← Bulwark Takes
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- [00:04]
A
Hi, Bill Kristol here for Bulwark on Sunday. Very pleased to be joined by Ryan Goodman, professor of Law at NYU, editor of the indispensable JustSecurity.org website, expert in many aspects of constitutional law, international law, but also, well, national security law in general. And obviously you served at the Defense Department for a year or two on these matters. So you have actual experience on it. And I thought we would talk about the blowing up by the US Military with I think a hellfire missile of a drug vessel in the Caribbean on Tuesday strikes me as well. I really would love to get your, your thoughts on legality of what happened, why it might have happened, what the implications are and so forth. So, Ryan, thanks for, thanks for joining me.
- [00:55]
B
Yeah. Thank you. Looking forward to the conversation.
- [00:58]
A
So on Tuesday, I think we what we know, I think is that this drug vessel, alleged drug vessel, a vessel, though, certainly was blown up. The administration released video of it, apparently by a hellfire missile many hundreds of miles away from the United States, I believe, in the Caribbean. And what else? What do you think? What do you think happened? What do we know? What are the big questions about what happened? What do we think? What do we think? We know what happened? My English isn't any good, but what do we think of the big questions about what happened?
- [01:30]
B
Yeah, I guess the two of the biggest questions are three. So one, under what legal authority or who signed off on this? That's big question number one. Two, I think, is actually who is on that vessel? So there's some indication from former officials, it's doubtful that 11 people on a boat that size would be transporting drugs rather than smuggling people. So who's on the boat? Because, number two, number three, is this just the beginning to me? Is this part of a new campaign against similar vessels or even escalation towards kinetic warfare inside Venezuela? So that's some of the biggest questions.
- [02:26]
A
And also, I suppose, or relatedly, I mean, we stop boats all the time, the Coast Guard does, and apprehend people if they're smuggling drugs. And that seems not to have been considered this time. Yeah.
- [02:41]
B
Yeah. I mean, taking Marco Rubio, Secretary Rubio's words at face value, which seemed very plausible, they could have interdicted the boat and they decided not to because they, being the president of the United States, said just blow it out of the water. I don't want to try to stop the vote or apprehend the individuals, just basically destroy it and kill them. According to.
- [03:10]
A
Yeah, that is striking. I mean, their own. Well, I want to get A second to their own explanations and justifications, which have been somewhat confusing and a bit self contradictory. But I mean, say a word, just about the basic legal authority or lack thereof of what happened.
- [03:27]
B
Yeah. So I think that one way I want to kind of put this is we talk about the law a lot. I talk about the law definitely day in, day out. And I'm definitely going to say bottom line up front. This is patently illegal. But just, it's one of those moments in which knowing what seems to have happened here is just murder. I mean, murder. Even if one never picked up a legal dictionary, it just, it seems like it's murder and it seems like it's murder. And then just to drill down in the very way in which the Defense Department would define murder based on the Defense Department's pretty narrow but well settled views of international law. So under international law, under any scenario, it's hard for me to think how the lawyers could have signed off on it. And that's, that's part of why. That's one of my questions, like who signed up on this? Because basically, either take the White House's attempt, it seems to put the framework of this around war, that we're in an armed conflict or something, some sort. In an armed conflict, you can't kill civilians. You can't kill people who are just transporting drugs. And it would be murder under international law, Geneva Conventions and U.S. war Crimes act, and Article 118 of the Uniform Code of Military justice in the best case scenario for them, assuming we're in an armed conflict, and if we're not in an armed conflict, then you've still got murder under US Federal felony law, and you've got murder in the way the Defense Department acknowledges applies to extraterritorial U.S. military actions under international human rights law and the Foreign Restatement under US Law, so. Or interpretations of it through the United States lens. So it's just, it's. So this is such a gigantic change. And I put it this way as well. Having worked in the Defense Department, having worked on law of war issues for decades now, I've never seen the Defense Department have a policy action of killing civilians. Like, that's, that's what we're talking about today. And that's why, yes, there's the legalities of it. And it's easy to make the legal argument because I can't think of. I always try to articulate what the strongest argument is on the other side. I don't know it. I don't know how they could even come to the conclusion that this was legal.
