Donald Trump said in 2016 to the Republican National Convention, “We must abandon the failed policy of nation-building and regime change.”
Earlier this month, after the current administration launched a war against Venezuela and ousted—one might say changed the regime of—President Nicolás Maduro, Trump said, “We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.”
U.S.-led regime change in Venezuela seemed to fly in the face of Trump’s prior warnings against regime change wars. But the president’s defenders said this was a different kind of military operation, unlike the Iraq, Libyan and Syrians interventions Trump had once bemoaned.
In fact, Team Trump even went so far as to say that the recent U.S. intervention in Venezuela wasn’t really even a war at all.
That’s the thinking Secretary of State Marcio Rubio brought when he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday.
When asked by committee member Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) why the administration waged war against Venezuela without consulting Congress, as the Constitution demands, Rubio said that it was merely a “law enforcement operation,” not a war.
Paul asked, describing the actions the U.S. took against Venezuela, “If a foreign country bombed our air defense missiles, captured and removed our president, and blockaded our country, would that be considered an act of war?”
Rubio replied, “I will acknowledge you’ve been very consistent on all these points the entire career, no matter who’s in charge.” Paul has posed similar challenges to the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations foreign policy actions in the past.
Rubio continued, “So I will point to two things. The first is it’s hard for us to conceive that an operation that lasted about four and a half hours and was a law enforcement operation to capture someone we don’t recognize as a head of state indicted in the United States.”
Paul pressed on: “My question would be if it only took four hours to take our president, it’s very short. Nobody dies on the other side. Nobody dies on our side. It’s perfect. Would it be an act of war?”
Rubio did not answer directly and still insisted that the U.S. somehow did not commit an act of war.
“We just don’t believe that this operation comes anywhere close to the constitutional definition of war,” Rubio told the committee, still citing the quickness and efficiency of the operation.
Paul pressed even further, trying to get a basic answer to his basic question, “But would it be an act of war if someone did it to us? Nobody dies, few casualties, they’re in and out, boom, it’s a perfect military operation. Would that be an act of war?”
This time Paul didn’t wait for another non-answer from Rubio.
“Of course it would be an act of war,” he continued (emphasis added). “I’m probably the most anti-war person in the Senate, and I would vote to declare war if someone invaded our country and took our president. So, I think we need to at least acknowledge this is a one-way argument. One-way arguments that don’t rebound, that you can’t apply to yourselves, that cannot be universally applicable, are bad arguments.”
Rubio’s bad argument was not new. The Vietnam War was never an officially declared war but a “police action” similar to Rubio’s “law-enforcement operation.” But trying telling a Vietnam vet that it wasn’t a war, or the families of those who lost loved ones there.
Was the recent U.S. war against Venezuela like Vietnam? Not remotely. Was Venezuela even like the more recent U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria that Western non-interventionists criticize? It was not. Wars can be different.
But it was a war, something Paul was right to point out to Rubio in that setting.
Congress was originally supposed to elect what kinds of wars America should get into, great or small. Instead, neoconservatives like Rubio and hawks of different stripes not only insist that Congress does not need to be consulted, but have redefined America’s wars as anything but actual wars to justify these actions outside of normal constitutional and moral parameters. They wage language wars to dismiss real ones.
That’s exactly what Rubio was doing and why he couldn’t give a straight answer.
In 1965, the United States went to war in Vietnam, no matter what it was called. In 2001, the U.S. went to war with Afghanistan. In 2003, the U.S. did the same in Iraq. In 2011, a U.S.-led war ousted President Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. “We came, we saw, he died,” the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton later boasted of America’s Libyan war.
Imagine if Russia’s President Vladimir Putin came, saw, and helped carry out the same acts against the United States and its president, Donald Trump? What might that be called? Whether or not any foreign country might be capable of doing this is separate from the question.
In Marco Rubio’s defense, he is simply the latest government leader to make excuses for why yet another American war really wasn’t. Kudos to Rand Paul for not letting him get away with it.
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