The American Conservative

It is easy to believe that Trump entertained the idea of war with Venezuela for the express purpose of seizing their oil resources.

The Venezuelan people are the ones being made to pay the price for their government’s wrongdoing.

Now the U.S. is in the absurd position of supporting a “legitimate” government with no power.

These fantasies are rooted in grossly overestimating the power of our government to affect political change in other countries and exaggerating the vulnerability of the targeted regime.

There is almost no message less likely to spur defections from the Venezuelan military than this one, and there is no messenger less suited to delivering it than Trump.

Taken together with the imposition of sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector, the attempt to use aid as a political weapon to achieve regime change is particularly cruel.

There is usually a dangerous combination of hubris and failure to anticipate setbacks in every regime change policy, and this one is no exception.

Leave it to the sanctions addicts to make a terrible situation even worse.

U.S. military intervention in Venezuela must not happen.

It is inherently unjust to add to the burdens of people who are already enduring the corruption, mismanagement, and abuses of their government.

The president probably didn’t mean to call attention to how irrational and illegitimate his policies are, but he did.

He and his colleagues in Congress are outlining the principled antiwar and non-interventionist case against Trump’s misadventures.

This move by the U.S. to strangle the Venezuelan government will inflict punishment on the entire population and exacerbate the already severe humanitarian crisis there.

When Trump and the foreign policy establishment see eye to eye on something, that is a warning that the policy in question is profoundly flawed in some way.

The Trump administration is now effectively extending U.S. security guarantees to Guaidó and his supporters.

The U.S. shouldn’t have irresponsibly taken sides in a foreign crisis on the say-so of dangerous ideologues.

Rubio’s influence over Venezuela policy is a good example of how hawkish interventionists have been able to dominate the Trump administration.