In the vacillating contours of US President Donald Trump’s foreign policy, little should surprise. And outlying moments of apparent success against Iran’s nuclear program (even if short-lived), are uneasily partnered with moments of fleeting fancy, like seizing Greenland (remember that?)
But the looming possibility of military action against Venezuela – across a wide spectrum of violent options – drags the White House into realms of foreign involvement it has always said it loathed. And it puts it squarely in opposition to the lessons of the past two decades of US Republican military endeavors, and plenty of decades of regional experience before that.
Just what exactly does the Trump administration want to do here, and how long does it think it will take to achieve? These are two questions an administration conventionally seeks to publicly and painstakingly lay out the answers to before military action. But it remains mired in confusion. And the variables do not look good.
The most slender goal of military action is to stop drug trafficking. Yet this is something exceptionally hard to achieve with targeted strikes. Firstly, Venezuela is not the hub of narco-trafficking: that is a route which begins in neighboring Col
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