America has never been even close to perfect, a fact the Trump administration is going to great lengths to obscure. They insist that any mention of the country’s flawed history demeans and ignores what it has done right, and therefore any failures must not be mentioned at all. In truth, President Donald Trump probably believes the simplified fables he learned as a boy in the 1950s — like George Washington and the cherry tree — are all anyone needs to know about American history. The consequences of this ignorance are putting the country, and the entire world, in grave danger.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana famously wrote in “The Life of Reason.” For instance, if Trump had an understanding of the Vietnam War — perhaps if he had joined many in his generation in protesting America’s involvement, or if his father hadn’t arranged for him to avoid the draft with a dubious medical deferment — he would know what led to nearly 60,000 Americans, and millions of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians, losing their lives. He would understand that creating a pretext for war leads to disaster.
The U.S. became involved militarily in Vietnam in the 1950s as part of the growing anti-communist crusade during the Cold War. According to the “domino theory,” countries around the world would fall to communism one-by-one — unless America stopped its spread. By 1964, with U.S. “military advisers” on the ground supporting the South Vietnamese government against the communist insurgents of the North, President Lyndon Johnson and his advisers decided — foolishly, in retrospect — to commit U.S. troops. To do so, they used two isolated incidents of North Vietnamese patrol boats attacking a naval destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin.
It was only later the country learned there had only been one incidental attack, and the second was created as pretext to call it a provocation that required a massive American response. Johnson ordered U.S. Navy planes to bomb North Vietnamese torpedo boat bases and called on Congress to authorize the use of force. With congressional support, and within a few months, there were more than 100,000 American troops on the ground in Southeast Asia — and we all know how it turned out.
Unfortunately, some American leaders learned all the wrong lessons from that debacle. After 9/11, President George W. Bush had little trouble getting approval to invade Afghanistan to go after the perpetrators. But his administration then wanted to use the patriotism — and war fever — ignited by the terrorist attacks to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 but had been on the radar of right-wing hawks ever since the 1991 Gulf War. They manipulated intelligence that was just as thin as the Gulf of Tonkin incident to fashion a pretext for war, and after a lengthy, vociferous debate, the administration managed to get Congress to authorize the use of force. And we all know how that turned out too.
Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
These have become infamous examples of how the government can lie the nation into war, and as bad as they both are, at least the administrations attempted to adhere to the notion of following domestic law; they knew they needed congressional authorization. While they failed to get actual declarations of war, as required by the Constitution, they realized it was important to preserve the idea of using actual legal authority for military force.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration decided that such norms and measures were a waste of time. A U.S. naval ship blew up a vessel in the Caribbean that the president claimed belonged to a drug cartel and was being used to smuggle illegal narcotics. Its crew of 11 were killed. Trump proudly released the video of what can only be called a murder by the U.S. government, posting on Truth Social that it was done “against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists.”
This president has made it clear: He believes he has unlimited power, is answerable to no one and is not required to even pretend that he needs any authority other than his own to do anything. That odious power grab has now escalated to military action, and is the latest of the administration’s moves in the Caribbean.
This president has made it clear: He believes he has unlimited power, is answerable to no one and is not required to even pretend that he needs any authority other than his own to do anything. That odious power grab has now escalated to military action, and is the latest of the administration’s moves in the Caribbean.
Over the last few weeks, the Defense Department has been deploying warships off the coast of Venezuela as part of an anti-drug-trafficking mobilization. The situation is serious; analysts recently told the BBC that “the risk of escalation in the region is growing by the day.”
The War on Drugs has always been a metaphor, not a real military conflict. Over the years, the U.S. government has authorized covert actions, but officially it’s always been a law enforcement issue in which the Coast Guard arrests suspected drug runners and turns them over to the authorities. Defending the administration’s actions in the Caribbean, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the press this week that such deterrents haven’t worked. “What will stop them is when you blow them up,” he said. “Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up. And it’ll happen again. Maybe it’s happening right now.”
We need your help to stay independent
Experts in international law are hard pressed to find any legal justification for the administration’s action. Despite Trump’s omnipotent view of himself, simply designating the Tren de Aragua gang a foreign terrorist organization doesn’t do it just because the administration says so. Invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 wouldn’t work either, especially since the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals just blocked its use for deportations, holding there is no “predatory incursion” or “invasion” by members of the gang. If the issue is just about drug dealers, then it’s a criminal matter and the U.S. has decided it has the right to summarily execute them without any due process, something that got former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte arrested by the country’s national police and Interpol in March after the International Criminal Court charged him with crimes against humanity and issued a warrant for his capture.
Back in the day, the government would have said the boat had tried to attack the American ship and it blew it up in self-defense. But now they’re no longer bothering with such old-fashioned justifications. When asked under what legal authority they took this action, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth simply said, “We have the absolute and complete authority.” Vice President JD Vance, when asked the same question, gave an equally vacuous answer: “The legal authority is there are people who are bringing — literal terrorists, who are bringing deadly drugs into our country.”
Blowing up alleged drug traffickers in the waters off of Venezuela and saying they’re invading the United States is ridiculous. What makes more sense is that this is really a provocation to try to get Venezuela to attack one of the warships and set off a regime-change operation. Rubio has apparently been pushing for this large military deployment to pressure Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The country, after all, has a whole lot of oil, and the alleged peacenik Donald Trump seems to have been itching for his own war for a very long time. Let’s just hope that Venezuela doesn’t take the bait.
