Schrödinger’s covert action

While much of the pushback from the right wing to Donald Trump’s international hawkishness has come from voices focused on the Middle East, and feared potential for wider wars prompted by support for Israel, the actual test of a break within the Republican coalition on foreign policy disputes could come over the president’s stepped up focus on Venezuela.

The most recent development, with Trump issuing a rare public acknowledgement that he has authorized covert CIA actions on land. “I authorized for two reasons, really,” he explained this week. “Number one, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America. And the other thing are drugs, we have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela and a lot of the Venezuelan drugs come in through the sea.”

Think of it as Schrödinger’s covert action – does it really stay covert once you announce it? This would also seem to go against Trump’s stand against starting new wars, particularly those with a mind on regime change, which some of the president’s more hawkish supporters would clearly like to be the ultimate aim. It also includes newly ordained Nobel Prize winner Maria Corina Machado, who took to the airwaves in an interview with Christiane Amanpour this week practically begging Trump to greater action against Nicolas Maduro’s regime.

The sheer amount of resources the United States has moved into the region is impressive, well beyond the drones being used to take out a series of Venezuelan drug shipments at sea. As The Wall Street Journal reports:

“The U.S. has moved advanced weaponry into the Caribbean and in the skies north of Venezuela, including eight Navy warships, an attack submarine, F-35B jet fighters, P-8 Poseidon spy planes and MQ-9 Reaper drones. The Pentagon has deployed elite special operations forces, including the Army’s secretive 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the ‘Night Stalkers,’ a U.S. official said. Large troop-carrying and attack helicopters are part of the mix, with some aircraft conducting training flights fewer than 90 miles from Venezuela, the official said.”

This is definitely a significant force, but what it isn’t is a prelude to a land invasion of the sort likely necessary to take on Maduro’s armed forces. Instead, for now at least, Trump seems happy with the kind of actions that disturbs Rand Paul and Thomas Massie, but doesn’t commit larger troop numbers or personnel to a regime change project.

A fundamental aspect of the Trump tenure in his second term is that everyone is mindful about the future and what it will bring – namely, if his personally defined version of America First is the enduring approach of the GOP, or if there is a shift toward either further pullback around the world or back toward a default pre-Trump Republican security policy.

There are plenty of observers on both sides who emphatically believe they will be the beneficiaries once that post-Trump sort happens. Their reactions, and the reactions of voters on the American right, to whatever does happen in Venezuela in this ramped up non-covert covert action could determine where the wind is blowing headed into 2028. Or it could become an object lesson in how even the president most resistant to starting new farflung foreign wars might end up in one much closer to home.