Trump’s escalation with Venezuela has crossed red lines and is heading towards all-out war

The Trump administration is inching closer to taking the United States to war with Venezuela without providing evidence to justify it, holding any formal discussions or authorizations, or outlining a plan to deal with the chaos that experts say will almost certainly ensue.

US officials have now chosen targets for airstrikes in the South American country and believe they may be approved imminently, The New York Times reported. Wall Street Journal and The Miami Herald reported on Friday.

The move would escalate President Donald Trump’s two-month campaign of attacks in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, which have delicate at least 57 people. The administration, which has claimed that the attacks in South America target people bringing drugs into the United States, has not proven that any of its victims were a threat, nor has it attempted to prosecute them. Military officials told Congress on Thursday that they do not know exactly who they have killed so far, Democratic lawmakers. saying after a briefing.

At the same time, an attack would represent the second US assault on a nation that has not attacked the United States in less than a year (the first was against Iran in June), risking a domino effect of conflict and bloodshed, and underscoring the hollowness of Trump’s claims that he is improving world peace.

The identified targets include Venezuelan government facilities, the WSJ reports, meaning the proposed plan would further undermine the administration’s argument that it is simply targeting drug traffickers, including through covert CIA actions. Bombing another country’s territory and infrastructure is unquestionably war. Additionally, Trump’s advisers have intertwined his supposed fight against trafficking with regime change, often expressing a desire to overthrow Venezuela’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro. Officials have called him a drug kingpin (which he denies) and offered a $50 million reward for his arrest. double what the United States offered for the capture of Osama bin Laden, the planner of the 9/11 attacks.

The spiraling conflict is occurring with minimal controls or clarity around the Trump administration’s policymaking.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has not responded to multiple requests from weeks ago to share orders and legal rationale involved in the so-called counterdrug operation, leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee (including Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi) said Friday. The Trump administration has not publicly revealed the rationale for its escalating crackdown, but there has reportedly been infighting over whether the attacks are justifiable and fears that government lawyers will view them as arguing otherwise. Admiral Alvin Holsey, who led the US 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, an Army officer of 13 years who now belongs to 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 in recent weeks he has helped organize a national billboard and other outreach campaign called “Isn’t That What You Signed Up For?” inform American soldiers about resources for legal advice and community support, as the Trump administration has used the military in unprecedented ways abroad and at home. It is “a frightening and isolating experience” to receive orders that may be illegal and try to evaluate how to react and is “an increasing possibility,” Mann said, so the effort seeks to help people avoid violations.

News themezone spoke with Mann about developments in Venezuela on Friday afternoon.

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Thinking about being inside at a time like this, with the United States entering a spiral of conflict and a pretty confusing mission, whether it be narcotics or regime change, how would you feel about that and how do you imagine the people who are asked to carry out these orders in Latin America feel? What are your options? And what’s your take on whether legal efforts, such as court challenges to the Trump administration’s domestic troop deployment, will be quick enough to catch up, given how quickly actual deployments are moving?

Many of them probably hope that they are not asked to do something illegal. When we look at all the ship attacks that have occurred so far, it’s dozens, probably hundreds, of uniformed service members in terms of how many it takes from receiving an order to dropping a bomb or conducting a drone strike on one of these ships that participated in something that they were pretty sure was not legal. That’s still a small minority of all the troops that have now been deployed to the region, between the Air Force and the growing number of Navy ships we have outside of Venezuela.

In government in general, at the highest levels you have assigned attorneys who must be your attorneys, JAG if you are in the military. But as you advance through the ranks, you have no legal consultation. If you are a junior officer or a junior enlisted person, you are taking it in good faith that the orders you are receiving have gone through some type of legal review and are going to be legal, and I think that assumption is increasingly in question with the way this administration has deployed the military both in the Caribbean and in American cities. Our campaign put up a sign [near] SOUTHCOM, but we start with National Guard deployments and the broader issue of the administration trying to use the military illegally…which has both moral and legal implications for the people who choose to give those orders and the people who choose to carry them out.

I hope the legal challenges are successful, but I don’t think it’s wise to wait for that or have complete faith that that’s going to happen. In terms of domestic deployments, if the president invokes the Insurrection Act, then he can place both the Guard and active duty troops basically wherever he wants. And when we talk about attacks abroad and the possible war in Venezuela, the legal limitations were actually abandoned long ago when Congress abandoned its role in the construction and containment of foreign policy. In some ways, the ship attacks are crossing new red lines in terms of illegal use of the military, but many people have pointed out that the legal justifications for these attacks are not dramatically weaker than the justifications for many bombings in the Middle East over the past 10 years and under various presidents. There was already a precedent that the president could blow up anyone who said they were a terrorist to some extent.

The most terrifying part from an American perspective about the attacks in the Caribbean so far is that at the same time members of the Trump administration are calling a wide swath of Americans terrorists, via[[Presidential National Security Memorandum 7]and through public statements from people like Stephen Miller, they are also asserting their right to drone attack anyone the president calls a terrorist.

