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Opinion
Rodriguez or Trump: Who Is Really Running Venezuela?
Will Delcy Rodriguez govern the country as a compliant and coerced US puppet, or as the leader of an undefeated and independent Venezuela?
Jan 09, 2026
As the Senate voted to advance a War Powers Resolution on Venezuela on January 8th, Republican Senator Susan Collins declared that she did not agree with “a sustained engagement 'running' Venezuela.”
The world was mystified when President Donald Trump first said that the United States would “run” Venezuela. He has since made it clear that he wants to control Venezuela by imposing a US monopoly on selling its oil to the rest of the world, to trap the Venezuelan government in a subservient relationship with the United States.
The US Energy Department has published a plan to sell Venezuelan oil already seized by the United States and then to use the same system for all future Venezuelan oil exports. The US would dictate how the revenues are divided between the US and Venezuela, and continue this form of control indefinitely. Trump is planning to meet with US oil company executives on Friday, January 9th, to discuss his plan.
Trump’s plan would cut off Venezuela’s trade with China, Russia, Iran and other countries, and force it to spend its oil revenues on goods and services from the United States. This new form of economic colonialism would also prevent Venezuela from continuing to spend the bulk of its oil revenues on its generous system of social spending, which has lifted millions of Venezuelans out of poverty.
However, on January 7th, the New York Times reported that Venezuela has other plans. “Venezuela’s state-run oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, confirmed for the first time that it was negotiating the 'sale' of crude oil to the United States,” the Times reported. “It said in a statement on social media that it was using 'frameworks similar to those currently in effect with international companies, such as Chevron, and is based on a strictly commercial transaction.'”
Dealing with Trump is a difficult challenge for Delcy Rodriguez and other Latin American leaders, but they should all understand by now that caving to Trump or letting him pick them off one by one is a path to ruin.
Trump has threatened further military action to remove acting president Delcy Rodriguez from office if she does not comply with US plans for Venezuela. But Trump has already bowed to reality in his decision to cooperate with Rodriguez, recognizing that Maria Corina Machado, the previous US favorite, does not have popular support in Venezuela. The very presence of Delcy Rodriguez as acting president exposes the failure of Trump’s regime change operation and his well-grounded reluctance to unleash yet another unwinnable US war.
After the US invasion and abduction of President Maduro on January 3rd, Delcy Rodriguez was sworn in as Acting President, reaffirming her loyalty to President Maduro and taking charge of running the country in his absence. But who is Delcy Rodriguez, and how is she likely to govern Venezuela? As a compliant and coerced US puppet, or as the leader of an undefeated and independent Venezuela?
Delcy Rodriguez was seven years old in 1976, when her father was tortured and beaten to death as a political prisoner in Venezuela. Jorge Antonio Rodriguez was the 34-year-old co-founder of the Socialist League, a leftist political party, whom the government accused of a leading role in the kidnapping of William Niehous, a suspected CIA officer working under cover as an Owens Corning executive.
Jorge Rodríguez was arrested and died in state custody after interrogation by Venezuelan intelligence agents. While the official cause of death was listed as a heart attack, his autopsy found that he had suffered severe injuries consistent with torture, including seven broken ribs, a collapsed chest, and a detached liver.
Delcy studied law in Caracas and Paris and became a labor lawyer, while her older brother Jorge became a psychiatrist. Delcy and her mother, Delcy Gomez, were in London during the failed US-backed coup in Venezuela in 2003, and they denounced the coup from the Venezuelan embassy in interviews with the BBC and CNN.
Delcy and her older brother Jorge soon joined Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian government, and rose to a series of senior positions under Chavez and then Maduro: Delcy served as Foreign Minister from 2014 to 2017, and Economy and Finance Minister from 2020 to 2024, as well as Oil Minister and Vice President; Jorge was Vice President for a year under Chavez and then Mayor of Caracas for 8 years.
On January 5th 2026, it fell to Jorge, now the president of the National Assembly, to swear in his sister as acting president, after the illegal US invasion and abduction of President Maduro. Delcy Rodriguez told her people and the world,
“I come as the executive vice president of the constitutional president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro Moros, to take the oath of office. I come with pain for the suffering that has been caused to the Venezuelan people after an illegitimate military aggression against our homeland. I come with pain for the kidnapping of two heroes who are being held hostage in the United States of America, President Nicolas Maduro and the first combatant, first lady of our country, Cilia Flores. I come with pain, but I must say that I also come with honor to swear in the name of all Venezuelans. I come to swear by our father, liberator Simon Bolivar.”
