Let me share a few thoughts about the U.S. action overnight in Venezuela. I say “action” because it’s not clear to me that the U.S. itself (as in the people calling the shots in Washington) know what this was, or have decided. I woke up in the middle of the night and saw the news of some major U.S. attack. That only registered a few WTFs in my mind. Then I woke up again at maybe 4 a.m. and saw at the least the claim that U.S. forces had captured and exfiltrated Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Then my WTFs escalated to 11.
When I woke up this morning I had a sense that this was essentially a raid, in the sense that we attacked and blew up a lot of things but with the central goal the capture of the head of state. That’s a raid and one that would keep the existing state in place, with perhaps the assumption that it would quickly crumble and be replaced by a friendlier government. But now the U.S. president is saying that the U.S. will “run” Venezuela for some undetermined period of time. At least to the best of my knowledge it’s not clear whether the U.S. has any military presence in Venezuela at all or that there’s been any effort to dismantle the current sovereign authorities beyond capturing the head of state. So back to the WTFs …
The U.S. pulled off what is, in purely tactical terms, a pretty impressive operation. (I mean, they blew into a country, captured the head of state apparently with little resistance and brought him back to the U.S.) But my strong assumption is that they now seem to be totally winging it. And winging it would fit with a lot of my understanding of the whole series of events leading up to last night. I don’t think there’s one reason we just kidnapped the Venezuelan president or blew up the boats or placed Navy assets in the region. I think there are a number of factions in the U.S. government each wanting something like this for different reasons. Trump himself mainly thought it would be cool. And lots of different factions wanting this for different reasons and the president thinking it was cool was enough to create the forward momentum to get here. But having gotten here we don’t have any clear idea of what we’re doing. I’ll note that to the extant we accept the premise that Nicolas Maduro committed crimes under U.S. law, capturing him in a quasi-law enforcement operation does not, to put it mildly, create a rationale let alone the legal warrant for occupying the country, running its government or retooling its oil industry. I assume this goes without saying.
A couple other thoughts.
I’ve heard a lot of people talking about not consulting with Congress or not receiving an authorization to U.S. force from Congress. I think this is far, far beyond what are essentially sub-constitutional technicalities. The U.S. president just went to war with another country and now will apparently occupy it for essentially no reason, with no warning and with public opinion overwhelming against all of it. Someone quipped on BlueSky last night that Trump hadn’t even taken the proper constitutional steps to lie the country into this war. This was more than just a funny line. Even lying the country into a war gives some due to the idea that the country is supposed to have some idea what the president is doing, why and some opportunity at least to register an opinion about it. Nor can any of this be separated from the broader domestic and global fabric of Trumpism, the casual illegality, the impetuousness and more than anything else the simple but always visible premise that Trump owns the United States, its military, its people, its wealth, everything. Someone told me earlier that this was like Trump taking his ICE raids global. And yeah, it pretty much is. Trump does what he wants, like one does with things one owns. You don’t ask your table what room it wants to be in and most employers don’t ask employees what tasks they want to do. In Trump’s mind he owns the country and its power. He won it fair and square in the 2024 election. Everything that stands in the way of that basic premise is an obstacle to be overturned.
