — and to use it as an object lesson for the broken, warring world the far-right would force us all to inhabit.