After campaigning on promises to end American entanglements overseas, Donald Trump announced a mere month after winning the 2024 presidential election that the United States’ “ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity” for “National Security and Freedom throughout the World.” In his inaugural address, weeks later, he delivered a casus belli against Panama, accusing the country of mistreating the United States: “China is operating the Panama Canal. And we didn’t give it to China. We gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.”
Now, as the first year of his second term draws to a close, President Trump is mobilizing for war against … Venezuela?
The buildup to a possible conflict with Venezuela, which has included attacks on boats and a gathering of forces in the Caribbean, is unusual, even surreal, in its lack of a coherent public rationale. Not only has the administration failed to seek authorization for continued operations from Congress—as the Constitution requires for any military action longer than 60 days—it is barely engaging in the kind of jingoistic rhetoric that usually prefigures a conflict. The administration has doubled the reward for anything that might help lead to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s capture, but Trump hasn’t convincingly explained why.
[Read: Trump’s boat strikes could make the cartel problem worse]
The administration has insisted that Trump is targeting Venezuela because of its involvement in the drug trade. “This mission defends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on X in November. Donald Trump Jr. recently defended his father’s air strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean by arguing that drug cartels pose “a far greater clear and present danger to the United States than anything going on in Ukraine and Russia.”
A problem with this explanation is that regime change is an incredibly cost-ineffective strategy in any war on drugs. Another is that Trump, who has pardoned or otherwise granted clemency to more than 90 drug criminals across both terms, has taken a shockingly lax posture on the narcotics trade. On his second day in office this year, he pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, once the largest online black market for drugs and goods. Trump recently pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been convicted in an American court of turning his country into a “narco-state” that was exporting drugs to the U.S. It makes little sense why Trump would go out of his way to free one Latin American leader but take another one out for the same offense.
There is a long, sordid history of national leaders, including American ones, publicly lying their way into war while insiders know the real reason. In this case, the administration is barely spinning a story, and it’s not clear that anyone actually knows the real reason for the military buildup in the region or the deadly strikes on alleged drug boats, which have killed nearly 90 people since September.
Is Trump targeting Venezuela because Maduro’s government is a dictatorship? The U.S. did indeed declare Maduro’s electoral victory last year illegitimate, but Trump himself loves dictators. He enjoys their company and waxes jealous over the displays of submission they receive. One might hypothesize that Maduro is different because he is a left-wing dictator, unlike Trump favorites such as Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán, but that doesn’t hold up, either—Trump has fawned more ostentatiously over the Communist dictators Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un than any other president in history.
Toppling Maduro also doesn’t align with Trump’s long-standing criticism of regime change. His foreign-policy-strategy document, published in November, affirms, “We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.”
Lacking any halfway-plausible case for war, Trump’s supporters have resorted to depicting anybody who criticizes his actions as sympathetic to his targets. Joe Concha’s column in the Washington Examiner is headlined, “Anti-Trump Democrats Appear to Take the Side of Narco-Terrorists.” The invocation of the term narco-terrorist is most precisely defined as “a drug dealer Trump doesn’t like.”
Batya Ungar-Sargon, who has previously complained that Trump was unfairly denied the Nobel Peace Prize, is trying to rerun the Iraq War playbook by labeling narcotics a kind of weapon of mass destruction. “To Democrats and their sympathetic media, you’re not allowed to stop chemical weapons from killing your children,” she declared recently. “You’re supposed to politely ask them not to come. And if they do, you’re supposed to politely put them on trial, with a taxpayer-funded lawyer, of course.”
If you remove politely, which anyone who’s seen Breaking Bad or Narcos knows is not how the Drug Enforcement Agency operates, Ungar-Sargon’s account of America’s antidrug policy is accurate. The way it traditionally works is that we tell foreign drug dealers not to come, and, yes, if they do, we try them in court. The practice is less dramatic than using missiles to destroy boats that might have drugs, but it has the advantages of being legal and less likely to incinerate innocent fishermen.
As it happens, the only figure in this conflict who has treated drug lords with politeness is Trump, who announced on Truth Social in late November, “I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan Orlando Hernandez who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly.”
[Jeff Flake: When leaders mistake brutality for strength]
Donald Trump Jr. recently tried to explain his father’s foreign doctrine as a kind of brilliant unpredictability. “What’s good about my father, and what’s unique about my father, is you don’t know what he’s going to do,” he said. “The fact that he’s not predictable … forces everyone to actually deal in an intellectually honest capacity.”
Intellectual honesty does not seem to be the hallmark of this administration’s foreign policy. A more helpful way of understanding the president’s whims is to think of him as a small child who develops an obsessive fixation on a new toy before losing all interest. You can wait him out or try to appease him, but you can’t talk him into a rational assessment of cost versus benefit, or assume his stated preference will hold true for very long.
This puts the president’s defenders in an uncomfortable position. Perhaps Trump will follow through on his threats to rid the world of the supposed perils of Maduro and his alleged drug cartels, or maybe he’ll just move on. Residents of Greenland and Panama are certainly grateful the president has found a new toy.
The post Trump’s Toddler Foreign Policy appeared first on The Atlantic.
