Trump pulls international relations back to the 1980s with a new slush fund and slushy rationale

The Trump Administration has abandoned the standards of international law and is considering military action that would destroy the nation’s most important alliances.

Hi folks. We wrote this about a month ago, but when the DHS violence in Minnesota erupted I felt the right thing to do was to hold onto this article for a few days. That turned into a few weeks. By now the mainstream media has long forgotten about the Trump Administration’s military ambitions, but we haven’t. Apologies for the delay in getting this out. —Josh

The U.S. attack on Venezuela and seizure of the country’s president Nicolás Maduro and his wife earlier this year, and the overt threats to take over Greenland, plunged American foreign policy back into the force-based era that predated the current international legal order the U.S. largely built after World War II.

As with the strikes on civilian vessels leaving Venezuela suspected of transporting illegal drugs, the Trump Administration justified the attack on Venezuelan territory as an act of national self defense against “narco-terrorism,” a term with no definition or standing in American law. It also claims the operation, for which special forces units trained for months, was a law enforcement action rather than a military strike.

The Administration also considers itself unbound by domestic law or constitutional limits on its power to wage war. It violated the War Powers Resolution by informing Congress only after the attack had begun. Secretary of State/National Security Advisor Marco Rubio didn’t even alert his former colleagues on the Senate Intelligence and Foreign Relations Committees of the possibility of direct action.

Pulling a legal justification from the 1980s

The White House seemingly relied on a 1989 internal opinion written by would-be Trump Attorney General William Barr, when he was with the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, to justify the arrest and rendition of Maduro. Barr had concluded the president has an “inherent constitutional authority” to send the FBI to arrest individuals breaking U.S. law “even if those actions contravene international law.” Barr was writing to justify the American arrest of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega after a military invasion of the country in 1989. State Department lawyers at the time disagreed, stating such arrests violated other nations’ territorial integrity.

In that case, the George H.W. Bush Administration had stronger grounds to claim the action was being taken in self-defense and in accordance with the UN Charter. General Noriega had overthrown a popularly-elected government with a military coup, which then requested American assistance in exile. The general persuaded the Panamanian legislature to declare open conflict with the U.S., which still maintained a military presence in the country to help secure the Panama Canal. Noriega’s forces shot and killed one American military officer and wounded another, then threatened to attack the 35,000 American civilians living in Panama City. Venezuela’s Maduro, meanwhile, had not made any hostile acts toward the United States, even though the Trump Administration characterizes its alleged support for drug running as such.

Trump gets a slush fund

Trump himself undermined the national security justifications for the Venezuela attack by asserting the U.S. would regain control of the country’s long-nationalized petroleum reserves which are considered the largest in the world. On January 9, Trump issued an executive order declaring the risk of any court or creditor attempt to seize the reserves would constitute a national emergency and therefore impermissible. Revenue from Venezuelan oil sales will be deposited in foreign government deposit funds at the U.S. Treasury, which foreign governments use to make payments to the U.S. Government. The administration would decide how much of the money would return to Venezuela. But it was reported on January 14 that some of the $500 million received in the first sale of Venezuelan oil was deposited in an account in Qatar, essentially a slush fund.

Taking Greenland for military bases we already have

Meanwhile, Trump has fixated once again on acquiring the Danish territory of Greenland. He posted on social media, after speaking with the foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland, that anything less than American control would be “unacceptable.” His rhetoric led Denmark and Sweden to deploy military forces to Greenland.

Through a 1951 treaty that built off Danish-American military cooperation during World War II, the U.S. has very broad access to Greenland for self defense already. An update of the agreement allows the U.S. to build military installations on Greenland, as Trump wishes to do for missile defense, simply by asking Copenhagen. U.S. Space Force currently operates a ballistic missile early warning station at an air base the US constructed in the early 1950s. Denmark granted some self-rule rights to the territory in 2009, but that agreement did not include military affairs. All six of its political parties support its independence at some point in the future.

Trump first fixated on Greenland in his first term, when he became interested in adding it to American territory because of its large size. Given the unbridled personalist turn to his foreign policy, now turned to action in the Caribbean, he may decide to act without consideration of the dire consequences of doing so.