Savage: Well, presidents of both parties going back have carved out an ability to use American military force abroad unilaterally without going to Congress under certain circumstances. The circumstances are basically incidents where there’s a national interest, and the anticipated scope, duration and nature of the hostilities fall short of war in the constitutional sense — so one-off airstrikes, peacekeeping operations, small-scale interventions. Bombing Iran was seen as “across the line” because it created such a risk of a major regional conflagration, that it could lead to a full-scale war. Congress needed to be involved from the beginning if we were going to cross that line. The boat strikes are certainly in that category. Trump is assuming for himself the power to essentially order the summary extrajudicial executions of people who had always been treated as criminal suspects. And the crime they are suspected of committing — not even a capital offense — is drug trafficking. That’s an extraordinary thing. No one thinks that outside of the government that there is actually an armed conflict, but who’s going to challenge him inside the government? Clearly the military is not, especially because their JAG Corps has been gutted by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
JAG Corps are the lawyers in the military who might issue opinions saying, “Don’t do that.”
Savage: Whose purpose is to provide legal advice to military commanders about obeying the law. And the law says militaries are not allowed to target civilians even if they are suspected of crimes, if they pose no imminent threat. That is murder in peacetime, that is a war crime in an armed conflict. Nevertheless, the military is doing what Trump is telling them to do.
And now, with the raid into Venezuela, using ground troops on the sovereign soil of another country, where they killed 80 people and effected regime change. And he says he can do that too, in this case under the guise of being a law enforcement operation. So they can combat drug smugglers by saying that’s not a law-enforcement investigation, that’s war. And then they can send troops into the foreign territory of another country without congressional authorization by saying, that’s not war, that is just a law reinforcement operation. It’s just an extraordinary set of events. It is a demonstration of the theme we were talking about, of you can just do stuff, and especially if you’ve hired the right lawyers who are not going to raise objections.
What may unify these interventions, if anything — and I’m going to be a little bit provocative here — is that, for now, they have seemed to turn out pretty well for the United States. And let me just give some examples. When we think about the president’s approach to foreign affairs this entire past year, it ends with NATO paying more than ever for its own defense, which therefore puts less burden on the U.S. Treasury. The United States is now feared by Latin American leaders who have major problems with drug cartels, and we’re seeing that those governments — look at Mexico, for example — can do a heck of a lot more to fight those cartels when they feel threatened by Donald Trump. Just reckon with that for a minute, that, as legally dubious as some of these actions have been, they do appear to serve the U.S. national interest.
Swan: I don’t find this difficult to reckon with at all, and this is kind of the point I was getting at earlier, which is that, just because something is unlawful or legally contested, it doesn’t mean that it’s not appealing, or doesn’t get some good for America. The two major military operations that he has authorized, in Iran and in Venezuela, resulted in no American service members dying. Whatever you think about the operation to get rid of Maduro, it was an astonishing display of military prowess. And if you’re Donald Trump and you pull off such spectacular military successes and then get the reinforcement of the praise and the fear, it’s self-reinforcing. And that’s why you see him now saying: “Well, what about Greenland? What about Cuba? What about regime change in Iran?” Is he just going to continue to get lucky in all these circumstances? We don’t know.