- [05:54]
A
Now that's very helpful. I hate powerful. Everyone hates to hear that this might have been an act, you know, a murder committed by the US government. And we have. And you, you're bracketing even the question of how they assessed apparently, or claimed to have assessed. These were drug smugglers and members of a terrorist gang as opposed to people smuggling in, you know, people who wanted to come to the US and that which would mean the most of the people on the 11 people on the boat perhaps were just people who wanted to illegally enter the US Right. Including children, conceivably. I mean it really is. And that seems honestly just from reading it, and the odds are probably a little greater on that side of the equation than the drug smuggler side.
- [06:39]
B
Yes. So a former official speaking to the New York Times in a byline piece by multiple New York Times reporters, some of the best in the business, said that it is more likely in their estimation that what you just said that there was a smuggling human beings rather than smuggling drugs. Because when they smuggle drugs, the modus operandi is to have as few people on board as possible, so as much of the cargo can be used for the narcotics. And then if you just take the next step from that, what you just said, which is if they are smuggling people, then part of the 11 people that were killed are the migrants. It's not even the drug smugglers. And that's just God awful. And we do have a new statement, as you've said, Bill, it's been changing over time, but we have a new statement, very official, from the executive branch to the Congress as a War Powers Report. And it notably fails to identify who those people are and even notably fails to say that they were Trin Naragua. And it says in fact that they were affiliated with a designated terrorist organization. And coming from my background at the DOD and the like, affiliated with usually does mean one ratchet out. It does not mean the membership in the group. It does actually. It's very meaningful to say something like that. So do they really, really know who they were? If they knew who they were, you would leave them. You would have it in the War Powers Report. And then my colleague Tess Bridgman, she tweeted this out, put it out on Blue Sky. She said that she's read every War Powers report that's ever been published. She means that she's the head of the War Powers Report Project that's based at the recenter on Law and Security. They've read and coded every single War Powers report that has ever been issued in US history. And she said this one is lacking. There are conspicuous absences in this one that seem to suggest they have a. Something that's very suspicious. And I would say, and I think she would say they seem to have a lack of knowledge of who they actually kill.
- [08:45]
A
And I would say just for me watching from the outside, having been in the executive branch many years ago, but maybe having a bit of an ability to sense when people are saying things with confidence that they know are true or throwing out things that they hope will deflect or think possibly can be true. And we've had so many statements that have sort of thrown out and then not backed up. Right. Well we know exactly who these people are. I think one of them was that Hexaf. Maybe you said we know their names. We had intercepts that prove that it's a drug, prove that they were transporting drugs. Imminence there was an imminent threat. I think maybe that was Rubio who threw out that phrase. You know, kind of remembering that that might be hoping that might be a justification for this kind of preemptive and fatal military strike. Collective self defense. It just feels to me and I'd like you to go through some of these and you know, and their applicability or not applic ability but that just feels to me where people are, they're saying phrases they think will help them either legally or obviously in terms of the public relations on this. But it almost seems like none of them, none of them applies or at least they haven't been followed up on when you would expect as you say, when you have the official war powers word, that's the moment to say there are these individuals. We know some of the names, not all the names perhaps or at least we know the names. That's classified. But we'll tell you privately about those names. And we know we have these, this kind of intelligence. We're not going to give away sources and methods. But you know, there we've all seen many of these kinds of reports and briefings and we've seen a final point, I'll just make a comment on all of it is we've also seen many times after military action an actual briefing by uniformed officers and by the Secretary of Defense or spokesman where they go into some detail about what happened and explain both the legal justification but also just why they know what they know and why they did what they did. The Iran attack would be a good example. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Secretary of Defense. I mean there's Been absolutely nothing, I guess. Isn't that right? I mean there's been, there have been comments and you know, random, you know, when people are shouting questions by Hegseth Rubio and Trump and President Trump, but no official account of what happened.
