The Strangest War

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, October 30, 2025

 

The most dystopian developments of the second Trump presidency weren’t merely predictable, they were predicted. Exasperated doomsayers like me have spent the last nine months and will spend the next 39 repeatedly asking variations of the same question: What did you think would happen?

 

Well, I sure didn’t think a war with Venezuela would happen.

 

Our looming adventure in South America is shaping up to be the strangest U.S. military conflict of my lifetime. Every other major war we’ve fought had some plausible-ish casus belli—containing communism in the Far East, destroying the terrorist outfit that perpetrated 9/11, preventing Saddam Hussein from gobbling up parts of the Middle East, and later, from building nuclear weapons. Bombing campaigns in Serbia and Libya were also supported by credible humanitarian rationales.

 

An attack on Venezuela would be the first time in my memory that the U.S. government hasn’t at least tried to make a compelling case for war before moving forward.

 

The ostensible reason for targeting Nicolás Maduro’s regime is to halt drug trafficking into the United States, but numerous media outlets, including The Dispatch, have already debunked that. Venezuela just isn’t much of a player in the international drug trade and has nothing to do with the plague of fentanyl overdoses that’s killed so many Americans over the past decade.

 

There isn’t some hot dispute here à la Iraq over whether the government’s argument for military intervention is backed by the evidence. “Drug trafficking” is obviously a pretext and the White House isn’t aggressively insisting otherwise. When Maduro accuses it of “fabricating a new war,” he has a point.

 

The other strange aspect of this exceedingly strange war is how sharply it contradicts the foreign policy of the administration that’s preparing to wage it. Not since George W. Bush went from opposing nation-building in 2000 to invading Iraq three years later has a president betrayed his own vision of foreign relations as completely as Donald Trump seems poised to, and Dubya had the excuse that the war on terror required a more proactive approach to threats from the Middle East.

 

Trump’s excuse for trying to take out Maduro is … what, exactly?

 

His “America First” foreign policy is a rebuke to Bush’s, as he reminded his buddies in Saudi Arabia a few months ago. He gained traction as a Republican candidate in 2015 by criticizing the Iraq war and eventually spun that into an indictment of both parties’ utopian fantasies about exporting democracy at gunpoint. No longer would the United States spend blood and treasure on trying to improve sh-thole countries by forcibly removing their leaders, he vowed. Instead he would make America great again by “ending endless wars” and improving our own people’s lives.

 

If doing so required him to partner with cretins like Vladimir Putin or Nayib Bukele or, say, Nicolás Maduro, he’d do so unapologetically. America first.

 

Now here he is, less than a year into his second term, about to out-Bush Bush by bombing his way to regime change in Venezuela for reasons no one can convincingly articulate. Surreally, Donald “Peace Prize” Trump seems set on waging a war that plainly wouldn’t have happened had the supposedly warmongering Kamala Harris been elected president instead.

 

Although maybe that shouldn’t feel as surprising as it does. Trump spent the campaign screeching about socialism before turning around and governing like a socialist. Why wouldn’t he pull the same trick with neoconservatism?

 

Even so, I can’t understand what he thinks he’s going to accomplish. For the president and his most ambitious deputies, there’s far more potential downside than upside in attacking Venezuela.

 

Owning it.

 

Start here: What would a good outcome in this standoff with Maduro look like? Gil Guerra tried to answer that question elsewhere on the site today and came away stumped.

 

The best-case scenario would involve Maduro fleeing in terror of Uncle Sam or being deposed by his own terrified henchmen, clearing the way for opposition leader Maria Corina Machado or president-in-exile Edmundo González to take power. The country would then come together peacefully in a big kumbaya moment behind its new leader, who would herald Trump as the savior of Latin American democracy and strike a big, beautiful deal with the White House granting the United States a share of the country’s natural resources.

 

In fairness to the president, he does appear to be trying to engineer that outcome. His military build-up in the Caribbean feels like a smokescreen for more clandestine efforts to target Maduro (and perhaps a few top flunkies) specifically. The plan, I think, is to remove the Venezuelan leader with little bloodshed except his own and hope that the show of force at sea convinces Maduro loyalists in the government to embrace the new political reality—or else.

 

But it probably won’t work. Per Guerra, Maduro’s anti-American patrons in Cuba, Russia, and China won’t want him to hand Trump an easy win by leaving without a fuss. And removing him forcibly is apt to create “a power vacuum where various armed factions—regime remnants, criminal networks, potentially even external actors through proxies—compete for control while the opposition leadership remains vulnerable and reliant on the U.S. for military support and security.” The country’s disintegration could plausibly create a massive refugee crisis that reaches America’s southern border, upending the argument that removing Maduro might make would-be Venezuelan migrants to the U.S. feel more comfortable staying put.