In other public statements, acting president Rodriguez has struck a fine balance between fierce assertions of Venezuela’s independence and a pragmatic readiness to cooperate peacefully with the United States.
On January 3rd, Delcy Rodriguez declared that Venezuela would “never again be anyone’s colony.” However, after chairing her first cabinet meeting the next day, she said that Venezuela was looking for a “balanced and respectful” relationship with the United States. She went on to say, “We extend an invitation to the government of the US to work jointly on an agenda of cooperation, aimed at shared development, within the framework of international law, and that strengthens lasting peaceful coexistence,”
In a direct message to Trump, Rodriguez wrote, “President Donald Trump: our peoples and our region deserve peace and dialogue, not war. That has always been President Nicolás Maduro’s conviction and it is that of all Venezuela at this moment. This is the Venezuela I believe in and to which I have dedicated my life. My dream is for Venezuela to become a great power where all decent Venezuelans can come together. Venezuela has the right to peace, development, sovereignty and a future.”
Alan McPherson, who chairs the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy at Temple University in the US, calls Delcy Rodriguez “a pragmatist who helped stabilize the Venezuelan economy in recent times.” However, speaking to Al Jazeera, he cautioned that any perceived humiliation by the Trump administration or demands seen as excessive could “backfire and end the cooperation,” making the relationship a “difficult balance to achieve.”
After the US invasion on January 3rd, at least a dozen oil tankers set sail from Venezuela with their location transponders turned off, carrying 12 million barrels of oil, mostly to China, effectively breaking the US blockade. But then, on January 7th, US forces boarded and seized two more oil tankers with links to Venezuela, one in the Caribbean and a Russian one in the north Atlantic that they had been tracking for some time, making it clear that Trump is still intent on selectively enforcing the US blockade.
Chevron has recalled American employees to work in Venezuela and resumed normal shipments to US refineries after a four-day pause. But other US oil companies are not eager to charge into Venezuela, where Trump’s actions have so far only increased the political risks for any new US investments, amid a global surplus of oil supplies, low prices, and a world transitioning to cleaner, renewable energy.
Meanwhile, the US Department of Justice is scrambling to make a case against President Maduro, after Trump’s lawless war plan led to Maduro’s illegal arrest as the leader of a non-existent drug cartel in a foreign country where US domestic law does not apply. In his first court appearance in New York, Maduro identified himself as the president of Venezuela and a prisoner of war.
Continuing to seize ships at sea and trying to shake down Venezuela for control of its oil revenues are not the “balanced and respectful” relationship that Delcy Rodriguez and the government of Venezuela are looking for, and the US position is not as strong as Trump and Rubio’s threats suggest. Under the influence of neocons like Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham, Trump has marched the US to the brink of a war in Latin America that very few Americans support and that most of the world is united against.
Mutual respect and cooperation with Rodriguez and other progressive Latin American leaders, like Lula in Brazil, Gustavo Petro in Colombia, and Mexico’s Claudia Scheinbaum, offer Trump face-saving ways out of the ever-escalating crisis that he and his clueless advisers have blundered into.
Trump has an eminently viable alternative to being manipulated into war by Marco Rubio: what the Chinese like to call “win-win cooperation.” Most Americans would favor that over the zero-sum game of hegemonic imperialism into which Rubio and Trump are draining our hard-earned tax dollars.
The main obstacle to the peaceful cooperation that Trump says he wants is his own blind belief in US militarism and military supremacy. He wants to redirect US imperialism away from Europe, Asia, and Africa toward Latin America, but this is no more winnable or any more legitimate under international law, and it’s just as unpopular with the American people.
If anything, there is greater public opposition to US aggression “in our backyard” than to US wars 10,000 miles away. Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia are our close neighbors, and the consequences of plunging them into violence and chaos are more obvious to most Americans than the equally appalling human costs of more distant US wars.
Trump understands that endless war is unpopular, but he still seems to believe that he can get away with “one and done” operations like bombing Iran and kidnapping President Maduro and his first lady. These attacks, however, have only solved imaginary problems—Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons and Maduro’s non-existent drug cartel—while exacerbating long-standing regional crises that US policy is largely responsible for, and which have no military solutions.
