Opinion | Now We Know Trump’s Aim in Venezuela: Oil
Mr. Hennigan writes about national security issues for Opinion from Washington.
Over the past four months, President Trump and his cabinet members offered a meandering list of vague and at times conflicting explanations why the administration was amassing warships, attack planes and thousands of military personnel off the coast of Venezuela.
It was about drug smuggling (despite the fact that little cocaine and virtually no fentanyl comes from that country to ours). It was about President Nicolás Maduro’s attempts to destabilize the United States by flooding the southern border with freed prisoners and mental patients (a claim made without evidence). It was about how Venezuela stole oil and land from American businesses (though that’s not entirely true, either).
Now Mr. Trump appears to have come clean. In the wake of Saturday’s predawn military operation in Venezuela, in which Mr. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were captured and flown to a U.S. warship, Mr. Trump made clear that it was essentially about the oil all along.
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” he said at a news conference later on Saturday morning.
The president spoke at length about securing American industry access to Venezuela’s oil fields, which account for roughly 17 percent of the world’s known reserves. A sustained U.S. military presence will be required, he indicated, for the foreseeable future. How many troops will be needed and for how long is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, the United States expects to run the Venezuelan government “until such time that we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” he said.
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Mr. Trump’s willingness to use the U.S. military in legally dubious and audacious ways has become a running theme of his second term. The self-proclaimed peace president is showing that American warfare, once contemplated and debated, is now an almost daily expectation. Since returning to the White House not quite a year ago, Mr. Trump has authorized U.S. forces to launch airstrikes or night raids across Yemen, Iran, Somalia, Nigeria, Iraq, Syria and now Venezuela.
The United States has not formally declared war on these countries, which is why many Americans might wonder why our troops are engaged in operations there. Mr. Trump, after all, campaigned on promises to keep the U.S. military out of such foreign interventions. But looked at another way, his actions are a continuation of something that’s long been happening: For a quarter century the global war on terror has habituated Americans to their presidents authorizing lethal military operations in countries many of them would struggle to find on a map.
Mr. Trump labeled Mr. Maduro a “narco-terrorist,” along with the alleged criminal group the Trump administration says he leads. It’s the language the administration needed to establish political and legal cover to topple a leader for whom it lacked compelling evidence of posing a direct security threat to the United States, though Mr. Maduro has led a repressive regime for more than a decade. While U.S. administrations since Sept. 11, 2001, have stretched executive powers over the military under the banner of maintaining national security, they did so while generally keeping Congress apprised of the missions underway.
Now we’re watching a president seem to unilaterally decide on regime change. It is illegal, it is antithetical to the democratic process, and it’s another example of Mr. Trump misleading the American people about his true intentions.
Leading up to Saturday’s attack, Mr. Trump’s team framed the buildup of U.S. military activities in the Caribbean, including strikes on some 30 boats that have killed at least 110 people, as a limited effort to counter Venezuela’s drug smuggling. Saturday’s operation, which involved months of planning and highly orchestrated execution, resulted in Mr. Maduro and Ms. Flores making their way to the United States aboard a naval ship. Both have been indicted in federal court and are expected to appear before a U.S. District Court judge in New York City.
Mr. Trump said that Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s interim president, would act as a partner in allowing the United States to run her country, though she later declared that Mr. Maduro was the nation’s “only president.” America, of course, has an abysmal track record in helping run other countries; its forays into nation building in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya were all spectacular failures. Ms. Rodríguez’s comments make clear that Mr. Trump is without a detailed road map for how to prevent the same thing from happening in Venezuela.
But let’s set all that lack of planning aside and recognize the audacity of what’s just occurred: The president has enlisted the United States in an open-ended obligation to govern a foreign country with the stated goal of exploiting its sizable oil infrastructure for America’s economic gain, and perhaps for the Venezuelan people.
In the past, American presidents have tried to perfect the art of preparing the nation for war. This typically has entailed a few months of speeches, international trips to build a military coalition and high-profile offers giving adversaries a way out, short of armed conflict. All of this is done in hopes that the American public and Congress alike will understand and appreciate why conflict — never anyone’s first choice — is necessary to advance the United States’ interests.
Little of that well practiced routine was on display ahead of the Trump administration’s attack on Venezuela. The president muddled what his policy goals were as he amassed a wide range of forces in the region. He refused to seek congressional approval for his actions, possibly because some Republicans didn’t agree with them. He didn’t even privately notify Congress in advance of U.S. forces’ capture of Mr. Maduro and Ms. Flores.
At every turn, Mr. Trump has demonstrated his unwillingness to concede Congress’s constitutional right to declare war. Last year Republicans blocked a bipartisan Senate resolution that would have legally prevented Mr. Trump from engaging in direct conflict with Venezuela. This was a mistake. Republicans and Democrats must reassert this authority before he acts again unilaterally in the growing list of places he’s already threatened — including Mexico, Panama, Canada and Greenland. Americans must not continually find themselves embroiled in conflicts for reasons they barely understand.
W.J. Hennigan writes about national security, foreign policy and conflict for the Opinion section.