“As the Senate considered a resolution that would have blocked the Trump administration from using military force against Venezuela, Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly gave a classified briefing to key members of Congress.
In that November briefing, Rubio “indicated that the administration is not currently preparing to target Venezuela directly and didn’t have a proper legal argument for doing so,” The Washington Post reported at the time. Similarly, CNN reported that administration officials told lawmakers that “the US is not currently planning to launch strikes inside Venezuela and doesn’t have a legal justification that would support attacks against any land targets,” and that the legal justification offered for strikes against suspected drug boats traveling near Venezuela “does not extend to land targets.”
In the early hours of Saturday morning, however, American forces did attack a land target in Venezuela: Fort Tiuna, the military compound where Venezuelan leader Nicholas Marudo was holed up. According to the BBC, at least four more targets in and around Caracas were hit during the operation.
On Sunday, reporters asked Rubio about the obvious gap between what he (and other officials) told lawmakers in November and what had just unfolded in Caracas.
Rubio told the Post that the administration would need congressional approval only if it “was going to conduct military strikes for military purposes.” And this, he insisted, was not a military strike but “a law enforcement operation.”
That claim seems to contradict the description offered by President Donald Trump at his press conference on Saturday morning. Trump described Maduro’s capture as an “extraordinary military operation” unlike anything since World War II. The administration also trotted out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine to describe in detail how U.S. forces had breeched Venezuelan defenses and successfully captured Maduro in an operation that lasted more than two hours and involved more than 200 troops.
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The Trump administration did not need Congress to sign off on specific operational choices: the time, location, forces involved, and so on. What the Constitution and relevant statutes require is that Congress authorizes the use of the military. That could have been done without jeopardizing any specific mission.
Think about Iraq. Congress approved the use of military force in October 2002. Congress did not need to approve the operational details of the invasion in March 2023. That’s the purview of the executive branch, but only after getting permission from Congress.”
“Congress is supposed to declare wars under the U.S. Constitution, and we have laws that are supposed to constrain unilateral military deployments without congressional consultation. The Trump administration has blown through both of those domestic legal prohibitions, either because it could not be bothered to get consent from Congress or it did not think it would get the votes.”
Chip restrictions on China appear to work because China is obsessed with asking US administrations to lift the restrictions, and because the Chinese companies say the restrictions slow their progress.
This war may have really been about China. China has been working hard to expand its influence in South America, and had been succeeding heavily in Venezuela. China may have had plans to base missiles in Venezuela. In a war over Taiwan, China could disrupt US shipping in the Caribbean. It is in US’s interest to not have great powers like China and Russia threatening it from nearby countries like Venezuela.
“Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, criticized the U.S. in a nationally televised address, calling the operation that captured Maduro an act of “military aggression” aimed at regime change. The comments appeared to contradict Trump’s claims that the U.S. could work with her to oversee the country’s transition. Earlier Saturday, the Venezuelan government declared a state of emergency and said said it would mobilize to “defeat this imperialist aggression.””
The US as a rule of law democracy, and international norms and values against military action against other countries, are under threat with this attack on Venezuela.
“Initially, Trump defended his military operations near Venezuela as keeping drugs out of the US, although experts say the cocaine that passes through Venezuela winds up mostly in Europe while fentanyl is sourced from China.
Trump also accused Maduro of emptying Venezuela’s prisons and “mental institutions” into the U.S., although there’s no evidence of that either. According to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have settled in the U.S. in recent years due to economic and political instability in their home country.
By mid-December, Trump accused Maduro of “stealing” U.S. oil and land. Trump appeared to be alluding to work done in the 1970s in Venezuela by Western oil companies before the government there opted to nationalize its reserves, eventually forcing out American companies.
In a Dec. 17 social media post – around the same time sources say Trump was making a decision to greenlight the Jan. 3 military operation — Trump said the U.S. military threat to Venezuela will “only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before — Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”
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Two days later at a press conference, Secretary of State Marc Rubio offered a more general explanation than access to oil reserves, calling Maduro’s presidency “intolerable” because it was cooperating with “terrorist and criminal elements” instead of the Trump administration.”