Realism. Restraint.
By 
Something something “Genocide Joe:”
Venezuelan officials said in statements that while a death and injury toll was still being assessed, Venezuelans had been killed in the strikes. A U.S. official said there had been no American casualties in the operation but would not comment on Venezuelan casualties.
In a brief phone interview with The New York Times after the announcement, Mr. Trump celebrated the success of the mission to capture the Venezuelan president. “A lot of good planning and lot of great, great troops and great people,” he said. “It was a brilliant operation, actually.”
When asked if he had sought congressional authority for the operation or what is next for Venezuela, Mr. Trump said he would address those matters during a news conference at 11 a.m. at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla.
I suppose at this point that we hope that Maduro isn’t immediately replaced by a more brutal successor, that Venezuela does not collapse into civil war, and that the United States does not get further drawn into that conflict. That’s all I got, folks; hope. And not much of it. For technical details of the raids check in with Tyler Rogoway.
US is describing this as a law enforcement operation rather than a war… which is totally accurate because law enforcement always requires extensive airstrikes in the middle of the night on a foreign capital. And of course this is not faintly out of character:
President Donald Trump has presided over a rapid surge of U.S. military activity abroad since returning to the Oval Office.
In the first year of his second term, he has authorized a series of strikes ranging from the unprecedented use of bunker-buster bombs against Iran’s most fortified nuclear sites to a sustained counternarcotics campaign off the Venezuelan coast.
Trump, who has labeled himself a “peace president,” frames the expansion of force as a strategy of “peace through strength.”
At his inaugural ball in January, he declared, “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”
Trump added that his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.”
Since taking office on Jan. 20, 2025, Trump has overseen at least 626 air strikes, according to data compiled by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project that was shared with Military Times.
By comparison, his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, launched a total of 555 strikes in his entire four-year term.
In other news, let’s recollect that Trita Parsi and Sam Moyn are the dumbest fucking guys on the face of the planet:
That makes Trump’s choices essential. He appears to be open to a multipolar world, though his investment in rules and laws is a different matter. But if he is serious about reducing America’s global military footprint, bringing our troops home and ceasing to play the increasingly unwanted role of world police, then avoiding anarchy and promoting peace by sustaining a multilateral system will serve U.S. interests and thus Trump’s.
Trump is a keen advocate for his own interests. His first-term foreign policy was marked by a transactionalism that occasionally enabled him to transcend Washington’s typical moralizing in favor of advancing U.S. interests through engagement, such as negotiating the withdrawal from Afghanistan with the Taliban. This “what’s-in-it-for-me” approach to world affairs may enable Trump to jettison Washington’s mythmaking about its coalition-of-the-willing international order.
A working world order is an important condition for Trump’s apparent foreign policy goals — including winning the economic competition with China and forging peace in Ukraine. Those goals can’t be achieved without a healthy, predictable security framework that prevents disagreements and conflicts from spiraling into mutually destructive wars.
Some existing norms, laws and institutions encourage a range of good outcomes and deserve to stay in place, among them United Nations Charter rules that constrain force and the United Nations itself. As for ending the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, that will depend on the art of the deal. But everything depends on whether the bargaining occurs in the shadow of some belief that it is better to have fair, common standards.
Yeah. That’s all working out, boys.
There’s a lot of folks who work in the Beltway who are absolutely, utterly unwilling for both psychological and financial reasons to associate themselves with partisan politics. These people feel constrained by the need for “balance,” which is effect means sanewashing every Republican presidency and hyperbolizing every Democratic presidency. It’s a tired formula.