We are at this moment after the chaos in Hegseth’s office, the firing of many top commanders, the bypassing of some to appoint those perceived as loyalists, and the elimination of an independent press corps at the Pentagon. Is the US military establishment in a position to manage this type of operation? How concerned are you now about transparency and the chain of command?

Are they administratively capable of continuing to bombard people? I think so. The fact that we have now seen the second flag officer expelled for these attacks in the Caribbean, General McGee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the one hand, is an optimistic development because it means that some of our senior leaders are trying to fulfill 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 agents who take his place will feel the same. What I can’t tell you is how much solidarity there is at the flag officer rank… or whether that replacement is going to learn the lesson Hegseth is trying to teach them, which is “get in line or I’ll fire you.” It remains to be seen what behavior we will see from our upper echelon of military leadership.

Presidents finding creative legal justifications for killing people abroad and Congress allowing them to do so is not new. As you look at the current escalation and the limited barriers against it, are you thinking about the lessons that could have been learned from the post-9/11 War on Terror? And specifically the lessons of US intervention in Latin America over decades? How is that history overlooked and what can we take from it?

We should understand these events as a continuation of the War on Terror; we never reject that logic. We pulled some troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but the idea that we should bomb unilaterally without a clear connection to how that makes Americans safer and the claim that anyone you call a terrorist is someone who can then be bombed, detained, or mistreated outside the law was never really challenged.

The lesson I hope we have learned from US history in Latin America is that, moral objections aside to regime change in countries in the region, it is also disastrous for us politically and economically. Regardless of what one thinks about Venezuela now, turning it into a war zone will not make it more stable, solve the economic crisis there, or stop the refugees that are flowing into neighboring countries and contributing to straining some of the resources of countries in the region. The lesson that people like [Secretary of State] What Marco Rubio learned is that we simply didn’t try hard enough in the 1980s and now we finally have the chance to finish the job. Their theory is that if the Venezuelan regime is changed, the oil supply to Cuba will be cut off, then the Cuban regime can be changed. These people did not learn the lesson of not giving up the foreign policy of 50 or 60 years ago.

The anti-war movement generally faces an uphill battle in the United States. Some have felt that with Trump’s “America First” line and the MAGA base, which questioned intervention against Iran alongside Israel, those conservatives could be useful. How do you plan to organize around this?

In execution, “America First” appears to have led to many foreign interventions. I am encouraged when Americans of all political affiliations oppose dangerous and unnecessary foreign intervention; For me it’s too early to see if that has translated into a truly more rational foreign policy situation. The trend you’re talking about certainly exists… but it’s too early to say that it’s really going to constrain the foreign policy of the president or his party. I wish it were so, I hope so, but it certainly seems that the death of the neoconservatives has been greatly exaggerated.

One aspect of Trump’s second term is that he is carrying out exaggerated versions of policies that we have had for 20 years and he is doing it without trying to justify it in moral terms, and that makes it easier for many people to understand why this kind of interventionism is wrong. On Capitol Hill, some representatives who weren’t interested in opposing foreign interventions are becoming a little more interested. In part because of the woke effect of US support for the genocide in Gaza, there are certainly many more Americans who are paying attention to how the US behaves abroad. I have been encouraged to see, at least in the Democratic Party, fairly consistent positions against these interventions without many ambiguities, and to see some Republicans begin to act at least rhetorically against them.

We will have to see which votes come out in favor of a war powers resolution against intervention in Venezuela.

My organization sees this as a moment to explain to the people of this country and elected leaders why they need to pay attention to the connection between foreign policy and our lives here at home. And I think putting the National Guard on our streets while we start blowing up random people in boats makes it a lot easier to explain that what we do abroad doesn’t stop there.

A sufficient reaction, a retreat from Venezuela or simply Trump’s volatility are probably our way out of this situation, or perhaps it is a combination of all three. In terms of damage and danger until that happens, what barometers will you follow to understand this situation, in terms of human lives, violations of American and international law, and broader instability going forward?

Nationally, I will be watching to see how many members of Congress and other institutions speak out against it and try to stop it. Personally, I’m thinking about what echelons of our military leadership accept or reject what could be patently illegal orders…we shouldn’t assume that the first attack will be against a Venezuelan military base. It could be something the administration thinks is a drug lab but turns out to be someone’s house; It could be civil or political leadership. When this begins, there will already have been a mass departure of economic refugees from Venezuela, in part due to the sanctions we have applied. I will deal not only with the loss of life, but also with the number of people who have to flee.

We have personally seen Trump take satisfaction in eye-catching actions that he can call a victory. Iran meets those requirements and, to a lesser extent, the ceasefire in Gaza. [in January] did. I don’t know if that will work in Venezuela given the success so far of their 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.