A Supreme Act of Incompetence: The Illegal, Insane, and Inevitable War with Venezuela

6 minutes read time.

In a stunning and dangerous escalation that has pushed the United States to the brink of a new, unnecessary, and almost certainly illegal war, the Felonious Punk administration on Tuesday ordered a lethal military strike on a vessel in the Caribbean, killing 11 people it vaguely labeled “narco-terrorists.” This was not a careful, intelligence-driven operation; it was a reckless act of “gunboat diplomacy,” a move so profoundly stupid and so disconnected from reality that it can only be understood as a supreme act of incompetence bordering on insanity. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. taught us, we should judge a person by the content of his character. The president is showing us his character, and it is that of a man who is willing to start a war based on a demonstrably false pretext, in violation of international and domestic law, all to serve a cynical domestic political agenda. And he has, as we have seen time and again, surrounded himself with characters who are all too willing to go along for the ride.

The Anatomy of a Lie: A War on Drugs with No Drugs

The administration’s entire public justification for this act of war rests on a single, powerful, and easily disprovable lie: that they are protecting America from a flood of Venezuelan fentanyl. This is a deliberate and malicious falsehood. As a devastating fact-check in the New York Times makes clear, citing data from the administration’s own DEA, Justice Department, and Congressional Research Service, Venezuela plays “virtually no role in the fentanyl trade.” Fentanyl is produced in Mexico with chemicals from China. This is not a matter of debate; it is a documented fact. The entire premise of the strike is a lie.

The second lie is the administration’s attempt to brand the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as a powerful, state-sponsored “narco-terrorist” organization. The most detailed research on the gang, conducted by the think tank InSight Crime, completely demolishes this claim. They have found “no direct participation of TdA in the transnational drug trade,” and concluded that the name is now being used as a cynical “catch-all description for Venezuelan criminals” to justify a pre-determined policy. This is not an intelligence assessment; it is the creation of a convenient bogeyman. The purpose of this lie, as legal experts have noted, is to create a flimsy pretext to invoke the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force, a cynical attempt to bypass Congress and the War Powers Resolution and give the president a free hand to wage his war.

A Catalog of Illegality: A War on the Law Itself

With the flimsy pretexts of fentanyl and “narco-terrorism” stripped away, what we are left with is a naked act of aggression that, according to a consensus of international law experts, is almost certainly a crime. As a detailed analysis by BBC Verify makes clear, the strike likely violates the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which prohibits the use of lethal force in international waters except in the most extreme cases of self-defense. More damningly, legal scholars have labeled the killing of the 11 individuals a potential “extrajudicial arbitrary killing” and a “fundamental violation of human rights,” because the United States is not in a state of declared armed conflict with either Venezuela or the gang in question.

This contempt for international law is mirrored by a contempt for domestic law. The administration’s entire legal theory is based on a dangerously expansive and almost certainly unconstitutional view of presidential power. A federal appeals court—one of the most conservative in the country—has already ruled that the administration cannot even use the archaic Alien Enemies Act to deport members of this same gang because there is “no invasion or predatory incursion.” Having been defeated in the courts, the administration has now simply decided to bypass them entirely and resort to the brute force of the military.

The Real Motives: A “Wag the Dog” Scenario

If this isn’t about drugs or terrorism, what is it really about? The sources point to two cynical, and not mutually exclusive, motives. The first is raw domestic politics. This is a spectacular “show of force,” a piece of “gunboat diplomacy” designed to appease the hardline anti-Maduro voting bloc in South Florida, a key constituency for Marco Rubio and the Republican Party.

The second, and far more chilling, possibility is that this is a deliberate provocation, a “wag the dog” scenario designed to create a legal loophole. Having been told by the courts that they cannot use wartime powers because there is no war, the administration may now be using the U.S. military to deliberately provoke an international incident in the hopes that a Venezuelan retaliation would give them the pretext to declare the very state of conflict they need to justify their unconstitutional domestic immigration policies. It is a profoundly dangerous and deeply cynical game, playing with the lives of American soldiers and the stability of an entire continent to win a legal argument back home.

An Incompetence Bordering on Insanity

The most stunning aspect of this entire affair is its sheer, breathtaking incompetence. The administration seems to believe that President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela is a fool who will walk blindly into their trap. But Maduro, for all his many faults, is a survivor. He is not falling for this unless he is backed into a corner by his own people. Instead, the administration’s aggression is far more likely to backfire catastrophically. It will almost certainly push other Latin American nations, who have a long and bitter history of “Yankee imperialism,” into a coalition of support for Maduro against what they see as a blatant act of American aggression.

The administration, in its arrogance, seems to have no clue what it is getting itself into. They have based a military action on a lie, in violation of the law, for a domestic political purpose, with no clear endgame and no apparent understanding of the second- and third-order consequences. It is a supreme act of incompetence, a foreign policy so reckless and so disconnected from reality that it borders on the insane