Dealing with Trump is a difficult challenge for Delcy Rodriguez and other Latin American leaders, but they should all understand by now that caving to Trump or letting him pick them off one by one is a path to ruin. The world must stand together to deter aggression and defend the basic principles and rules of the UN Charter, under which all countries agree to settle disputes peacefully and not to threaten or use military force against each other. Any chance for a more peaceful world depends on finally starting to take those commitments seriously, as Trump’s predecessors also failed to do.
There is a growing movement organizing nationwide protests to tell Trump that the American people reject his wars and threats of war against our neighbors in Latin America and around the world. This is a critical moment to raise your voice and help to turn the tide against endless war.
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Funded by Our Own Tax Dollars, American Fascism Is Here
Civil disobedience is a moral requirement now. We do more after Renee Nicole Good's murder, not less.
Jan 09, 2026
One of the hardest tasks we face collectively is identifying the moment when we have passed a point of no return. It isn't a question of simply identifying the crises. These are clear and plenty. The question is: when have we shifted into a form no longer recognizable to ourselves?
In the span of one week, we have watched more of the unthinkable unfold, earthshattering moments piling up. It is only a week into a new year, yet we are already exhausted by 2026. The US government abducted the president and first lady of Venezuela in violation of every norm established through the UN to hold our fragile world together. Trump has reached beyond the bounds of international law with such brazen contempt that even the pretense of world order has shattered.
And in that same week, on a snowy Minnesota morning, an ICE agent, later identified as Jonathan E. Ross, emboldened by this brutal administration shot Renee Nicole Good through her car window. He shot her through the front windshield. As she slumped forward, he shot her again and again through the side window. He murdered her. And then his fellow ICE officers stood by as she died. They prevented a physician who rushed to help from providing emergency care, when the physician asked if he could check for a pulse, ICE agents refused and said “I don’t care" as Renee bled out.
This Is Who We Are Now
Renee had dropped her children off at school that morning. She drove with her partner and their dog to be a legal observer, to ensure there would be witnesses to the illegal acts happening around our country. She drove toward the vulnerable, members of her community who were being targeted by masked thugs, to make sure they were not alone. And she was murdered for it.
We will organize. We will refuse. We will not fund our own terror.
The ICE officers near her did nothing to try to revive her. Nothing to keep her alive. They barred those around her from helping. The shooter simply walked away, gazed at his phone flippantly, got in a car, and drove off.
So who are we? Are we Renee Good, whose children's toys were squeezed into every crevice of her car, who understood that when neighbors are under attack, showing up to bear witness is not optional, rather, it is our obligation? Or are we the masked agent who carelessly takes a gun and shoots an unarmed witness in the head?
The Architecture of Exclusion
What we are witnessing is what social psychologist Morton Deutsch called moral exclusion—the process by which we come to see more and more people as undeserving of rights, as outside the sphere of justice. When people are morally excluded, their mistreatment becomes justifiable. Their discrimination becomes policy. Their exploitation becomes economic strategy. Their murder becomes enforcement.
The ICE agents who killed Renee and prevented anyone from saving her life had excluded her from their moral community. She was not a mother to three children. Not a neighbor. Not a beloved partner and precious daughter to her mom and dad. Not a person worthy of life-saving intervention. She was disposable.
This is not new in America. We have always had these ebbs and flows, moments when fascistic violence surges and moments when it recedes just enough for us to pretend it's over. For the majority of this country's history, Black and brown people were morally excluded by white people. And white people learned to accept this. We became numb to it. Look at who fills our prisons: the majority are Black and brown people. We have been complicit in building and funding a system that treats Black and brown lives as disposable. We pay our taxes knowing where they go. We see the incarceration rates and do nothing.
The moral universe in the eyes of the state has always been small. What is happening now is that it is shrinking further, faster. The violence we accepted against Black and brown communities is expanding. Fascism is here.
Funded By Our Money
It is critical for us to understand that we are the ones funding this. Soon we'll be filing our taxes. Many of us, including those who are undocumented and continue to work and pay taxes, are funding the very system that is murdering our neighbors.
When we seek funding for education, for healthcare, for research, we are really asking for our own money back. Instead, anything that benefits us is being diminished and defunded by the Trump administration. Anything that supports our quality of life, our thriving, our children is being stripped away. And our taxpayer money is being used to fund thugs who are murdering Renee, who are abducting our neighbors, who are terrorizing our communities.
The same money that could be ensuring every child has what they need to learn is instead arming untrained ICE agents who shoot mothers in front of witnesses. The same money that could be providing healthcare is instead funding mass deportation operations. The same money that could be supporting research and innovation is used to blow up boats in the Mediterranean.
