Why Trump's capture of Maduro seems both unprecedented and eerily familiar

Not long after the news broke that a US operation had removed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife from their home and brought them to the US to face charges, a new version of the classic Trump “unprecedented” debate broke out among various scholars I follow. One set of arguments maintains that the administration’s actions go beyond anything that can be justified in US political tradition: the direct involvement of the administration in an action in South America; the removal of a foreign leader without a clear plan for what comes next (which distinguishes this event from what happened with Manuel Noriega in 1989). Another viewpoint situates what happened in a long tradition of US imperialism, in Latin America and elsewhere. What explains why what has happened – as with so many other things in the last year, and the last decade – feels both like such a shocking violation of laws and norms, and also like something rooted in much larger political forces?

The answers to this question will fill volumes, but I’ll take a stab at a few aspects of this situation, from a US institutions perspective.

The presidency vs. the president

Complaints about unconstrained president war power predate the Trump administration by decades, and a flurry of such scholarship accompanied the Bush administration’s actions in the war on terror and the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions. A common argument about how this has come to pass is that courts have been deferential and Congress has completely whiffed on its Constitutional role – again, far before the sycophantic dynamic of MAGA’s hold on the Republican Party. Jack Goldsmith expands on the way that relevant domestic law has evolved in the area of war powers, and its relevance for the legality of the Maduro capture. The basic argument is that because the other two branches have declined to meaningfully check presidential war power, much of the relevant legal reasoning comes from the executive branch itself. And unsurprisingly, this reasoning tends to come out in support of strong executive power. When you start from the premise that the job of the executive is to enforce laws and protect the security of the nation, some very expansive legal reasoning is possible.

So that’s the presidency – cue the memes about Republican presidents starting wars for oil. But there are elements of this that are distinct to Trump: the mostly inexperienced foreign policy team; the profound disdain for alternative perspectives and expertise; and the persistent presence of self-interest. IR scholar Elizabeth Saunders has identified Trump’s foreign policy as that of a personalistic regime. In other words, we have an office that’s amassed a great deal of power, with few meaningful checks in place. And that office is occupied by someone apt to make decisions based on what he thinks sounds good, or the last thing he heard. Or what benefits him financially.

Forget the Don-roe Doctrine, it’s the Bush doctrine all the way down

Let’s set aside for the moment that the phrase the “Don-roe doctrine” sounds like something a mediocre sports commentator might say about a college football coach to fill airtime. What’s more important is that what’s actually happening seems to carry core elements of the Bush doctrine from 2 decades ago. It’s worth looking at not just the execution of the 2003 Iraq invasion but actually the broader political logic that allowed it to happen, in order to get a sense of what the politics might look like now. Understanding this requires us to revisit the basic ideas of the Bush doctrine, and also looking at how it has played out politically at the time and since.

While the logic of preemptive war hasn’t really been part of the Venezuela conversation in the same way, the “narcoterrorism” argument builds on War on Terror ideas about invasion and presidential power. The even more striking aspect of this is the attempt to tie opponents of the capture to being pro-Maduro in some sense. There’s at least one story circulating about Democrats frustrated that their co-partisans are being nitpicky about things like the law, instead of celebrating the takedown of an illegitimate leader. This is also straight from the Iraq invasion era, in which the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime was used as a moral justification. Even at the time – as bipartisan majorities in Congress approved the administration’s war plans – the Bush doctrine was the subject of some skepticism. But how has it played out politically?

Since the news of the invasion broke, I’ve been thinking a lot about Mariah Zeisberg’s terrific book, War Powers: The Politics of Constitutional Authority. Her basic argument is that war powers aren’t divided in the Constitution in a neat and clear way, but rather different “security regimes” are established and articulated politically, according to a set of standards about what the executive and legislative branches both do well in a given a security situation. One of the things that’s quite fascinating about her treatment of the Cold War is that it explains how US foreign policy became much more president-driven, while still allowing for input from Congress, dissenting perspectives in the executive branch, and across party lines. This was often done outside of official channels to preserve the appearance of national unity. But this input could make otherwise executive-centric actions, like Kennedy’s decision-making in the Cuban missile crisis, accepted as legitimate. Their absence defined the illegitimacy of Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia. Looking at the Cold War security order through this lens of informal, but established practices, she argued, can distinguish legitimate from illegitimate executive actions.

What’s interesting about the Bush doctrine and the Global War on Terror is that it’s never developed a reasonably stable politics to manage different perspectives and assess costs and benefits of different strategies. Witness the Obama administration’s difficulties establishing a coherent response to the revolutions of the Arab Spring, floundering over the “red line” in Syria, denying “hostilities” in Libya under the War Powers Resolution, and claiming AUMF authority to pursue ISIS in Iraq and Syria. The Democratic lines were mostly procedural – about backing away from executive authority. This was a nice thought, but disregarded polarization in Congress and left the Obama administration in a position it couldn’t sustain.

So how does this apply to Trump and the current situation? Mainly, it seems like the lack of what Zeisberg terms a “security order” creates a lot of opportunities to improvise. But the ideas that inform the Bush doctrine – that fighting terrorism (narco or otherwise) justifies whatever the president can think of, and the corollary is that anyone who opposes this is not only pro-terrorism but pro-dictator. It short-circuits political discussion, and offers powerful, if superficial, soundbites.

A major difference is that action in Venezuela is shaping up to be rather unpopular, and it’s not the early 2000s. But administration opponents will need to be disciplined and organized. Unpopular policies do not magically create checks on the executive. And Trump’s people have a different set of communication tools to delegitimize opponents and raise the costs of opposing them.

In sum, the Maduro capture and the Trump administration’s statements about it draw on existing political forces – the politics of the Bush doctrine, the power of the executive branch to act unilaterally on the global stage. But signature Trumpist elements include a lack of real attention to US standing in the world, or respect for the kinds of informal constraints that have counter-balanced these other forces. Furthermore, these developments are fragile and contested – presidents have amassed war powers, but also mounting legal criticisms. The Bush doctrine lays out principles but a clear set of norms and debates have never really been consolidated. As with many things about Trump, it incorporates both long-term political developments and unprecedent behavior. And, perhaps more than in other areas, this one is a recipe for instability at home and abroad.