 

If chaos ensues, Trump would be forced to choose between pulling back and letting Venezuela collapse or sending in the troops to try to restore order, which means putting U.S. servicemen in harm’s way. The first option would make him responsible for creating a destabilizing humanitarian mess in South America; the second would leave him on the hook for sacrificing American soldiers’ lives in another inscrutable “war of choice.” Not great, either way.

 

And unlike Bush after the Iraq war went south, there’ll be no one to share blame with. Not only has he not sought Congress’ approval for war with Venezuela, he hasn’t even included the opposition party in classified briefings on one of the pretexts for the mission. This is all Trump. He’ll own it entirely.

 

Bamboozled.

 

It’s the rare sort of major mistake that might realistically crack his base of support.

 

After all, plenty of moderates voted for him last year believing that his political instincts were closer to their own than Harris’ were. He wanted to deport illegal immigrants en masse but he also wanted to prioritize targeting the violent criminals among them. He promised “strength” abroad but he also chastised his predecessors for being too willing to put troops at risk in missions that weren’t clearly in the national interest.

 

He misled those moderates on immigration and soon, it appears, he’ll have misled them on his views of war. At some point they’re going to realize they’ve been bamboozled. And they’re going to be mad about it.

 

Although not as mad as “America First”-ers will be.

 

One can take the Steve Bannons and Tucker Carlsons of the right only so seriously after they warned Trump not to attack Iran, were ignored, and then clammed up in short order afterward so as not to antagonize their audiences. They had good reason to do so: Most Republicans might nod along to jeremiads about “endless wars” but they instinctively relish seeing their favorite president bomb a longtime nemesis into nuclear disarmament. Ditto for their views on aiding Ukraine, which shifted in a blink from skepticism to support once Trump finally gave up on trying to negotiate with Putin.

 

The Lindberghian isolationists of right-wing infotainment realize that they won’t win a battle against the president for the loyalty of their audiences. All they can do when he starts acting like Lindsey Graham is grumble a little and move on.

 

But a war of choice with Maduro will test their restraint, especially after the New York Times revealed earlier this month that the Venezuelan strongman was willing to ransom his country’s wealth to America in return for Trump’s support for his regime—only to be rebuffed. A deal like that would have been a crowning achievement of MAGA realpolitik, proof that the U.S. government can materially improve the lives of its people if only it stops turning its nose up at corrupt, tyrannical scumbags and starts working with them.

 

Instead, the Bannons and Carlsons are watching a Dick Cheney-esque regime-change fantasy play out in real time under the Trumpian banner. If war erupts, they’ll be privately incensed—at their own lack of influence over the president, at the way he’s re-normalizing interventionism on the right, and at the fact that an election-stealing authoritarian has been cast as the villain in America’s latest drama abroad. The point of postliberal foreign policy is to convince Americans to stop hating guys like Maduro and Putin and to start wanting their leaders to act like them. So why is Donald Trump, a would-be election-stealing authoritarian himself, backing Machado and Volodymyr Zelensky?

 

They’ll never admit it but the “America First” faction will be rooting quietly for an unholy military fiasco to unfold in Venezuela, a debacle that will supposedly disabuse the modern right once and for all of the idea that foreign despots are natural enemies instead of friends we haven’t made yet. If the mission goes badly, the right’s doves will turn it into a major front in the Republican civil war of 2028. Only by nominating a stridently dogmatic isolationist, they’ll say, can the GOP avoid being seduced into another foolish war of choice like the one against Maduro.

 

But they won’t be able to blame Trump publicly for that choice. So whom will they blame?

 

Scapegoats.

 

They’ll blame Marco Rubio, of course—and maybe, if he isn’t careful, J.D. Vance.

 

Various reports have alleged that the secretary of state is the driving force behind the effort to oust Maduro, undoing the détente brokered earlier this year by O.G. Trumpist Ric Grenell. Grenell coveted Rubio’s job after Trump was reelected but was named a special presidential envoy instead, and wasted no time making his mark in the role: He visited Maduro in January of this year and struck a handshake deal in which the two countries agreed to swap detainees.

 

That put the U.S. and Venezuela on track for better relations and portended the same sort of amoral transactional arrangement with Caracas that the White House has cultivated with banana-republic dictators like Bukele. But Rubio wasn’t having it. As an old-school Reaganite hawk, the son of refugees from Castro’s Cuba, and a native of South Florida, despising left-wing Latin American tyrants is in his marrow. He wanted Maduro out and set about convincing the president of his position.

 

He couldn’t make the argument forthrightly, however, as liberating people from oppression is not a MAGA priority, to put it mildly. So he cleverly and disingenuously made an “America First” case for regime change instead. Maduro is flooding our country with drugs. (Again, not true.) He’s directing a vicious gang of illegal immigrants, Tren de Aragua, to terrorize our cities. (Also not true.) His downfall would ease immigration from Venezuela and install a friendly government that’s willing to accept more deportees from the United States

.

