“It’s War, I Tell You! War!”
The U.S. incursion into Venezuela is unconstitutional, poorly thought out, and likely to destabilize oil prices, the European alliance, and several South American countries. What could go wrong?
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But first, your Moment of Zen … a time-lapse movie of Sunday night’s sunset, taken on the Post Road south of Marathon, Texas.
Monday, January 5, 2026
Happy New Year! May 2025 be better than last year for all of us, and for our country. As I write below, I do not think we are off to a good start.
The United States invaded Venzuela Saturday, with military units kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife. There was no loss of life and only minimal loss to equipment, thanks to our military’s competence and capability. But it is not clear that the overall mission – which seems to be expropriation of the country’s natural resources – has been thought out, planned for and resourced. With that in mind, here are …
Five Things to Think About
The Venezuelans are not going along.
At Trump’s triumphant press conference, he said that Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez “is essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again.” (Consider that formulation: she’ll do what we think is necessary.) A few hours later, however, Rodriguez demanded “the immediate release of President Nicolás Maduro — and his wife Cilia Flores — the only president of Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro.”
Apparently, we are not, as Dick Cheney so memorably expressed it re Iraq, “being greeted as liberators.” But Rodriguez is in a dangerous spot: she may want to defy the yanquis, but the CIA are certainly cultivating other government and military leaders who will be more accommodating. That spells domestic unrest and trouble for both Venezuela and its neighbors.
This is not well planned.
President Trump announced that “we will run Venezuela,” although he was decidedly unclear about details. When asked who, specifically, would be running Venezuela, he gestured vaguely to the people behind him – including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, General Dan “Raising” Caine (yes, that is what they called him), and, alarmingly, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen “Nosferatu” Miller. No other details have been forthcoming.
As General Mark Hertling has argued in The Bulwark, regime change is an extraordinarily complex national undertaking. The Bush Administration and its military leaders were far more competent than the Trump clown car parade, and they still screwed up Afghanistan and Iraq for at least a generation.
The Venezuelan attack is unconstitutional.
The United States has made war on Venezuela, as the performative chest-beating from both Trump and “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth made clear. But the Constitution places the sole authority to declare war in the Congress. Admittedly, that provision has been ignored and abused in the past – remember, 20 years of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq were justified by an “Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF)” resolution passed in the wake of 9/11. But the Trump Administration did not even observe the formalities: according to Politico, “[t]he Gang of Eight, which includes senior congressional leaders and top members of the House and Senate Intelligence committees, was notified of the operation only after it had been launched.” Democratic congressional leaders claim that, to the extent they were briefed at all, they were misled about Trump’s plan and whether “regime change” was on the table.
Once upon a time, the fact that such an important presidential act was unconstitutional would trigger investigative news reports, congressional investigations, and lawsuits. But the Venezuelan adventure is just another in the “long train of abuses and usurpations” that is the Trump authoritarian project. I doubt whether this Congress will ever assert its proper role; that may have to wait until January of 2027.
This is Marco Rubio’s one brief, shining moment.
Rubio has not been an impressive Secretary of State (he is also the National Security Advisor) thus far. On the most important issues facing the United States and the world community — Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and the ongoing fustercluck in the Middle East — he’s been sidelined by a couple real estate speculators. He does not seem to be a player in Trump’s other “shoot first, aim later” foreign misadventures – tariffs, Canada, Mexico, Greenland, Europe, Taiwan, etc. These issues demand a consistent, integrated policy approach, and so far we’ve seen nothing of the kind.
However, Rubio’s fingerprints are all over the Venezuela caper. Rubio, of Cuban heritage, opposes Venezuela’s support for the last dregs of the Castro dictatorship in Havana. He opposed both Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro as Cuban-style Marxists and would gladly replace them with an American puppet state. He helped sell Trump on the idea that Venezuelans had “stolen” “our” oil from us when they nationalized their oil industry — a flimsy justification for an invasion that evokes memories of the disastrous Iraq invasion of 2003.
But Rubio is playing a longer, more destabilizing game: bringing down the Cuban government. “I don’t think it’s any mystery that we are not big fans of the Cuban regime, who, by the way, are the ones that were propping up Maduro. … If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned,” he said on Meet the Press Sunday.
This is the Trump Doctrine – bad for the U.S., bad for the world.
Geopolitically, the Trump regime’s fixation on the Western Hemisphere is part of a return to the old doctrine of “spheres of influence.” It cripples the 80-year international order, enforced by the United States, that contained Communist authoritarianism in Europe and the Far East. In it, the United States becomes the hegemon in the Western Hemisphere – hands off, everyone else. In return, Russia gets a freer hand to re-subjugate the old U.S.S.R. and the protection that Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asia enjoyed from Chinese adventurism disappears. This new philosophy undergirds much of the National Security Strategy document released last month and panned by national security and foreign policy experts.
A reduced role as the “world’s policeman” is dangerous for the U.S. and the world, certainly in the short run, although it appeals to the “America First” crowd. But they will quickly become jittery over sudden American adventurism in Venezuela, and Cuba, and Panama, and Greenland, and Canada and Mexico and god knows where else. The international leadership of which the Firsters tire will be replaced by the old school hemispheric imperialism of the late 19th and 20th centuries, which caused and then exploited much of the poverty and political instability of Central and South America. It’s hard to imagine who comes out ahead in such a revanchist universe.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on the above in the Comments.
None of this is to suggest that Nicolás Maduro was a good, or even legitimate, leader of Venezuela. Voices from Venezuela and neighboring countries (especially Colombia) describe his departure as an unalloyed good. But getting rid of the bad guy – Nicolae Ceaușescu or Saddam Hussein, for example – is the easy part. As Colin Powell said of Iraq’s reconstruction, “you break it, you bought it.” The United States has broken Venezuela’s government – now it owns it and the problems to follow.
Unfortunately, the Venezuela attack may just be the beginning of foreign distractions — Epstein files, anyone? — as we go into 2026. Over the weekend, Trump threatened Colombia, repeated his claim that we must have Greenland, and said we have to do “something” about Mexico Trump’s desperation is increasing as he stares down the barrels of midterm losses, his obviously declining health, and the civil war that has broken out with the MAGA movement.
Buckle up for 2026!
We send a dozen or so helicopters to capture a banana republic president, but we have Putin, who has an international warrant for his arrest, at a US Air Force base in Alaska, and he’s let go. One good thing about Trump, my wife doesn’t cancel out my vote anymore.
i do not think there was very much nobility in the anti-communist fervor of the 1980s or for that matter, in the 1960s, oil was very much in play then, and yes, the cynicism is baldly blatant. nothing noble here.