- [10:50]
B
That's right. Yeah. I think there's, I agree with all of that. There's an absence in coming forward in a forthright manner in the way in which you would think they would want to Just here's we're going to present our strong, strong guest argument or strong argument. I also thought it was notable that the first leadership on this seemed to be the Secretary of State rather than the Secretary of Defense and the chair, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That's also notable. What you said in terms of the White House puts out the statement that it was in collective self defense, which sounds like they got some lawyer. Maybe it's Stephen Miller with some law legal background to use the terms that lawyers would think, okay, that might justify something, but it was deeply suspicious. Collective self defense technically means that there's another state out there that thinks it was subject to an armed attack and has asked the United States specifically to come to its defense against that armed attack, which seemed very implausible. And then like you said, Bill, lo and behold, when they submit the War Powers Report to Congress, it's not in there. There's no reference to it. And that's in comparison to prior war powers reports where if it's in collective self defense, you put it in the War Powers Report because it puts you in such a stronger footing if you're, if the President, United States is using military force in order to protect some ally or partner because they require it in an armed attack, it would be in there. So that's part of it. And then the one, you know, that I think others who are not following it as closely might have still seen that President Trump said that the vessel was coming to the United States and Secretary Rubio said, no, they're heading, they were headed to Trinidad and Tobago, which is still 1600 miles away from Miami. It's just, it's like, and, and they took the monumental decision of ending these people's lives based on, they can't even get their stories straight as to what they knew or what about them. So.
- [12:50]
A
And they, they think obviously saying that, well, drugs kill a lot of people in the United States, which is true, and we should be very tough on drug smuggling and so forth, that that somehow justifies it. But they sort of threw in the phrase imminent threat. I Suppose they thought that also helped.
- [13:03]
B
Yeah, I mean, is it an imminent. Yeah, so it has to be. Exactly. Imminent threat is legal. It's not just sounds legal is legal, but it has to be an imminent threat of an armed attack or in certain situations, an imminent threat that this individual poses to American lives. But imminent in the sense of they're about to pull the trigger. Not that they're about to bring in drugs to the United States which will be used by US citizens and the population and people will potentially die from the use of those drugs down the line. Like inconceivable. And so that's why it would boil down to like this is not murder in self defense or killing in self defense. It would boil down to a very Strong case under U.S. federal law of murder under the U.S. the UCNJ, unless there are other pieces of information that we don't know about. And under the UCMJ also, just to put a final point on it, people within the military cannot claim the defense of following orders if the order itself is patently unlawful. So I think we really want to know what they were told and who signed off at it. And just by way of background, I am also thinking that there is this executive order that was super unusual, passed a few weeks ago that said the President, United States and the Attorney General shall declare for the entire executive branch what is the law. Is that what happened? Is it similar to what we think might have happened with the airplanes that were being sent to El Salvador Secot Prison in which sounds like senior officials in the Justice Department, Emil Beauvais and some other reporting. Pam Bondi and Stephen Miller cooked up some legal argument that they sent down. It's the most plausible explanation, I think that people in the military can have that. We were told by somebody that it was legal. That's what's so hard to figure out because I think that people are putting themselves at risk, legal risk.
- [15:04]
A
And just. I'm gonna get back to that a second. But the, the. It just seems that the boat's a thousand miles away. It's a little fishing boat. We have pretty good capabilities for stopping those boats, boarding them if they fire. Obviously we have the right to fire back or if they look like they're going to fire even. But none of that is even tried. I guess I can't quite get over that. You know, it's not as if we don't have a lot of history of doing this in the Caribbean and the ability to do this.
- [15:31]
B
Yeah. So to me it does raise. Because I want to try to think of what is the strongest argument on the other side. I do think it does raise potentially the strongest argument that Secretary Rubo has articulated as a policy matter, but it also shows you the rationale. So it sounds like he's saying, yeah, we could have interdicted them, as we've always done. And my understanding from speaking to people in the postcard and the like, and we have a piece published with just Security by Mark Nevitt, it's so routine, the ways in which they're able to fairly straightforwardly apprehend these kinds of votes and then arrest the individuals and confiscate the narcotics. And Rubio has said that, no, the President just wanted to send a signal by blowing it up. And then the policy argument that he's making is, look, yes, it is true that we can apprehend and confiscate the product, but that is already part of the drug smugglers trend Aragua business model. They've priced that in and there's only like a small percentage in which we're really ever going to intercept the boats and the confiscate the product and the rest of the individuals. And they price all of that in. What they don't price in is that we'll just blow them up. And that's why we took the decision. So he's actually giving us the policy justification and just to articulate it. So there's something to that potentially, if you do the think about the math that way. But that's not an imminent threat.
