At the Libertarian Party’s May 2024 national convention, President Donald Trump asked for an endorsement and promised, “We believe that the job of the United States military is not to wage endless regime change wars around the globe, senseless wars.”
This rhetoric swayed some anti-war libertarians to endorse him, but Trump has shown that he’s just another interventionist president.
On Oct. 15 The New York Times reported Trump had authorized “covert CIA action in Venezuela” against President Nicolas Maduro: “American officials have been clear, privately, that the end goal is to drive Mr. Maduro from power.” Later that day, Trump confirmed the report in a meeting with reporters. “We are certainly looking at land now, because we’ve got the sea very well under control,” he said.
On Monday, Venezuela claimed it had captured “mercenaries” working for the CIA. And on Tuesday, Newsweek reported Trump deployed near Venezuela B1-B Lancer bombers and the USS Gerald Ford, America’s newest and largest aircraft carrier.
The increased tensions occurred even as Trump continued to blow out of the water private boats he claimed, without proof, are loaded with drugs. He even announced, “I don’t think we’re going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. OK? We’re going to kill them.”
That’s just a bad excuse for what Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, aptly called extrajudicial killings. “The Constitution says only Congress can declare war,” he said. “Until then, these strikes are as wrong as what China or Iran does.”
As to drugs, we talked to Jacob Sullum, a senior editor at Reason and the author of “Beyond Control: Drug Prohibition, Gun Regulation, and the Search for Sensible Alternatives.”
While the administration routinely invokes fentanyl, the Caribbean is the wrong target for fentanyl smuggling. “Illicit fentanyl overwhelmingly comes over the border from Mexico,” Sullum explained. “Contrary to what Trump has implied, the Caribbean traffic mainly involves cocaine, which is produced primarily in Colombia.”
Sullum explained the attacks on the boats won’t stop the drug trade. Smugglers can use many alternatives across our southern border, including in vehicles, or by air, tunnels, mail and courier services. Trying to win a drug war by murdering people on boats in the Caribbean is a fool’s errand.
But this is about more than drugs.
Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves. And Trump actually said at a June 2023 rally in North Carolina, “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over; we would have gotten to all that oil; it would have been right next door.”
This is not to defend Maduro, an authoritarian thug who is subjecting the Venezuelan people to economic misery and suffocating their potential. A UN Panel of Experts found his June 2024 re-election, in which he got 51.2%, “fell short of the basic transparency and integrity measures that are essential to holding credible elections.” But as Trump promised, and millions of voters believed, regime-change wars were supposed to be a thing of the past.
This editorial board certainly hopes to see the day when the people of Venezuela are free. But the United States must not indulge in regime change efforts abroad. Trump was elected, ostensibly, to focus on making America great, not playing global imperialist.