What Happens When No One Believes American Threats?
For a few minutes, I found something perversely comforting about Donald Trump’s seeming threat of military action against Venezuela, of all places, on Friday at the end of a week of escalating bluster about North Korea. Not because the prospect of launching wars on multiple continents simultaneously struck me as prudent, but precisely because it seemed so outlandish. Venezuela? Really? The guy who ran for president in part on justifiable skepticism of U.S. military commitments overseas, whose program explicitly devalues the kind of human-rights and democracy concerns that might justify coercive action against Nicolas Maduro’s authoritarian regime, is going to use the “military option”? He can’t be serious.
And if he’s not serious about military option, he could easily have been bluffing about the prospect of raining “fire and fury” on the Korean Peninsula—one that, as both and have detailed in of Sunday shows to reassure that conflict was not “imminent,” with National-Security Adviser H.R. McMaster saying “I think we’re not closer to war than a week ago.” Trump, then, appears to be a man willing to invoke the “military option” cavalierly and off the cuff—reportedly even his own advisers—and without any clear intent to follow through. (A Defense Department spokesperson told me Saturday that “the Pentagon has received no orders in regard to Venezuela.” Similarly, Peter Baker of notes there in the Pacific—like the movement of additional ships toward the Korean Peninsula, or the evacuation of Americans living there—indicating preparations for a possible strike on North Korea.)
