Democrats Must Oppose Trump’s War on Venezuela

Pity the nation where John Yoo is the voice of reason.

Yoo, of course, is one of the most notorious of the many national security ghouls who served in the George W. Bush administration, where he used his legal expertise to write in 2002 the so-called “torture memos” that sought to justify the use of waterboarding and other violations of the Geneva Convention in the name of the Global War on Terror. This is not someone typically concerned about following the law.

Yet in 2025 Yoo has emerged as a critic of one of Donald Trump’s most brazenly illegal foreign policy acts: his decision to blow up boats in South American waters on the grounds that they are being run by Venezuelan drug cartels.

No evidence has been provided to support these claims—but even if there were such evidence, the United States is not at war with Venezuela, or with drug cartels, or with any of the 14 people killed in these attacks. And there is no proof that the boats posed an imminent threat to any American. Bombing the boats and killing all those on board is an act of murder, plain and simple.

Even someone with Yoo’s rotted moral compass can see that. Writing in The Washington Post on September 23, Yoo warned that “these attacks risk crossing the line between crime-fighting and war.” He added that “a broad, amorphous military campaign against the illegal drug trade” would “would violate American law and the Constitution.” He speculated that “the use of military force against the cartels may plunge the U.S. into a war against Venezuela” which would also create “difficult problems.”

These mild cautionary words hardly amount to a ringing expression of anti-war and anti-imperialist sentiment. Yet they are much more pointed than anything said by congressional Republicans (who have predictably lined up behind Trump, with only the mildest expression of even a desire for oversight). Even more scandalously, they are harsher than the comments of most congressional Democrats.

Opposing illegal acts of murder might seem like an obvious move for an opposition party. But Democrats, like they do so often, have preemptively conceded defeat.

On September 18, Politico reported, “Democrats have a dilemma as they oppose President DONALD TRUMP’s attacks on alleged drug trafficking vessels from Venezuela: Hold the military accountable for the strikes without looking like they’re defending cartels.” And on September 29, journalist Aída Chávez tweeted, “A senior Dem staffer is discouraging Democrats from coming out against regime change in Venezuela, congressional sources tell me. The staffer is using the Bush-era Iraq line, arguing that opposing Trump/Rubio’s regime change amounts to supporting Maduro.”

This Democratic staffer clearly hasn’t reflected on the simple fact that the “Bush-era line” conflating opposition to war with support for a dictator had the damaging effect of aligning senior party leaders (including Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Joe Biden) with a disastrous war and undermining the ability of the party to be an effective opposition—or that Democrats started recovering politically only when they took a firmer stance against the Iraq fiasco.

The stranglehold that militarism has on the Democrats can be seen in the comments of Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, a “former” CIA analyst who remains an ally of the national security state. Slotkin told Politico, “We have uniformed military asking their chain of command for letters that ensure that they don’t have personal liability for any illegal action in these operations. I have no problem going after drug traffickers.” In other words, Slotkin’s goal is not to stop Trump’s bombing campaign and possible rush to war with Venezuela but to simply make sure it follows proper legal protocol.