Donald Trump’s attack on Venezuela is illegal and unwise

President Donald Trump exits an appearance in the White House Rose Garden on April 2, 2025. (Damon Winter/The New York Times)

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Over the past few months, President Donald Trump has deployed an imposing military force in the Caribbean to threaten Venezuela. Until recently, the president used that force — an aircraft carrier, at least seven other warships, scores of aircraft and 15,000 U.S. troops — for illegal attacks on small boats that he claimed were ferrying drugs. On Saturday, Trump dramatically escalated his campaign by capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as part of what he called ”a large scale strike” against the country.

Few people will feel any sympathy for Maduro. He is undemocratic and repressive, and has destabilized the Western Hemisphere in recent years. The United Nations recently issued a report detailing more than a decade of killings, torture, sexual violence and arbitrary detention by henchmen against his political opponents. He stole Venezuela’s presidential election in 2024. He has fueled economic and political disruption throughout the region by instigating an exodus of nearly 8 million migrants.

If there is an overriding lesson of U.S. foreign affairs in the past century, however, it is that attempting to oust even the most deplorable regime can make matters worse. The United States spent 20 years failing to create a stable government in Afghanistan and it replaced a dictatorship in Libya with a fractured state. The tragic consequences of the 2003 Iraq War continue to beset America and the Middle East. Perhaps most relevant, the United States has sporadically destabilized Latin American countries, including Chile, Cuba, Guatemala and Nicaragua, by trying to oust a government through force.

Despite this history, Trump seemed to commit the United States to a nation-building project in Venezuela. “We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” he said in a news conference Saturday. He offered almost no details. He has not even offered a coherent explanation for his actions in Venezuela. If Trump wants to make the case for an invasion and a takeover of another country, the Constitution spells out what he must do: Go to Congress. Without congressional approval, his actions violate U.S. law.

The nominal rationale for the administration’s military adventurism is to destroy “narco-terrorists.” Governments throughout history have labeled the leaders of rival nations as terrorists, seeking to justify military incursions as policing operations. The claim is particularly ludicrous in this case, given that Venezuela is not a meaningful producer of fentanyl or the other drugs that have dominated the recent epidemic of overdoses in the United States, and the cocaine that it does produce flows mostly to Europe. While Trump has been attacking Venezuelan boats, he also pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, who ran a sprawling drug operation when he was president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022.

A more plausible explanation for the attacks on Venezuela may instead be found in Trump’s recently released National Security Strategy. It claimed the right to dominate Latin America: “After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.” In what the document called the “Trump Corollary,” the administration vowed to redeploy forces from around the world to the region, stop traffickers on the high seas, use lethal force against migrants and drug runners and potentially base more U.S. troops around the region.

Venezuela has apparently become the first country subject to this latter-day imperialism, and it represents a dangerous and illegal approach to America’s place in the world. By proceeding without any semblance of international legitimacy, valid legal authority or domestic endorsement, Trump risks providing justification for authoritarians in China, Russia and elsewhere who want to dominate their own neighbors. More immediately, he threatens to replicate the American hubris that led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

As a presidential candidate, Trump seemed to recognize the problems with military overreach. In 2016, he was the rare Republican politician to call out the folly of President George W. Bush’s Iraq War. In 2024, he said: “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”

He is now abandoning this principle, and he is doing so illegally. The Constitution requires Congress to approve any act of war. Yes, presidents often push the boundaries of this law. But even Bush sought and received congressional endorsement for his Iraq invasion, and presidents since Bush have justified their use of drone attacks against terrorist groups and their supporters with a 2001 law that authorized action after the Sept. 11 attacks. Trump has not even a fig leaf of legal authority for his attacks on Venezuela.

Congressional debates over military action play a crucial democratic role. They check military adventurism by forcing a president to justify his attack plans to the public and requiring members of Congress to tie their own credibility to those plans. For years after the vote on the Iraq War, Democrats who supported Bush, including Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, paid a political price, while those who criticized the war, like Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama, came to be seen as prophetic.

In the case of Venezuela, a congressional debate would expose the thinness of Trump’s rationale. His administration has justified his attacks on the small boats by claiming they pose an immediate threat to the United States. But a wide range of legal and military experts reject the claim, and common sense refutes it, too. An attempt to smuggle drugs into the United States — if, in fact, all the boats were doing so — is not an attempt to overthrow the government or defeat its military.

We suspect Trump has refused to seek congressional approval for his actions partly because he knows that even some Republicans in Congress are deeply skeptical of the direction in which he is leading this country. Before the recent seizure of Maduro, Sens. Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski and Reps. Don Bacon and Thomas Massie — Republicans all — backed legislation that would limit Trump’s military actions against Venezuela.

A second argument against Trump’s attacks on Venezuela is that they violate international law. By blowing up the small boats that Trump says are smuggling drugs, he has killed people based on the mere suspicion that they have committed a crime and given them no chance to defend themselves. The Geneva Conventions of 1949 and every subsequent major human rights treaty prohibit such extrajudicial killings. So does U.S. law.