Of all the decisions a president can make, the most perilous is going to war. The Vietnam War doomed Lyndon Johnson, just as the Korean War did Harry Truman. The Iraq invasion was a political debacle for George W. Bush. The lesson is that presidents should avoid war at almost any cost. 

But Donald Trump, no student of history, has not absorbed that lesson. For months, he has been courting war with Venezuela: blowing up boats alleged to be smuggling drugs, massing naval forces and fighter jets in the Caribbean, demanding the resignation of President Nicolás Maduro and declaring the closure of Venezuela’s airspace. 

He may hope these measures will be enough to get rid of Maduro. If they aren’t, Trump appears poised to launch direct attacks on Venezuela. In a Thanksgiving address to U.S. troops, he said those strikes are “going to start very soon.” 

Why he would be willing to take such a hazardous step is not obvious. Trump ran on a promise to stay out of foreign conflicts. He has no idealistic mission to spread democracy. Venezuela hasn’t attacked U.S. targets or built weapons of mass destruction. Most of his supporters don’t care who governs Venezuela, or how. 

Trump has framed his policy as essential to smashing drug cartels and stopping the flow of lethal drugs. But fentanyl is what accounts for most U.S. overdose deaths, and it comes mostly from China and Mexico. What comes from Venezuela is cocaine, the majority of which goes to Europe. 

This dubious pretext lost all credibility, though, when Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández. He was serving a 45-year prison sentence for working with cartels to smuggle cocaine into the U.S. — or, as he reportedly put it, “shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.” 

A war against Venezuela has several possible outcomes, most of them bad. It could fail, cementing Maduro in power as the leader who vanquished the Yanquis. It could force him out only to plunge his country into violent chaos. It could mean new waves of Venezuelans trudging toward our southern border. It could lead to a U.S. ground invasion and insurgent warfare. 

So what is driving Trump to risk his presidency on a war that the public doesn’t want? It may be foolish to attribute rational purposes to someone so impulsive and destructive. But one obvious motive is his insatiable desire to exert his power abroad as well as at home. He needs not only to dominate others, but also to be seen as dominant. 

Being an incurable bully, Trump looks for weaker nations he can abuse, as when he threatened to seize Greenland from Denmark, take back the Panama Canal from Panama and make Canada the 51st state. 

He also has unfinished business. In his first term, Trump adopted a “maximum pressure policy” against the Venezuelan ruler, vowing that “Maduro’s grip of tyranny will be smashed and broken.” It wasn’t, and though the American people have forgotten his failure, Trump has not. His appetite for retribution has no limit.

But with this president, it’s also important to follow the money. Trump has a cash register where his heart should be. Running in 2016, Trump offered his plan for the U.S. role in Iraq: “Take the oil.” As president, he said he was keeping troops in Syria “only for the oil.” 

This year, he forced Ukraine to agree to share vast sums in future revenues from its mineral resources with the U.S. Trump never stops looking for targets to plunder and treasure to extract.

In peace talks, The Wall Street Journal reports, Trump envoy Steve Witkoff and Russian negotiators have been “charting a path to bring Russia’s $2 trillion economy in from the cold — with American businesses first in line to beat European competitors to the dividends.” Russian oligarchs “have sent representatives to quietly meet American companies to explore rare-earth mining and energy deals.” 

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk took a dim view of the administration’s approach: “We know this is not about peace. It’s about business.” 

The same motive is undoubtedly behind Trump’s obsession with Venezuela, which has the world’s largest oil reserves. Replacing Maduro is meant to open up an array of lucrative opportunities — which Trump could distribute to enrich himself, reward his cronies and bend corporations to his will. 

The looming conflict brings to mind an earlier war in which Ulysses S. Grant saw combat. “I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico,” the former general and president lamented late in life. “I am always ashamed of my country when I think of that invasion.”

But not every president is capable of shame.

Steve Chapman was a member of the Tribune Editorial Board from 1981 to 2021. His columns, exclusive to the Tribune, now appear the first week of every month. He can be reached at stephenjchapman@icloud.com.

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https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/03/opinion-donald-trump-venezuela-war-chapman/