Venezuela Shows The Danger Of Power
On January 2, the United States armed forces conducted a military operation which resulted in the seizure and detention of another country’s sitting president and his wife. The precise legal authority invoked for this operation remains unclear. What is apparent, however, is that the justification appears to rest on a familiar but troubling fusion: elements of overseas law enforcement (Maduro was indicted in the U.S. during Trump’s first term, for narcoterrorism, drug trafficking, and corruption); U.S invasion to remove a person of political interest, “just another rendition”); assertions of self-defense (an imminent or ongoing threat); and a more candid material claim—that American interests would be served by control over Venezuelan oil resources.
Each of these rationales has antecedents in U.S. practice over our 225 year history, especially in the Western Hemisphere. Taken together, and as in the past, they raise constitutional, statutory, and international law questions of extraordinary seriousness.
A complete assessment of whether this action was lawfully authorized under U.S. domestic law, and whether it constitutes a violation of international law, is complex and consequential, and urgently needed. It should consider the President’s Article II powers, the role of Congress in declaring and authorizing war, the War Powers Resolution and other statutory authorities including the post-9/11 Authorization of the Use of Military Force Act, and long-standing international law prohibitions on kidnapping, aggression, and violations of sovereignty. We must also raise the increasingly explicit question, voiced openly by senior officials, including remarks attributed to Secretary Marco Rubio, as to whether the Administration believes the United States should care at all about United Nations constraints or multilateral legal norms.
Answers to those questions matter. Significantly. But for the moment, it is worth setting them aside to examine and understand how the United States arrived at a place where such an operation could plausibly be contemplated, executed, and defended.
The answer lies in a decades-long expansion of unilateral presidential power overseas—an expansion driven as much by congressional acquiescence and judicial deference as by executive ambition.
The events of the trajectory are familiar. The 1989 invasion of Panama and the seizure of Manuel Noriega blurred the line between military action and criminal law enforcement. Subsequent assertions of extraterritorial jurisdiction, particularly during the post-9/11 era, erased additional remaining distinctions between war and policing. Renditions, targeted killings, and “hybrid” military-law-enforcement operations normalized the idea that the President could unilaterally seize individuals abroad, justify it through a mélange of statutory and inherent authority, and present Congress and the courts with a fait accompli and good intentions.
Over time, these practices significantly increased the real power of the presidency, regardless of what formal doctrine might say. But there was always an unstated assumption: that the person occupying the Oval Office was competent, serious, and acting in good faith on behalf of the nation.
Americans may, and do, hold sharply divergent views about the presidents who have served since Jimmy Carter. There was much disagreement about policy, ideology, judgment, and outcomes. Many of us at The Steady State designed and carried out these policies across multiple administrations, often in contested and ambiguous circumstances. We debated, we questioned, and at times we disagreed—but we never questioned the patriotism or good faith of the presidents we served, and we executed their lawful decisions because we trusted their commitment to the Constitution and the country. It would be difficult to argue that any of them lacked a genuine, focused concern for the United States, its constitutional order, its international standing, and the safety of its people.
That assumption, that the presidents exercising these increased powers would continue to be men who respected law, institutions, and norms, was the unspoken corollary of every post-Cold War expansion of executive authority.
That corollary no longer holds.
Donald Trump and his Cabinet, and the Congressional bloc enabling this behavior, have demonstrated, repeatedly and unmistakably, contempt for law, for constitutional constraint, and for the values that have historically shaped American conduct abroad.
In this context, the reported seizure of a foreign head of state, treated less as a grave act of international consequence than as a kind of spectacle, overseen from the comfort of a luxury golf resort, is not merely symbolic. It reveals what happens when vast, accumulated presidential power is placed in the hands of an individual who neither believes in, nor feels bound by, the system of checks and balances that U.S. power presupposes.
The balance envisioned by the Framers cannot survive indefinitely on inertia. In the long term, the United States will need to undertake a serious recalibration of presidential authority. Congress will need to reclaim powers it has allowed to atrophy. Courts will need to reassert their role as enforcers of constitutional limits rather than passive observers of executive fait accompli. and good intentions.
But the immediate problem is more urgent and more concrete. We in the Steady State are sounding an alarm, based on our deep understanding of the danger, and urging a constitutional path to restraint.
Checks and balances only function when the actor being checked believes in the legitimacy of the system itself. They require not just institutional capacity, but constitutional faith.
This president does not have it.
And that, not merely the legality of any single operation, is the true crisis now confronting American constitutional governance.
Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 360 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.
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