The Point of No Return
This is a watershed moment. This is the point of no return.
Until now, we at least had a story. Even if for Black and brown Americans, for poor Americans, equal rights were always an empty promise, we had a story of America that mattered to the world.
I know because it mattered to me. As a little Hungarian girl under Ceaușescu in Romania, I believed in a place where you could be an ethnic minority without persecution, speak your language without criminalization, name histories without being targeted. It is all so complex, and really both things were simultaneously true. The dream was real even when the reality fell devastatingly short. That dream saved lives. Saved my life. It animated people risking everything, crossing deserts, floating across seas, to reach what America promised to be.
Now that story is gone. The norms are being exploded and we are being exploded along with it.
When the institutions fail, when the story shatters, ordinary people must become what we thought the country would be. Renee Good understood this. She showed up to protect the persecuted because no one else would.
In the face of fascistic terror, there are always people who crumble and people who refuse. Renee refused. She refused to look away. She refused to let the vulnerable face terror alone. And for that refusal, she was murdered.
Refusing to Fund Our Own Terror
We cannot afford to crumble. We must refuse. We must show up more, not less.
This means becoming sanctuary. Houses of worship, community centers, neighborhoods. When ICE comes, we document, witness, disrupt. We block deportation buses. We make this machinery of exclusion slower, harder, more costly to operate. Civil disobedience is a moral requirement now. We do more after Renee's murder, not less.
And, crucially, here is the power we must claim: We are funding this.
This means we have power. Take it back. Build mutual aid networks. Fund bail funds, legal defense, sanctuary. Take care of each other when the government we fund refuses to.
Demand it back. Call every elected official. Tell them: not one more dollar for ICE. Not one more dollar for detention centers, where 32 people died in 2025 while in ICE custody. Not one more dollar to militarize our communities. Every dollar used to fund this violence is stolen from us. We will organize. We will refuse. We will not fund our own terror.
We will not buckle before the masked cowards who murder our neighbors. Like Renee, we show up. We build sanctuary. We make our communities ungovernable to fascism.
This is the point of no return. We are the ones who refuse.
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Renee Good Died From the Kind of State Violence Our Founders Warned Against
When state authority stops serving the people but instead lords over them, stops being questioned by the media and the people, and stops fearing consequences because it lives behind a shield of immunity, a police state is inevitable.
Jan 09, 2026
When I read that the young mother who was executed at point-blank range by one of President Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement goons on Wednesday was named Renee Nicole Good, it sent a chill down my spine.
As the pain and outrage was washing through me, it also struck me as almost too much of a coincidence that she was there protesting state violence and Ben Franklin had been using the name “Silence Dogood”—as in “Do Good”—to warn American colonists about the very same dangers of state violence.
When 16-year-old Franklin slipped his first Silence Dogood essay under the door of his brother’s print shop in 1722, America had few police departments, no body cameras, no qualified immunity, and few militarized patrols prowling city streets. But young Franklin already understood the danger.
Writing as a fictional widow, Franklin warned that “nothing makes a man so cruel as the sense of his own superiority.” The remark was in the context of self-important ministers, magistrates, and petty officials, but he was also talking about raw state power itself as we saw with the execution of Renee Nicole Good.
If we want to live in the democratic republic Franklin, Paine, and Madison imagined where power is given by “the consent of the governed,” then outrage isn’t enough.
Power that is insulated, Franklin taught, answers only to itself and believes its very authority excuses the violence it uses.
Franklin’s insight didn’t die on the printed page but, rather, became the moral backbone of the American Revolution. As Do-Good, he repeatedly cautioned us that power breeds cruelty when it’s insulated from consequence, that authority becomes violent when it believes itself superior, and that free speech is usually the first casualty of abusive rule.
In "Essay No. 6", in 1722, Dogood wrote:
Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech.
Renee Nicole Good was on that Minneapolis street to express her freedom of speech, her outrage at the crimes, both moral and legal, being committed by ICE on behalf of Donald Trump, Tom Homan, Kristi Noem, and Stephen Miller.
Thomas Paine took Franklin’s warning and sharpened it into a blade. Government, Paine said, is a “necessary evil” but when it turns its legally authorized violence against its own people, it becomes “intolerable.” Authority doesn’t legitimize force, Paine argued; instead, the ability to use force without accountability inevitably corrupts authority.