- [16:54]
A
That's not an imminent threat.
- [16:55]
B
So it's like it shows you the fluctuating rationales that they're using and none of that gets to. You can't kill people outright murder, even if that's your policy goal.
- [17:06]
A
Yeah, that's well said. What about the Coast Guard? We talked about this a little bit when we were chatting the other day. Where is the Coast Guard? Do we know?
- [17:18]
B
And that's so we don't know. And the piece by Mark Nevitt is very good because he was a Navy JAG and worked alongside Coast Guard. And he basically explains what the baseline operations are that you would assume that there'd be Coast Guard very much involved and then the Coast Guard would take the lead and they had the authorities to conduct boarding and seizure and warnings and all the rest of it. But they don't seem to have been involved in this. It seems to be a purely military Pentagon operation. And one other piece I'd put on to that is based on some of the reporting, New York Times and elsewhere it seems as though now for at least a couple weeks that the Coast Guard has been excluded from the military operations that are happening just outside the Venezuelan co. Venezuelan coastline. And so that does raise for me the one big question. One of the big questions back to like, who authorized this? Was this pre. Planned, like to actually have the situation where you've got military assets in this, in the, in the area, but you don't have Coast Guard assets? Sounds like this was more deliberate.
- [18:24]
A
And you'd maybe think that more people.
- [18:25]
B
Signed off on it and knew what was coming, rather than something that happened in the immediacy at the moment, like the airplane is going to El Salvador or Seagram Prison. So that, that. And that troubles me more because it means more people in the loop that would actually authorize something.
- [18:41]
A
Right. I mean, it was, it was planned to be. And Hellfire missile was apparently shot to kill these people. And there was no question is sometimes there are things that happen in war that are unfortunate and maybe deserve punishment. Maybe, maybe under the pressure of the occasion, they don't deserve punishment because it's understandable. But you know, where you're at a conflict, you know, you think you've been fired on, you haven't been fired on, you fire back, it turns out it was a mistake, or you killed civilians, but you authentically believed you were at risk, or you're your, your, Your colleagues, your fellow troops were at risk. This is nothing like that. And this is. Well, that's. I haven't really focused on this. I think you're really right to raise that. The Rubio justification, which is sort of plausible, as you say, as a policy matter kind of, you know, they'll only really listen if we kill them, is of course also extremely revealing as to the absence of imminent threat, the absence of. Of the normal defenses of why you have to kill people, especially if you don't really know who they are, it seems to me, which they haven't, which isn't. It isn't at all clear. They do.
- [19:43]
B
Right, Absolutely. And I would just, you know, suggest to anyone who's thinking along the lines of, well, this is the. This is. Ruby is right as a policy matter, and this is what we need to do to stop the scourge. And that members of Trend Nicaragua have killed more Americans through narcotics and the like than the Al Qaeda offshoot Al Shabab in Somalia. I would just suggest that. What would. You know, where's your limiting principle? Why wouldn't you. Would you allow the use of force like this inside the United States we do not allow. We've never allowed law enforcement to just decide they're going to kill drug traffickers. Let's. I can't find a distinction morally between what just happened on the high seas versus why not just start happening? Why not just start doing that inside the United States? And as you say, part of the reason behind we don't do things like that is also due process. So to me, it's the same kind of due process that I think triggered it for Joe Rogan as to the deportation of people to seek out prison without actually figuring out, do you have the right person, we have criminal trials to figure out, was that person actually a drug trafficker? And just to put another finer point on it, and inside the United States, if they were convicted by a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, they would not get capital benefit because it's not capital offense. So the road that folks are going down by thinking that this is palatable or smart idea is really atrocious. And just to put one more finer point on it, President Trump has said that he deeply respects what the former president of the Philippines, Duterte had done in executing in the way in which he carried out his drug war, which included extrajudicial killings and the like. And notably, one of the most vocal critics of Duterte was Senator Rubio, writing letters about how should suspend financial assistance to the Philippines because it's extrajudicial killings and that's not how you handle a drug problem. And Darte, where is he now? He's in the Hague because he's been charged with extrajudicial killings by the International Criminal Court.
