Trump’s War
by David Cole
“It was a brilliant operation, actually.” So claimed Donald Trump early this morning in a phone call with The New York Times about the US military’s overnight invasion and bombing of Venezuela, culminating in the abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, who have been brought to New York to face an indictment for drug smuggling.
It was an illegal operation, actually. Illegal on so many fronts that it can be challenging to keep them straight. First, and most importantly, it violates the bedrock rule of international law, which prohibits nations from attacking other sovereign states except when authorized by the UN itself or when acting in self-defense. Trump has invoked self-defense for all his aggressive actions against Venezuela, from summarily executing at least 115 people in unprovoked assaults from the air on boats alleged to be carrying drugs in international waters, to destroying a loading dock in the country itself and, now, bombing Caracas and abducting Maduro. The basis for that claim, Trump insists, is that Maduro has facilitated the smuggling of drugs into the United States, and that those drugs in turn kill thousands of Americans each year. But self-defense applies only in response to an actual or imminent armed attack, and whatever else drug smuggling might be, it is not even conceivably an armed attack. (According to US records, moreover, Venezuela is not even a source of fentanyl, the lethal drug that has been the agent of many of those overdose deaths and that Trump recently labeled a “weapon of mass destruction.” It mostly comes from Mexico.) Quite simply, Venezuela has not attacked the United States. The only nation with a self-defense justification here is Venezuela.
The attack also violated the US Constitution, which gives Congress, not the president, the power to declare war and authorize the use of military force. The only situation in which presidents can constitutionally conduct unilateral military action is, again, in self-defense against an ongoing or imminent armed attack. The Venezuelan operation also violated the War Powers Resolution, which requires the president to notify Congress before introducing troops into any situation of ongoing or imminent hostilities.
The fact that Maduro was indicted doesn’t remotely authorize the military action. First, this was not a mere law enforcement operation; it was regime change. In a press conference earlier today, Trump admitted as much: “We don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years,” he said. “So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. And it has to be judicious, because that’s what we’re all about.” He singled out one aspect of that “transition” in particular:
As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust…. We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies—the biggest anywhere in the world—go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country. And we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so.
That is not law enforcement; it is imperialism, pure and simple.
Second, trying Maduro contravenes the principle of international law that heads of state are absolutely immune from trial in the courts of a foreign country. Trump should know; after all, he successfully argued in the US Supreme Court that he himself had immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts” in his own country, even after he left office. Yet if what he is doing to Maduro is lawful, it would be just as lawful for another nation to capture Trump and put him on trial in their own courts.
Trump’s escalating military attacks against Venezuela are not entirely unprecedented.…
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
Like President Lyndon B. Johnson consulted Congress before engaging the North Vietnamese during and after the Tonkin Gulf incident, like President Ronald Reagan did before invading Grenada, like President George H. W. Bush did before invading Panama, and like President Barack Obama did before drawing up his kill lists every Tuesday to execute terrorists, one of whom was an American citizen. You have a short memory.
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