And here we are. This is the ninth time ICE agents have shot into a person‘s car, and the second time they’ve killed somebody in the process.
For Paine, violence by agents of the state isn’t an aberration, it’s the default outcome when power concentrates without clear accountability. Where Franklin warned about cruelty born of a sense of superiority (as armed, masked white ICE officers search for brown people as if they were the Klan of old), Paine warned us that force will always be directed against the governed unless that power is aggressively constrained.
James Madison—the “Father of the Constitution”—then took both men at their word. He didn’t design a constitution that assumed virtue; instead, he designed one that assumed abuse.
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” he wrote in Federalist 51, adding, “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
Because we and our politicians and police aren’t angels, Madison pointed out, state power must be restrained, divided, watched, and continuously challenged. Which is why the Framers of the Constitution adopted the checks-and-balances system—splitting the government into three co-equal parts—that Montesquieu recommended, based on what he had learned from the Iroquois (as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Democracy).
Franklin himself became even clearer about the threat of unaccountable state-imposed violence as he aged. Governments, he repeatedly warned, always claim violence is necessary for safety and we saw that Wednesday when puppy-killer Kristi Noem claimed that Renee Good was a “domestic terrorist.” Her comment is the perfect illustration of Franklin’s assertion that state violence, once normalized, always tries to claim justification.
To add insult to murder, Trump pathetically waddled over to his Nazi-infested social media site and claimed:
The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital… [T]he reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis.”
Silence Dogood would have confronted him head-on, as she-Franklin repeatedly did with the petty, self-important officials of colonial New England. He repeatedly noted that surrendering liberty for a little temporary security not only doesn’t prevent state brutality but actually it invites it. In a 1759 letter, Franklin explicitly warned us about men like Donald Trump and the siren song of “law and order”:
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Once a state teaches its agents that force is the solution, force becomes their habit. That’s how police states are formed out of democracies, as the citizens of Russia, Hungary, and Venezuela have all learned. And now, it appears, we’re learning as America becomes the world’s most recent police state.
This isn’t an uniquely American problem: It’s older than our republic. And Franklin told us exactly how it happens: When state authority stops serving the people but instead lords over them, stops being questioned by the media and the people, and stops fearing consequences because it lives behind a shield of immunity, a police state is inevitable.
As Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz noted Wednesday, the killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis wasn’t a “tragic anomaly.” It was the predictable outcome of systems Franklin would have recognized instantly; the kind of corrupt strongman systems that reward domination, excuse cruelty, and punish dissent.
Trump wants us on the “radical left” to shut up and go away. But Ben Franklin taught us that silence in the face of power isn’t neutrality but is, instead, an extension of permission. He wrote as Silence Dogood precisely because he understood that abuse flourishes when citizens turn their eyes away and lower their voices.
If we want to live in the democratic republic Franklin, Paine, and Madison imagined where power is given by “the consent of the governed,” then outrage isn’t enough. We must demand accountability, insist on transparency, and refuse to accept state violence and a firehose of official lies as the price of order.
Three centuries ago, a teenage printer’s apprentice warned us that silence enables abuse. He was right then. He is right now.
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War-Making Belongs to Congress―and the Oil Belongs to the People of Venezuela
The question is not whether a particular president’s motives are sincere, nor whether a foreign government is flawed. The question is whether the United States will remain governed by law―or by precedent accumulated through silence.
Jan 09, 2026
The recent Senate debate over U.S. military action in Venezuela exposes a fundamental rupture in American constitutional governance: who has the authority to initiate war. The Constitution answers that question plainly. Yet modern practice―and the arguments advanced in defense of it―have drifted dangerously far from that design. Alongside this constitutional crisis stands a second, inseparable issue: whether the United States may lawfully claim control over the natural resources of another sovereign nation, specifically Venezuela’s oil, under the threat of force.
These questions are not abstract. They determine whether the United States remains governed by law or by precedent accumulated through executive action and congressional silence.
At the center of the debate are two sharply opposed views articulated on the Senate floor. One asserts that the President, as Commander in Chief, may unilaterally use military force whenever he deems it necessary to advance national interests, with Congress relegated to the limited roles of funding restriction or impeachment after the fact. The other insists that the power to initiate war belongs exclusively to Congress, not as a technicality, but as a deliberate constitutional safeguard against impulsive, personalized, or imperial war-making.