- [22:06]
A
Do you have any insight as to how the chain of command allowed this to happen or made this happen? I guess, to make it more. More. More accurate. And normally there's obviously, people look at the justification they're being given from above or. And then, of course, lawyers are involved. Did you have any sense of what might have happened in the Pentagon when the White House usually gets involved too? Right.
- [22:30]
B
Yeah, I mean, I'm. This is maybe a strange thing to say. In a way, I'm heartened by the idea that the career lawyers inside the DoD were potentially excluded from the process. I'm heartened by that in the sense that. Not really, but that they. It's very hard for me to imagine those people signing off on this. And it's a better world in which they didn't, in a sense. But there's a line in Charlie Savage's reporting, and Charlie's the best in the business, which Seems to indicate that career lawyers were excluded from the process, which also shows you consciousness of guilt. Why would you exclude the career lawyers from the process? So I, that's part of the. To me, what I meant at the outset about. I really want to know who signed up and this and how that went down the chain.
- [23:21]
A
And one of the articles said that the Pentagon is looking for, you know, debating or looking for the right legal justification for what happened after the fact. Right.
- [23:32]
B
I think that, yeah. The only piece of that, that I'm not sure if it, and if maybe I'm reading it just too literally is that you could say they're looking for the right legal justification to tell the public. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the most charitable thing to be said is maybe they have a legal justification in their heads, but they're thinking, well, what should we tell the public? But I think it sounds like what was reported in the past about the strike against Salmani and. But in the first Trump administration, that it might have been strike first and then trying to come up with a legal justification later.
- [24:08]
A
But now, what, five days later? We were speaking on Sunday midday. There's been no briefing, to my knowledge. I think there hasn't been. Well, we don't. I don't think there's been reported a briefing of the Gang of Eight, the congressional leaders on this, which they are supposed to do. Obviously, there's been this literally one and a quarter page letter to Congress on the war acquired under the War Powers act, which is extremely vague and which seems to imply that the legal justification is the president's Article 2 powers. I mean, there's no other, to my knowledge, there's no actual, like, law cited in it, you know, or anything like that. USC this and that, you know. So anyway, yeah, I mean, and they're not having the public press conferences, as I said earlier, and the military hasn't stepped forward and they're not going on shows to explain what happened after this alleged victory in the, in the war on drugs. So all of that just feels to me as if they're either very worried about. They don't. I mean, they're worried about what they did. They are very, not very confident in the justification, maybe either policy or legal for what they did. I don't know. This is not the way this administration really, to be fair, almost any administration behaves after what they think is a successful and defensible military action that would be popular if it were what they said it was.
- [25:27]
B
Absolutely. And that's also the other piece, you know, just in terms of the various things that haven't happened that would ordinarily happen is the reporting that things on Friday they were scheduled to do a classified briefing of it seemed like the Gang of Eight or members of Congress, and then they canceled it. So that's also not something you do if you think you have a strong case even or a plausible case to be made. And then, and maybe it's because I would imagine that there must be some upset inside the DOD subsequent to the strike of people, especially we're not included in that process, but to be able to satisfy folks that they are not in legal jeopardy. And Jack Murphy, who seems like a very well networked and resourced individual, has said on social media at least that people at southcom are looking for lawyers because they're worried about that. And so maybe that goes into, you know, you got to have a public explanation of what the legal rationale is coming out of the White House and out of the Secretary of Defense that also satisfies an internal audience, not just the public audience and not just US Allies and the like in Congress, but an internal audience that's extremely important, which is members of the Defense Department and the US Military. So I think that's one part of it. And then I think maybe it's just worth my saying one other line or two about what you just touched on, Bill, in the sense that they did not cite any domestic authorization in the War Powers Report. And it seems like they're relying on Article 2 just in case. It's helpful for people to know this. There is no congressional statute that authorizes this. One does not even need to enter. And I even ambivalent in saying the words enter. Any discussion or debate about the 2001 AUMF following September 11. It has nothing to do with this. That was about Al Qaeda and the attack on September 11th. There's no. I can come up with lots of creative legal ideas. There's nothing that can tie that authorization to this or any other authorization I know of. We'll have a piece of just security in all likelihood soon from Marty Liedemann, who is also an expert in this area. There's also a very weak Article 2 authority for them to claim this, because here's the argument. Do you think the president of the United States has the authority to kill people anywhere around the world that he suspects of crimes? He or she just any future president. You think that's an Article 2 authority? Right. So I don't know what they're going to come up with.
