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Barack Obama and Donald Trump have this in common: Both owe their political ascents in part to blunt attacks on leaders who sent America to war. Obama dubbed Iraq “a dumb war” before it began; by the time he defeated Hillary Clinton and John McCain in 2008, the war they had voted to authorize as senators had become unpopular. Eight years later, when Trump was first seeking the presidency, many Republicans continued to defend George W. Bush’s foreign policy. He broke with GOP orthodoxy, declaring that “the war in Iraq was a big fat mistake” and advocating for an “America First” foreign policy.
Yet both presidents took a different approach in office. After denigrating the judgment of Iraq War hawks, Obama appointed Clinton as his first secretary of state, and she became the top official urging him to wage the 2011 war in Libya that yielded regime change. Trump chose the Iraq War supporter John Bolton as one of his first-term national security advisers, failed to end the war in Afghanistan, and picked Marco Rubio, a hawkish interventionist, as his second-term secretary of state. Now, The Wall Street Journal reports, Rubio is “the top official” behind a pressure campaign against the Nicolás Maduro regime in Venezuela. (The White House has denied that Rubio is driving Venezuela policy.) And last Saturday, Trump himself said that the United States is preparing for possible military action in Nigeria because, in his telling, the government of the religiously divided nation of 232.7 million is not doing enough to prevent Islamist militias from killing Christians.
American voters are in no mood for new wars of choice. Although majorities don’t seem bothered by the administration’s strikes on alleged drug boats off the coast of Venezuela, a full-blown war is another story: In polling on Venezuela, YouGov found that 55 percent of Americans “would oppose the U.S. invading Venezuela,” while just 15 percent would support it (the rest were unsure); 46 percent “would oppose a military overthrow of Maduro,” while only 18 percent would support it.
But for more than two decades, voters who oppose wars of choice have had nowhere to turn. In post-2004 presidential races, anti-war Americans keep rejecting establishment hawks, only to see the supposed alternatives empower hawkish advisers and deploy force unilaterally. Congress shares the blame: Legislators committed to protecting and defending their enumerated powers could have impeached several post–World War II presidents for usurping Article I and the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which was designed to limit the president’s ability to initiate war unilaterally. Instead, presidents face no consequences for doing so. Obama took military action in Libya without congressional authorization. Trump unilaterally ordered strikes against Syria in his first term and Iran in his second. And congressional inaction may enable yet more risky wars started by Trump, public opinion be damned.
Trump has authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela. He has suggested that Maduro’s days are numbered and has a $50 million bounty out for his arrest. And although the administration reportedly told Congress yesterday that it currently doesn’t have legal justification for land strikes, it hasn’t ruled out future operations. The hawkish faction that Trump is empowering has also floated the possibility of land operations in multiple Latin American countries. “I think President Trump’s made a decision that Maduro, the leader of Venezuela, is an indicted drug trafficker, that it’s time for him to go, that Venezuela and Colombia have been safe havens for narco-terrorists for too long,” Senator Lindsey Graham told Face the Nation late last month. The Pentagon has moved warships, an attack submarine, fighter jets, drones, and Special Forces teams into the region; ground operations against drug cartels in Mexico are reportedly being considered too.
Trump and other administration officials seem to believe that Maduro’s ouster could be good for America, reasoning that it could improve American access to the country’s oil and weaken its drug gangs. But the foreign-policy analysts Evan Cooper and Alessandro Perri of the Stimson Center, an international-security think tank, argue that “the Trump administration’s approach is strategically unsound, risking increased regional instability and hostility towards the United States.” A direct attack on Venezuela would fuel anti-American sentiment throughout the region, they say, advantaging China as it vies with the U.S. for influence there. Armed groups would initiate guerrilla attacks to resist any attempt at removing Maduro, they warn, and if regime change succeeds, chaos would likely threaten peace and anti-drug efforts in neighboring countries. War, they say, would exacerbate the dire economic conditions that “have led 7.7 million to leave the country since 2014.”
Trump, of course, is prone to changing his mind and contradicting himself: He told 60 Minutes recently that a full-out war against Venezuela was unlikely, even as he appeared to threaten Maduro. Whatever Trump may decide, he should not be able to initiate war unilaterally. No one person should. These sorts of wars of choice, which have uncertain outcomes and huge potential downsides, are precisely the kinds of conflicts Congress was created to study, debate, and vote on. Even in the case of Iraq, when congressional deliberation led to the approval of a war most Americans came to regret, the House and Senate votes at least gave citizens a chance to hold their representatives accountable.
As a second-term president, Trump doesn’t have to face voters again. But just as Obama’s hawkishness fueled the anti-establishment populism that helped Trump get elected, a Trump-administration invasion of Venezuela or Nigeria could further incense and radicalize America’s anti-interventionist voters, who keep backing politicians they perceive as opposing wars of choice only to see them wage new ones.
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Today’s News
- The Federal Aviation Administration is preparing to implement nationwide air-traffic reductions starting tomorrow, potentially affecting up to 40 major airports as air traffic controllers continue to be short-staffed. The cuts could cause widespread flight delays and cancellations.
- President Donald Trump announced a deal with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk to cut prices for GLP-1 drugs such as Wegovy and Zepbound to as little as $149 a month, and to expand Medicare and Medicaid coverage of them.
- The Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to keep in place, for now, a rule requiring passports to list sex as shown on a person’s birth certificate.
Dispatches
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Evening Read
America Is Great When America Is Good
By Nancy Pelosi
As America approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding, I have returned again and again to the words of Thomas Paine, who advanced the cause of American freedom with a memorable call to action: The times have found us.
The times had indeed found Paine, and the rest of our Founders, who summoned the courage to declare independence from a king; to win a war against the strongest empire in the world; and to write our Constitution (thank goodness they made it amendable). In the century that followed, the times found Abraham Lincoln, who saved our union by winning the Civil War. And now the times have found us once again.
Read the full article.
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Read. “Maybe it was easier to say everything like this, with a crowd at your feet and a rope around your neck.” Read a short story by George Packer from The Atlantic’s December issue.
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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