The Trump administration is inching closer to entering the U.S. into war with Venezuela without providing evidence justifying it, pursuing any formal debate or authorization or outlining a plan to deal with the chaos experts say will almost certainly ensue.
U.S. officials have now chosen targets for airstrikes in the South American country and believe they may be approved imminently, The Wall Street Journal and Miami Herald reported on Friday.
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The move would escalate President Donald Trump’s two-month campaign of strikes in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, which have killed at least 57 people. The administration, which has claimed the strikes around South America target people bringing drugs to the U.S., has not demonstrated that any of its victims were a threat, nor did it attempt to prosecute them. Military officials told Congress on Thursday that they do not know exactly who they have killed so far, Democratic lawmakers said after a briefing.
Simultaneously, an attack would represent America’s second assault on a nation that has not attacked the U.S. in less than a year — the first being against Iran in June — risking a domino effect of strife and bloodshed, and underscoring the hollowness of Trump’s claims he is enhancing world peace.
The identified targets include Venezuelan government installations, the WSJ reports, meaning the proposed plan would further undercut the administration’s argument that it is simply targeting drug traffickers, including through covert CIA actions. Bombing another country’s territory and infrastructure is indisputably war. Also, Trump aides have intertwined their purported anti-trafficking with regime change, often expressing a desire to oust Venezuela’s authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro. Officials have called him a drug kingpin (which he denies) and offered a $50 million reward for his arrest — double what the U.S. offered for the capture of Osama bin Laden, the planner of the 9/11 attacks.
The spiral into conflict is occurring with minimal checks or clarity around the Trump administration’s policy-making.
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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has not answered multiple weeks-old requests to share orders and legal rationales involved in the so-called anti-drug operation, the leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee (notably including Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi) said Friday. The Trump administration has not publicly released the basis for its growing offensive, but there have reportedly been internal struggles over whether the strikes are justifiable, and fears of being seen as arguing otherwise among government lawyers. Adm. Alvin Holsey, who led the U.S. Southern Command, retired earlier this month after clashing with Hegseth over the legality of the attacks, according to CNN.
Among those monitoring the situation is Harrison Mann, a 13-year Army officer now with the progressive group Win Without War. Mann. Mann quit his last military job at the Defense Intelligence Agency over U.S. support for Israel’s devastating offensive in Gaza, which itself appeared to violate U.S. and international law, and has in recent weeks helped organize a national campaign of billboards and other outreach called “Not What You Signed Up For?” to inform U.S. soldiers about resources for legal counseling and community support as the Trump administration has used the military in unprecedented ways abroad and domestically. It’s “a frightening and isolating experience” to receive orders that may be unlawful and try to assess how to react and it’s “increasingly a possibility,” Mann said, so the effort seeks to help individuals avoid violations.
HuffPost discussed developments around Venezuela with Mann on Friday afternoon.
A billboard erected outside SOUTHCOM, the U.S. military branch overseeing ongoing and expanding operations in Latin America. OUTFRONT Media
Thinking back to being on the inside at a moment like this, with the U.S. spiraling into conflict and a pretty unclear mission, whether narcotics or regime change, how would you be feeling about it — and how do you imagine folks being asked to carry out these orders in Latin America are? What are their options? And what’s your sense of whether legal efforts, like court challenges against the Trump administration’s domestic deployment of troops, will be fast enough to catch up, given how quickly the actual deployments are moving?
A lot of them are probably hoping that they don’t get asked to do something illegal. When we look at all the strikes on boats that have happened so far, that’s dozens, probably hundreds, of uniformed service members in terms of how many it takes from getting an order to actually dropping a bomb or doing a drone strike on one of these boats who participated in something that they were quite confident was not legal. That’s still a small minority of all of the troops who have now been deployed to the region, between the Air Force and the growing number of Navy ships that we have outside of Venezuela.
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In government in general, at higher echelons you have lawyers who are assigned to you who are meant to be your counsel, JAGs if you’re in the military. But as you go further down the ranks, you don’t have legal consultation. If you’re a more junior officer or a junior enlisted, you’re taking it on good faith that the orders you’re receiving have been run through some kind of legal review and are going to be lawful, and I think that assumption is increasingly in question with how this administration has deployed the military both in the Caribbean and in American cities. Our campaign put a billboard [near] SOUTHCOM but we started with National Guard deployments and the broader issue of the administration trying to use the military in illegal ways… which has both moral implications and legal implications for the people who choose to give those orders and the people who choose to carry them out.
I hope that legal challenges carry the day, but I don’t think it’s wise to expect that or have total faith that that’s gonna happen. In terms of domestic deployments, if the president invokes the Insurrection Act, then he can put both Guard and active-duty troops basically anywhere he wants. And when we’re talking about overseas strikes and the potential war in Venezuela, the legal constraints to that were really abandoned a long time ago with Congress abandoning its role in constructing and containing foreign policy. In some ways the boat strikes are crossing new red lines in terms of illegal use of the military but a lot of folks have pointed out that the legal justifications for these strikes are not dramatically flimsier than the justifications for a lot of bombings around the Middle East for the past 10-plus years over multiple presidents. There was already a precedent that the president could blow up anybody who he said was a terrorist to a certain extent.