- [27:56]
A
Yeah, no, that's really Astonishing. Now, they do say in the letter, I believe under the War Powers act to Congress that this, this is not this, there could be future such actions. I can't remember exactly how they put it, but it's an. They imply. Well, they don't apply. They say they may this is part of an ongoing effort or something like that. So I don't know if that makes it that's even more startling. I guess they just think they have the right to do this repeatedly with no more explanation than they've given so far.
- [28:25]
B
Yeah. In the Wall Street Journal reporting right around Tuesday suggested that there were actually plans to carry out more strikes like this. I think, see that the Journal at the time is one of the two. Both right around then on Tuesday were also saying to carry out more strikes like this this week. And to me, that might actually be a good indication that there is now resistance internally to doing so. But who knows? And if anything, they might be taking this to the next level of escalation with respect to using lethal operations inside or any military operations inside Venezuela itself.
- [29:03]
A
Well, let's talk about that because it seems to be from I can sort of see from their point of view they'll take a little hit if they are taking any hit from, you know, on the questionableness of this attack. But if it's the precursor to a big assault on the Maduro regime with, you know, bombing of sites inside Venezuela or whatever, that'll get sort of forgotten, you know, as the kind of this is the opening operation of a much larger operation. But what is the so A, do you think that's plausible, I guess, just based on the reporting that we've seen. And B, what would the status of that be? I mean, what's the authorization for us? I mean, I guess trend Iraqwa is a designated terrorist organization. Does that give any kind of and well, just talk about what, what is happening with respect to Venezuela as, as a whole.
- [29:50]
B
So I do think that we might be, it looks like there's lots of indications that we might be going down that path. I do wonder about it in the sense that I thought that a large part of the base of support for President Trump's agenda was ending forever wars. And this would be taking on, in terms of counternarcotics wars or drug wars, a potentially completely endless war with amorphous enemies. So just it's very puzzling to say the least. And there's already some fracture coming on with Senator Rand Paul criticizing the vice president on the vessel itself blowing up of the vessel. But that seems to be with the military assets that are in the region seems to be potentially where they go. And then that is also a massive change from just blowing up the vessel. I do think that under international law, the United States government has a pretty good argument as to why blowing up that vessel was not a violation of the UN Charter. If the vessel, for example, was not officially a flagged vessel by the Venezuelan government or any other government, which doesn't seem to be the case, it seems, just seems to be a hapless boat with the members of these individuals on board. So that would not necessarily be a UN charter violation, etc. Going inside Venezuela, taking the fight directly onto Venezuela and Maduro there, we're in a totally different category. And the authorization for that, both domestically in terms of unique Congress or something like that, and internationally is of a very different order. And under international law at least. But I think even just in terms of public justification, what would be said is that there's this direct link between Maduro and Trend. I think that's where they need to go. They need to go that way, at least for international, international law. I think in terms of public justification, and there has been under the Alien Enemies act and the proclamation and the litigation, their argument, which is that Trend Arragua TDA is being directed by Maduro and we know that to be false based on the US Intelligence community and the NIC report that was not leaked but declassified, which we have, we the public. That's not what the US Intelligence community says. They're not acting at the direction of Maduro. So it would be really going to war on the public knowing that the predicate is false. But that, but I do think that things might be heading in that direction.