That last one might be true, assuming Maduro’s ouster doesn’t lead to the sort of refugee supernova that I mentioned earlier. But if the White House wants an agreeable government in Venezuela, it doesn’t need to go to the trouble of a war; it could simply choose to work with the very agreeable Nicolás Maduro. I bet Grenell could have him on the phone in five minutes—maybe sooner, given those U.S. warships off the country’s coast.

 

It’s hard to arrive at any conclusion other than that Rubio wants Maduro out because it offends him ideologically to have Castroist socialist dictators in Latin America still pushing people around in 2025. It’s a noble impulse, but it’s also about as far from “America First” as a member of this administration can be. And the Bannons and Carlsons of the world are going to crucify him for it if the war goes sideways.

 

All of the goodwill that Rubio has carefully cultivated among MAGA populists will go up in flames unless the Venezuela adventure ends up a cakewalk. Postliberals have never fully trusted him, remembering his one-time support for comprehensive immigration reform, his criticism of Trumpism in 2016, and his history of foreign-policy hawkishness as a senator. His ethnicity also surely does him no favors among the least savory elements of the right’s current coalition. The likelier it becomes that he’ll be on the Republican ticket in 2028, the more eager “America First”-ers will be to find grievances against him to keep him off of it.

 

They’re about to be handed a big opportunity. The worse the war goes, the more intensely aggrieved at him they’ll be.

 

Which brings us to the vice president, who’s in no-man’s land here—and not for the first time.

 

J.D. Vance is the purest “America First”-er in the White House, a guy who said during his campaign for Senate in 2022 on the eve of Russia’s invasion that he frankly didn’t care what happened to Ukraine. That kind of talk made him the “it girl” of authoritarianism for figures like Bannon and Carlson, which in turn made him a senator, which in turn made him vice president, and which in turn has made him acceptable as a potential 2028 nominee to the nationalist chuds of the new right.

 

But Vance has a problem. As Trump’s No. 2, knowing that his chances at the nomination depend on keeping the president happy, he’s been stuck defending one foreign intervention after another this year.

 

He went to bat for Trump’s missile strikes against the Houthis, then for the bombing run on Iran’s nuclear program, then for continuing to sell arms to Europe for use by those Ukrainians he doesn’t care about. Very soon he’ll be forced to go to bat for attacking Venezuela on pretexts so flimsy that he and the MAGA right would have dined out on them for months had any other administration, Democratic or Republican, dared use them to justify a war of choice.

 

Maybe it won’t be held against him. The “America First” wing understands the political predicament Vance is in, after all, and can tell themselves that he’ll act differently as president once he’s no longer beholden to Trump. But certain elements of the new right bear Vance a grudge and doubtless suspect that, once safely elected, he won’t be the strident postliberal warrior in office that he seems to be. Can a guy who once worried that Trump might become “America’s Hitler” really be trusted to stand up to the hawkish foreign-policy “blob” that rules Washington, especially after getting so much practice defending its interventionist preferences since January?

 

If Vance faces an insurgent primary challenger in 2028 from the far right (or “even further right,” I guess), the fact that he was only rolling over on war with Venezuela because Trump told him to will not absolve him.

 

Motives.

 

And so we’re left with the question we began with: What does Trump hope to accomplish by ousting Maduro? Assuming he hasn’t taken Rubio’s “something something drugs” rationale to heart, what’s the strategic benefit of this war in his mind?

 

My best guess is that he’s executing on his “spheres of influence” view of foreign policy by picking a comparatively soft target in America’s backyard and sending a message by threatening to rough him up. Ousting Maduro is a matter of unfinished business for Trump, remember: His first administration recognized then-opposition leader Juan Guaido as the rightful leader of Venezuela in 2019, but Maduro resisted that effort to depose him and outlasted Trump’s own presidency.

 

Coming back for round two might be the president’s way of showing other nations in America’s “sphere” that if you don’t do what he wants, he’ll punish you for it eventually. No matter how long it takes.

 

Beating up Maduro serves another purpose: scaring actual drug traffickers around the region about what might await them if they don’t cut their operations in the United States. Attacking fentanyl cartels in Mexico would be fraught for all sorts of reasons, from poisoning relations with the Mexican government to risking a swell of migrants at the southern border who are desperate to escape the line of fire. One way to scare the cartels straight, potentially, without actually laying a glove on them is to make an example of Maduro instead.

 

Which makes sense—unless war with Venezuela proves more challenging than expected. If that happens, the conflict might have the opposite effect by turning American public opinion decidedly against using the military to fight drug trafficking. Mexican cartels currently wondering whether Trump might target them will gain confidence that he won’t: Why, he wouldn’t dare after instigating a public backlash to his presidency by attacking Caracas.

 

Simply put, the odds of things going wrong here are greater than the odds of things going right. With war, as with Trump, they usually are.