The reaction to the U.S. raid in Venezuela this weekend has highlighted a divide on the American right between two groups that normally seem united: realists and restrainers. The former eschew global ideological crusades and believe the U.S. should exert power abroad only to advance the national interest. The latter advocate restraint in U.S. foreign policy and oppose military intervention except as a last resort.
No Americans died in the operation, which resulted in the capture of the socialist strongman Nicolas Maduro and in the deaths of around 75 people, according to U.S. government estimates. White House officials said the raid was justified to gain access to Venezuela’s oil, remove an illegitimate leader with ties to “narco-terrorism,” and rob U.S. adversaries of a foothold in the region. Hours after the raid, President Donald Trump said the U.S. would “run” Venezuela “until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.”
Conservative realists are broadly supportive, or at least tolerant, of the intervention. Conservative restrainers are not—and many are profoundly anxious about what it portends for the remaining three years of Trump’s presidency. Of course, most conservative restrainers are themselves avowed realists. But they diverge, at this moment, from conservative realists less enamored with restraint. The intervention has exposed ideological and perhaps temperamental differences between the two camps and forced a reckoning over what conservative foreign policy should look like in the dawning era of multipolarity.
The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank, has become the main hub for restrainers since its founding in 2019. An official statement by Quincy published Saturday reflects the unequivocal opposition of many conservative restrainers to Trump’s actions. “The Trump administration’s attack on Venezuela runs counter to everything that we seek to achieve,” the statement says. It continues:
Military force is justified only in response to a clear, credible, and imminent threat to the security of the United States or its treaty allies. Venezuela, whatever its internal dysfunctions or connections to the international drug trade, does not pose such a threat. Using force absent that standard is not defense; it is aggression. It substitutes coercion for diplomacy and power for principle.
Conservative realists whom I reached out to say that restrainers are exaggerating the downsides of this weekend’s military action. Daniel McCarthy—the editor of Modern Age and a board member at The American Conservative—told me that Trump’s Venezuela operation “is America First, in that it’s undertaken in America’s regional interests, not in the name of abstract ideology or foreign interests.” McCarthy observed that the operation, which lasted just two and a half hours, was limited compared to previous U.S. interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Panama, and even Grenada, and thus “restrained” in that sense.
“Small-scale, short-term interventions with limited goals achievable by realistic means are ideologically unacceptable to the pure non-interventionist, but they don’t trouble a realist too much, even a realist devoted to restraint,” McCarthy said.
John Hulsman, a conservative realist and geopolitical risk consultant, takes a similar view. While realists are “cautious about the use of force,” Hulsman told me, they “are not philosophically opposed to it in the way many restrainers are.” A fierce critic of neoconservatives, Hulsman said he supports military action to advance America’s “primary interests” but otherwise sides with restrainers. In Hulsman’s view, the operation in Venezuela advanced core U.S. interests by ousting from America’s sphere of influence a “pernicious actor” who exacerbated immigration crises, participated in narco-terrorism, and “was becoming a client of peer superpower competitor China and great power Russia.”
Conservative restrainers disagree that the operation achieved the goals set forth by the White House. Since August, the administration has described an escalating military campaign against Venezuela as a counter-narcotics operation intended to prevent overdose fatalities in America. The raid this weekend was itself depicted as a “law enforcement” action to arrest Maduro for drug crimes. Yet the main drug that kills Americans is the synthetic opioid fentanyl, which comes mostly from Mexico, not Venezuela.
The oil justification, which the Trump administration has emphasized in recent days, has also come under scrutiny by conservative restrainers. “I’m not even really sure it’s a war for oil as much as it’s a simulated war for oil,” said Curt Mills, the executive director of The American Conservative, during a discussion hosted by the Quincy Institute. While Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, it lacks the infrastructure to produce it at scale. “There’s no real plan to get this stuff online,” Mills said.
Mills also questioned whether militarism in Latin America would help Washington compete with other great powers, and he laid out one reason to worry it would do the opposite. “If you’re sitting in Mexico City or Brasília today, does this make you more likely to build up a medium-term strategy of engaging more with the United States out of fear, or with Beijing out of pragmatism?” Mills asked. “And I think the answer is clearly the latter.”
Another leading conservative restrainer told me the Venezuela raid had created a “fracture” on the right, and that some antiwar conservatives were trying to rationalize the intervention even though it violated “core principles of restraint.” In a podcast conversation with me this week, Kelley Vlahos, a senior advisor for the Quincy Institute and contributing editor to The American Conservative, said the U.S. had violated Venezuela’s sovereignty by invading its territory and capturing its leader. She also cautioned against assuming the operation was “one and done.” Military intervention, she observed, often leads to unpredictable consequences and fails to solve the problems that ostensibly motivated it.
And even if Trump doesn’t intervene again in Venezuela, that doesn’t mean the intervention was a one-off.
Conservative restrainers like Vlahos and Mills are worried the raid in Venezuela augurs a new, more militaristic phase of the Trump era. The president himself, seeming to ride high after the successful operation, raised the prospect of military action against Colombia, Greenland, Mexico, and Iran, and he said that Cuba was “ready to fall.” Early in his second term, Trump threatened to annex Canada and “take back” the Panama Canal, and in 2025 he bombed Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.
“People voted for America First, but they didn’t necessarily vote for American empire,” Vlahos said. “And I honestly think, after what I saw this weekend, that the Trump administration is more interested in creating an American empire with him at the top as our first American emperor.”
Several prominent conservative influencers do seem to be in an imperial mood. Even self-styled anti-interventionists were pleased that this weekend’s operation was grounded in American interests, rather than international law, human rights, or democracy promotion. “I’m as reflexively non-interventionist as anyone can possibly be, but Venezuela appears to be a resounding victory and one of the most brilliant military operations in American history,” Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire wrote on X Sunday. “As an unapologetic American Chauvinist, I want America to rule over this hemisphere and exert its power for the good of our people.”
Whether the Trump administration can go down that path may depend on the support of an American public that seems skeptical of military action in the Western Hemisphere. Despite the tactical success of this weekend’s dramatic operation, a rally-around-the-flag effect hasn’t materialized. Only a third of Americans support the operation, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll. And while 65 percent of Republicans support it, that’s around twenty points lower than the number who approve of Trump. Moreover, a majority of Republicans—54 percent—said they were worried “the U.S. will get too involved in Venezuela.”
Trump distinguished himself in the 2016 presidential campaign by lambasting neoconservatives and pledging to avoid wars that don’t serve the national interest. One decade later, Trump’s foreign policy program may depend on his ability to convince Americans that the national interest would be served by more wars.
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