Trump’s War on Latin America Must Be Stopped

Any hope that Donald Trump would be an “antiwar” president went out the window almost as soon as he won the 2024 election, when he filled his administration with a coterie of warmongers. After a year in which Trump backed Israel’s war with Iran, went on a spree of blowing up boats in international waters, and, now, attacked Venezuela and abducted its leader, that hope has sailed over a cliff and crashed into the rocks below.

It hardly needs to be said that Trump’s regime change operation in Venezuela is brutish, dangerous, and brazenly illegal, though it is obviously all this and more. It’s illegal on multiple levels: a clear violation of international law, of course, but also the latest instance of Trump cheerfully wiping his shoes on the US Constitution. Despite what Vice President J. D. Vance claims, there is no loophole that magically invalidates that document’s War Powers Clause if the Justice Department indicts a foreign leader.

Those drug-trafficking indictments, by the way, have nothing to do with what Trump just did, though we’ll no doubt hear about them endlessly in the weeks ahead. As analysts have pointed out at length, Venezuela has almost nothing to do with the flow of cocaine into the United States. And Trump has gone almost comically out of his way to undermine his own talking point, pardoning a convicted narco-trafficking Latin American ex-president just weeks ago and publicly musing about how much he’d like to get his hands on Caracas’s oil reserves. He is now practically licking his lips over the field day that “our very large United States oil companies” are going to have as they get “very strongly involved” in Venezuela’s oil industry.

But it’s not just about oil. As Trump helpfully made clear today, the attack on Venezuela is him making good on his administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS), which made as its highest priority reviving the Monroe Doctrine — the “Don-Roe Doctrine,” in the president’s words today — to “restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere,” box China out of Latin America, and make sure the region’s left-wing governments are replaced by ones aligned with Trump. Within hours of toppling the Venezuelan president, Trump was threatening Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico with a similar attack.

God only knows what will follow from this. Once upon a time, Trump won the GOP nomination by assailing George W. Bush for dumb regime-change wars that blew up in Americans’ faces. Now, he’s not only moved those wars to our doorstep, but is outdoing Bush in premature declarations of “mission accomplished,” marveling at “the speed, the violence” of the operation that he himself compared to a TV show set up for his personal, slack-jawed entertainment.

Yet we have no idea what comes next, either in Venezuela — go ask Barack Obama and Libya how power vacuums tend to turn out — or around the world. Vladimir Putin has repeatedly justified his own loathsome war in Ukraine and other interventions by pointing to US-led interventions. How will Trump’s precedent— that a country, sufficiently powerful, can casually bomb its neighbors and kidnap their leaders — be taken up by other unscrupulous politicians in the decades to come?

Meanwhile, Trump has already set a land-speed record for mission creep. Despite the president and his acolytes claiming in the run-up to this that they would take a “break-it-and-leave” approach to Venezuela, Trump is already saying the United States will now “run the country,” might put boots on the ground there, and that he doesn’t “want to be involved with having somebody else get in, and then we have the same situation.”

That may not be so simple in a political tinderbox like Venezuela, where the United States’ own war games predicted an explosion of violence and “chaos for a sustained period of time,” which, if it happens, will turbocharge the mass immigration that Trump has staked his presidency on arresting. Sure enough, Trump did not rule out administering the country for years if that’s what it takes, offering only that “it won’t cost us anything” because of oil revenue.

This, it turns out, is the “MAGA” foreign policy: we’ll still do overseas quagmires and nation-building, but now we’ll do them in the Americas, first.

All the focus and condemnation will understandably be on Trump as we watch this unfold, but save some scrutiny for the liberal establishment that played a key role in getting us here. Marco Rubio, the architect of this operation who’s already angling for a similar one in Cuba, was confirmed to his position with the support of every single Democrat. The Nobel Peace Prize committee gave its tacit endorsement to this attack. The European Union, for all its years’ worth of talk of international law and respecting sovereignty, has not offered even a hint of resistance to Trump’s plans, and if anything, has quietly gone along with them.

In fact, if there’s one big loser from this that’s not Venezuela, it is the European center, which has used Nicolás Maduro’s ouster to highlight its own irrelevance and hypocrisy. This morning has seen European official after European official offer non-condemnations of Trump’s actions all clearly based on the same memo, complete with an empty, token reference to the UN Charter and international law — including, most disgracefully, the current president of the UN General Assembly, German liberal uber-hawk Annalena Baerbock, who offered a four-paragraph-long master class in equivocation. Some, like French president Emmanuel Macron and Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, offered outright support for the Venezuelan leader’s toppling.

In either case, the statements sit awkwardly with EU officials’ furious, justified denunciation of the Russian war in Ukraine, further cementing growing global outrage at what are widely seen as Western governments’ double standards. Shamefully, even European far-right figures like Marine Le Pen. who ostensibly share Trump’s politics, have made more forthright condemnations of what the US president has done than these leaders.

Trump is likely hoping, as per the NSS, that an aggressive move like this will cement US dominance over Latin America, cowing left-wing governments into subordination and halting the region’s drift towards China. But the United States does not have the ability to easily replicate what it’s done in Venezuela in countries like Brazil and Mexico, and it is just as likely to have the opposite effect: catalyzing deepening ties with China to counterbalance the growing threat from an increasingly belligerent Washington. His tariffs — in Brazil’s case, explicitly aimed at bullying the country to influence its internal politics — have already undermined his wider goal of making the region less economically dependent on Beijing.

In that sense, this looks less like a confident superpower flexing its muscles in its “backyard” and more like an exhausted one playing the only card it has left — the bloated US military — to project its dominance after every other attempt has fallen embarrassingly flat. Trump and the people around him may ultimately not succeed at advancing their larger strategy, but that doesn’t mean they can’t still do a lot of damage as they flail about, which they are surely about to do, in both Venezuela and in the wider region.

We are now firmly inside an uglier, more dangerous world that may very well make us pine for even the empty lip service to international law of decades past. And as long as these foreign adventures continue, no one except moneyed interests and reckless politicians will prosper — not those in the crosshairs, like long-suffering Venezuelans, and not ordinary working Americans, who are once again being dragged into a wasteful foreign conflict as they struggle to make ends meet.