Constitutional design and deliberate restraint lie at the heart of the Framers’ intent. Article I of the Constitution vests in Congress―not the President―the power to declare war. Article II assigns the President the authority to command the armed forces once war is authorized and to repel sudden attacks. This division was not accidental. It reflected deep skepticism, shared across the Founding generation, that executives are structurally inclined toward war. James Madison warned that the executive branch is “most prone to it,” driven by secrecy, ambition, and the temptation of unilateral action.
Bombing a foreign capital, removing a sitting head of state, and threatening prolonged military occupation are acts of war by any ordinary, historical, or legal definition. The Constitution does not permit semantic evasions to substitute for authorization.
The Framers, therefore, made war intentionally difficult to launch. They placed the decision in a deliberative body accountable to the people, requiring public debate, recorded votes, and political responsibility. That Congress has too often failed to exercise this duty does not diminish the Constitution’s command. Repeated violations do not convert usurpation into legality. Historical drift explains how power migrated; it does not justify why it should remain there.
Attempts to rebrand large-scale military operations as “law enforcement,” “arrest warrants,” or “limited actions” do not change their substance. Bombing a foreign capital, removing a sitting head of state, and threatening prolonged military occupation are acts of war by any ordinary, historical, or legal definition. The Constitution does not permit semantic evasions to substitute for authorization.
The War Powers Resolution―and the myth of congressional overreach is often invoked as the supposed villain. Critics claim that the 1973 War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional because it allegedly transforms Congress into “535 commanders-in-chief.” This argument inverts constitutional logic. The Resolution does not empower Congress to command troops; it reasserts Congress’s authority to decide whether hostilities initiated by the executive may lawfully continue. It exists precisely because Congress had been sidelined, not because it had seized power.
The statute’s reporting requirements and time limits are accountability mechanisms, not vetoes of military command. Congress’s true failure has not been excessive interference but persistent abdication―avoiding the political responsibility of authorizing war while permitting presidents to act first and justify later. That abdication corrodes checks and balances and transfers the gravest decision a democracy can make into the hands of one person.
Sovereignty, coercion, and Venezuela’s oil bring the constitutional crisis into sharp international focus. The claim that the United States may seize, sell, or administer Venezuelan oil for “mutual benefit” or reconstruction collapses under legal scrutiny. As reaffirmed by the United Nations Secretary-General, Venezuela’s oil belongs to the Venezuelan people. This is not rhetoric; it is a cornerstone principle of international law grounded in state sovereignty and permanent sovereignty over natural resources.
Any alleged “agreement” cited by the Trump administration with a Venezuelan interim authority cannot be credibly described as a genuine agreement at all. Consent extracted under duress is not consent. When a population faces a clear and present threat of escalating military force―further ground operations, hundreds more civilian deaths, and a highly probable invasion―what follows is not agreement but coerced acquiescence. Allowing foreign control of national resources under the shadow of overwhelming military power is not voluntary cooperation; it is survival under threat.
The decision to go to war is not merely strategic. It is moral, constitutional, and irrevocable.
International law does not recognize resource transfers imposed by force or intimidation as legitimate. To do so would resurrect a doctrine of conquest the modern international order was built to reject. If oil may be seized in Venezuela today because military pressure makes resistance impossible, it may be seized anywhere tomorrow by any power willing to invoke its own version of “national interest.”
Such actions erode not only international norms but the United States’ own legal and moral standing. They convert foreign policy from diplomacy into extraction and military power from defense into appropriation.
Democratic accountability and the cost of war demand a return to constitutional first principles. The decision to go to war is not merely strategic. It is moral, constitutional, and irrevocable. It places citizens in harm’s way, reshapes international relations, and unleashes consequences that last generations. That is precisely why the Constitution assigns the initiation of war to Congress.
Congressional authorization does not weaken national security; it strengthens it by conferring legitimacy, public consent, and strategic clarity. History shows that when the United States has truly been attacked, Congress has acted swiftly and decisively. What the Framers sought to prevent was not defense, but adventurism―wars launched without deliberation, accountability, or consent.
Allowing one individual to initiate war, seize foreign leaders, and appropriate another nation’s resources without congressional approval collapses the separation of powers and invites abuse. It replaces law with discretion, deliberation with impulse, and sovereignty with force.
In the end, the question is not whether a particular president’s motives are sincere, nor whether a foreign government is flawed. The question is whether the United States will remain governed by law―or by precedent accumulated through silence. On that question, the Constitution is unambiguous.
War begins with Congress.
And Venezuela’s oil belongs to Venezuelans.
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