- [32:23]
A
And, and the President wouldn't even presumably go, would he maybe would go to Congress and say, I want authorization to, you know, it's in our national interest and it's necessary for us to take action. Strike first, as it were, or not strike first. You would say it's in response to everything they've been doing by sending drugs into our country. But it seems hard to see how that's legitimate without getting congressional approval.
- [32:48]
B
Oh, I can't imagine it being legitimate without getting congressional approval. It really, like, it checks off all of the boxes that folks look to, including not just like, is this a use of force in national interest? Which is the one where I was alluding to with, can the President of the United States decide to kill anybody with US military force around the world that he or she suspects of a crime? That's one box that's not satisfied, but the next box that's not satisfied is that really does mean that the United States is going to what the Office of Legal Counsel, Justice Department will call war in the constitutional sense. Like that is going to war with Venezuela. Yeah. Would need congressional approval for that. There's no, there's no way around that. And despite all of the congressional acquiescence to this president coming from the Senate, the Republican side, I can't imagine you'd get that authorization, especially given everything we're talking about here. Seems like it's baked. The intelligence community is saying it's not the situation that they're. The White House is claiming it is. It seems like an endless war. Like what is the goal? Who exactly we're fighting and who, you know, who are the combatants in this war? I mean, do members of Congress really want to sign on to that in terms of the direction that seems like that would be going? That's a political question. But as a legal question, they would need to sign on.
- [34:16]
A
I suppose they might think it's only some bombing, it'll be like the Iranian thing, it'll go well, hope from the US Point of view and no one will get killed and we'll destroy things we say were needed to be destroyed. And maybe that's what they think they can do and I guess say a word about that. I mean, how does it compare to Iran was the most recent use of force by Trump and he seems to have regarded it as a success and the world hasn't gone crazy about the fact that we did it. And, and so why is this different?
- [34:47]
B
Yeah, no, I think that that's, I mean, I think it's not different in the sense that they needed authorization for what they did with Iran as well. And he may have taken away and Stephen Muller and others the lesson that we can just go ahead and do this unilaterally and even if there's some murmuring in Congress, it's, it'll die down the next news cycle. Now that though was a one off military operation against Iran. And like you said, I suppose maybe they think they could do it in a 24 hour bombing where they say we've destroyed all of these drug sites and TDA targets inside Venezuela. We've not gone after the Venezuelan military per se and we're done, we've sent in a signal. I, I could imagine that they would do that and they would say one and done and that's very dangerous. But I mean that's opening an armed attack against another country. So it still means you need congressional authorization for that. But I can imagine that's their political calculation.
- [35:52]
A
Right. And the Iranian regime really was responsible for the deaths of Americans and so forth in a way that it's not I don't I'm the last person to defend Maduro, the Maduro regime or anything, but it's not doesn't seem quite comparable, but I suppose they could think they could justify it all as part of the war. Say, one last thing on the this is relates to their domestic arguments, doesn't it, about the Alien Enemies act and their attempt to sort of unilaterally make Venezuela an enemy, which then allows them to, they thought, they claimed, allowed them to send these Venezuelans off to El Salvador and so forth.
- [36:26]
B
Yeah. So they, I mean, everybody anticipates that the Alien Enemies act case is going to go to the Supreme Court. And it's an open question how the Supreme Court's going to rule. And coincidentally, on the same day as the bombing of the vessel, the most conservative circuit in the United States, the Fifth Circuit, ruled against the Trump administration on the Alien Enemies act, saying that Trinidad Wago is not an organized force invading or engaging in predatory incursions of the United States. And if the and I'd say that the Fifth Circuit is so conservative that it's more conservative than the Roberts court, that's going up to the Supreme Court. And therefore the government, the Trump administration is in trouble legally. Are they in such trouble legally if there's an ongoing war with Venezuela? No. So then they're on a different track. And then they could say, you know, all this talk about trend, kind of organized gang and its linkages to Maduro and whether or not it is engaged in an incursion into the United States, forget it. The United States is in an armed conflict with Venezuela, which would then trigger the Alien Enemies act and in fact, to much broadly, much more broadly encompass any national in Venezuela and then, of course, a subset of Venezuela nationals or TDA members, and we're off to the races. Now, there's some folks who are speculating that that might actually be what's behind some of the mechanizations that are happening in terms of blowing up this boat and the deployment of US Military forces and the potential escalation inside Venezuela. I don't know as to what's wagging the dog. That's the tail wagging the dog or not, but it certainly would change the composure of the administration's legal arguments getting up to the Supreme Court in a way that would be much more favorable to the administration. And right now that looks like there's a darn good likelihood they're going to lose at the Supreme Court. One of their signature policies will be overturned.
