Last week, we established that the American abduction of Nicolas Maduro was less arbitrary and less a demonstration of unilateral might than it may have seemed - it existed within an ecosystem that allows for unilateral action at the margins of the Liberal International Order, but limits them when they target actors who are more firmly entrenched in the system. Hence Venezuela, a pariah state nominally aligned with Russia and China, makes for a much more appealing target than Mexico, Colombia, and (especially) Greenland, all of whom benefit from protection via economic and political integration.

At the same time, the actions taken against Maduro were also very specifically chosen: what the US president can do unilaterally inside the existing legal and institutional framework. If Trump could simply declare war on Venezuela and occupy it “for the oil,” he would not need elaborate legal covers. A formal war and an open resource grab would significantly overstep the limits of unilateral presidential power and into territory that requires explicit Congressional buy-in, making a constitutional crisis more likely.

In other words: international structure explains where action is possible; domestic constraint logic explains why it looks exactly like this and not like something else. My operating hypothesis is that the case of Caracas thus likely proceeded in three steps:

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1. Choosing the appropriate edge case

Venezuela serves as an effective target due to a number of historical factors that make it particularly low-friction for the American public, the Washington foreign policy establishment, and the military.

First, it avoids many of the ideological and collective memory tripwires of the War on Terror: the footprint is minimal, the target close. There is no reflexive question as to why the US is deploying to the other side of the planet; it ties in with known political narratives surrounding drug-trafficking (narratively strengthening the chosen legal cover for the intervention). Maduro is a known figure within American politics and elicits no sympathies - he’s an established boogeyman whose downfall did not need to be sold.

Second, it does benefit from a certain amount of historical normalization. The Cold War and the Monroe Doctrine both provide general antecedents for operations in Latin America, while the abduction of Noriega in Panama in 1989 provides a more specific point of comparison (more on that below): the narrative is media-friendly and digestible.

Third, there’s the softness of the target and the limited scope of the operation: no costly occupation (... thus far), no real deep deployment, and a minimal, surgical operation with minimal risk to American servicepeople (indeed, not a single American life was lost).

2. Abduction over invasion (the Panama logic)

Next, there’s the question as to why abduction over invasion, and the relevance of the Panama antecedent, beyond what we discussed above (limited intervention limits collateral to the American military). Operation Absolute Resolve draws heavily on the example of the abduction of Noriega from a conceptual perspective specifically because this limits the impact of arguments about executive power overreach.

President Trump’s actions have, over the course of his presidency repeatedly - some might say continually - been challenged on the grounds of their constitutionality. The most effective way to muddy the water with regard to what is permitted and what is not is to build on preexisting edge-cases and specific legal circumstances: for instance, invocation of the IEEPA and National Emergencies Act for sanctions, as well as the presidency of William McKinley more broadly.

The logic here is similar: given Congressional authority over declarations of war, the Trump Administration does not have unlimited, unrestricted access to the US military. However, by (very) roughly adhering to historical precedent, and to categories which loosen the rules governing unilateral deployment of military assets, the issue becomes questionable: limited military action framed as a law enforcement operation against an actor labelled not as a foreign head of state, but as a narcoterrorist is much more defensible as “not overreach” than deposing a geostrategic adversary at gunpoint “for the oil”.

This is also why Noriega’s removal is a key data point: by adhering as closely as possible to an intervention within reasonably recent history, the argument can be made that such an action has established precedent - even if the circumstances are completely different (the National Assembly of Panama having, crucially, declared war on the United States, and a US Marine having been killed). President HW Bush’s 1989 operation in Panama is the proof-of-concept that this pattern can be run without triggering an immediate institutional breakdown. Copying that pattern keeps the operation inside a zone where lawyers, agencies, and senior officers can say, “We’ve done something like this before.” Whether this kind of legal opportunism can actually hold up against scrutiny in the medium and long term is immaterial - the justification need only hold up enough to endure the immediate response and news cycle.

3. Projecting omnipotence

Once a moderately defensible legal and historical argument has been claimed, and once the operation is in the past, the next step is to rhetorically maximize its impact. The actions themselves, we have argued, are bound within a relatively narrow context - the ensuing claims are not: the US “runs” Venezuela, the operation was “about the oil”, which the US will now extract at will. The question of legality is shunted to the side, and instead the focus lands on what will be done next. In addition, even as the arguments are being made to defend the operation as limited in scope, the president himself presents the act in the most maximalist terms imaginable, and further broadens the scope: the Western hemisphere, Colombia, Mexico, Greenland, Canada, Cuba, and Iran all come under threat.

As a result, an action undertaken with such specificity as to satisfy a very narrow set of historical and legal criteria to a minimal degree becomes, rhetorically, an act of unilateral omnipotence that theoretically could have been directed anywhere. Its dubious legality contributes further to the impression that laws and customs no longer matter, amplifying the impact of any additional threats, as does the discussion of running the country or managing the oil as a fait accompli. Domestically, it sells the idea that constitutional and institutional constraints are largely symbolic; internationally, it signals to other states that the president of the United States can unilaterally redraw their political reality at will - which, it is important to note, is a very attractive headline (again, this is partially the point). Whether or not the threats made in the immediate aftermath of the operation are serious is immaterial: the operation granted them greater credibility than they would otherwise have had.
This strategy is a variation on Steve Bannon’s noted tactic of “flooding the zone”: creating so much noise that it is essentially impossible to respond to everything that’s occurring, allowing the actor to much more effectively manage the narrative. Trump has certainly been noted to do this before, and has particular incentive to do so at this specific moment, given falling poll numbers, the November midterms, and the persistent coverage of the Epstein files that has hounded him for months and divided his base.

The effect is threefold: it chips away at domestic expectations that anyone can meaningfully limit presidential war-making, and it cultivates a sense of despotic irrationality abroad - the feeling that the same treatment could, in principle, be applied anywhere next. On paper, Caracas is a constrained, legally-couched decapitation raid modelled on Panama. In people’s heads, it becomes proof that Trump can kidnap any leader, anywhere, and maybe annex Greenland next. And, above all, it keeps focus on the next hypothetical overreach, and not on Congress or the courts as they quietly sweep up whatever portion of the mess that they can.

Why is all of this important? Because it highlights the underlying fundamental that contradicts everything purported by point 3: the Trump administration does not, in fact, act out of omnipotent plenty - it picks and chooses battles based on international, domestic, and narrative constraints. That rather significantly reframes the way in which we should assess the administration’s probability-space of future actions, especially when it comes to things like toppling NATO over ownership of Greenland.

Much like the leadership in any other polity, the Trump administration does not get to handwave away its problems - it faces constraints both domestic and international to the execution of its ambitions. Keeping those constraints in mind is key to understanding which actions it can undertake, and which are - as of now, at least - beyond reach. And what might those be?

Next time: Iran.