The scariest part from an American perspective about the strikes in the Caribbean so far is that at the same time that members of the Trump administration are calling a broad swath of Americans terrorists, via [National Security Presidential Memorandum 7] and via public statements by people like Stephen Miller, they’re also asserting their right to drone strike anybody the president calls a terrorist.
We’re at this moment after chaos in Hegseth’s office, the firing of a lot of top commanders, skipping over some to appoint those perceived as loyal, and removing an independent press corps at the Pentagon. Is the U.S. military establishment in a position to be managing this kind of operation and how concerned are you about transparency and the chain of command now?
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Are they administratively capable of continuing to bomb people? I think yes. The fact that we’ve seen now the second flag officer pushed out over these Caribbean strikes, General McGee from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on one hand is an optimistic development because it means some of our senior leaders are trying to uphold their oath and trying to avoid breaking the law and trying to give their best advice to their superiors. What we don’t know is whether the officers who take their place are going to feel the same way. What I can’t tell you is how much solidarity there is at the flag officer rank… or if that replacement is going to learn the lesson that Hegseth is trying to teach them, which is “get in line or I’ll fire you.” It remains to be seen what behavior we’re going to see from our upper echelon in military leadership.
Presidents finding creative legal justifications to kill people abroad and Congress letting them do it is not new. Looking at the escalation now and the limited guardrails against it, are you thinking about lessons that could have been learned from the post-9/11 War on Terror? And specifically lessons from U.S. intervention in Latin America for decades? How is that history being overlooked and what could we take from it?
We should understand these events as continuation of the War on Terror – we never rejected that logic. We pulled some troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but the idea we should be unilaterally bombing without a clear connection to how that makes Americans safer and the contention that anybody you call a terrorist is somebody you can then bomb or detain or otherwise mistreat outside of the law was never really challenged.
The lesson I would hope we learned from America’s history in Latin America is that setting aside the moral objections to regime change in countries in the region, it’s also disastrous for us politically and economically. Whatever you think of Venezuela now, turning it into a warzone is not going to make it more stable, solve the economic crisis there or stem the refugees that are flowing into neighboring countries and contributing to burdening some of the resources of countries in the region. The lesson that folks like [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio learned is that we just didn’t try hard enough in the 1980s and now we finally have an opportunity to finish the job. Their theory is that if you regime-change Venezuela, that will cut off their oil to Cuba, so then you can regime-change Cuba. These people learned no lesson of not giving up on the foreign policy of 50 or 60 years ago.
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The anti-war movement generally faces an uphill battle in the U.S. Some have felt that with Trump’s “America First” line and MAGA base, which questioned intervention against Iran alongside Israel, those conservatives could be helpful. How are you thinking about organizing around this?
Inexecution, “America First” seems to have led to a lot of foreign interventions. I am encouraged when Americans from every political affiliation oppose dangerous and unnecessary foreign intervention; it’s to me too soon to see whether that has translated into an actually more rational foreign policy. The trend you’re talking about certainly exists … but it’s way too soon to say that it’s really going to restrain the foreign policy of the president or of his party. I wish it did, I hope it does, but it certainly seems that the death of the neocons has been highly exaggerated.
One aspect of Trump’s second term is that he’s performing exaggerated versions of policies that we’ve had for 20 years and he’s doing it without attempting to justify it in moral terms, and that makes it easier for a lot of people to understand why this kind of interventionism is wrong. On Capitol Hill, some representatives who were not interested in pushing back against foreign interventions are getting a little more interested. In part because of the awakening effect of U.S. support for the genocide in Gaza, there’s certainly a lot more Americans who are paying attention to how the U.S. comports itself abroad. I’ve been heartened to see at least in the Democratic Party pretty consistent positions against these interventions without a lot of equivocating, and to see some Republicans start at least rhetorically moving against them.
We’ll have to see what votes come out for a war powers resolution against intervention in Venezuela.
My organization sees this as a moment to explain to people in this country and to elected leaders why they have to pay attention to the connection between foreign policy and our lives here at home. And I think putting the National Guard in our streets while we start blowing up random people in boats makes it a lot easier to explain that what we do overseas doesn’t stay there.
Sufficient pushback, a climbdown by Venezuela or just Trump volatility are probably our ways out of this, or maybe it’s some combination of all three. In terms of damage and danger until that happens, what barometers will you track to understand this situation, in terms of human life, violations of U.S. and international law and broader instability going forward?
Domestically I’ll be looking at how many members of Congress and other institutions speak out against it and try to prevent it. I’m personally thinking about what echelons of our military leadership acquiesce versus push back against what could be patently unlawful orders… we shouldn’t assume the first strike is gonna be on a Venezuelan military base. It could be something the administration thinks is a drug lab but turns out to be somebody’s house; it could be civilian or political leadership. If and when this begins, there’s already been a massive economic refugee outflow from Venezuela in part because of sanctions we’ve applied. I’ll be looking at not just the loss of life but the number of people who have to flee.
We’ve seen Trump personally be satisfied with showy actions that he can call a win. Iran fits that bill, to a lesser extent the Gaza ceasefire [in January] did. I don’t know whether that will work in Venezuela given the success so far of his hawks, which in this case includes both [Trump’s chief domestic policy advisor] Stephen Miller and Marco Rubio.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