- [38:29]
A
Yeah. Interesting. And also the, the, I think there are reports now that the forthcoming national security strategy being drafted by the Trump administration, contrary to all the talk about China for years and during the campaign and the bluster, if I could say, about how we're taking on China, is now going to pull back from confronting both China and Putin's Russia and be focused on the Western Hemisphere. Kind of a more, you might say, version of America First.
- [38:56]
B
America first.
- [38:56]
A
Actually wasn't that bellicose even to the Western Hemisphere. I mean, the 1940America First. But there have been, there's a kind of Jacksonian, we're going to, we're not going to, we're going to avoid all these wars far away, but we're going to throw our weight around here. And that would be, I mean, consistent, I suppose, with the rhetoric about Panama and sort of Greenland, depending on where you think that, what hemisphere that's in, and consistent with a certain kind of authoritarian, if I could say, what's what I'm looking for, you know, sort of precedent elsewhere in the world. You, you bully the weak neighbors. You don't actually stand up to the difficult cases abroad. So I'm a little more, I originally discounted the talk about, oh, come on, we're gonna bomb that as well. That just seems crazy. But I guess I'm now a little, I don't know, I feel like that's not something that could be ruled out.
- [39:44]
B
Yeah. And it does seem Putin esque in a sense of thinking about the sphere of influence around the United States and relationships with how that has been thought of in terms of Soviet and Russian terms. And it's also the oddity of turning away from China as a threat. When Casper tells on the Joe Rogan show talking about how much China is sending fentanyl into the United States, it just doesn't seem like the most rational set of policy choices to keep the country safe from true adversaries.
- [40:22]
A
No, but maybe that's not the fundamental calculation here. Terrible. Anything we haven't covered that people should be looking for. I'm giving you a little. What do you think happens in the next days and week or two? Do they really, does Congress have, I mean, can they just get away with the current level of lack of clarity and transparency about anything that's happened?
- [40:44]
B
I don't think they can outrun that forever. So there needs to at least be briefings that would be secret. But I also can imagine that there will be multiple opportunities for members of the military, including the chair of the Jordan Chiefs of Staff, to appear before Congress in which usually their testimony is can is candid. And so I do think there are opportunities for both Congress and then the American public to actually find out what happened here. I do think if the shoe drops, that these 11 individuals were not, in fact, drug smuggling, that I think would be a big change in the national conversation. So I'm looking to see what happens with any information that comes about on that, and that maybe will come through investigative reporting and the like, because there's also going to be enough disgruntled individuals to maybe push that information out to the public if that, if it's there, if that's, if that's the case. And so those are the kinds of things that I'm looking for. And the biggest one is like, are there going to be another set of series of these kinds of attacks and as has been indicated, was the intent of the White House. So I think if we see that that doesn't occur, then maybe there really is an opportunity here for a realignment and that there's resistance hopefully going on inside the Defense Department against taking their own people down this path.
- [42:15]
A
Yeah, well, that's really something to watch for and that's so interesting. Ryan, thanks so much. It's been very helpful, very clarifying of an unclear situation. But I think we now know how to think about it at least and what to look for in the days and weeks ahead. So, Ryan Goodman, thank you for joining me today.
- [42:32]
B
Thank you. I really appreciate the conversation.
- [42:34]
A
And thank you all for joining us on Bulwark on Sunday.