‘Jackassery’: Former Senior National Security Officials Rip Trump’s Attack On Venezuela
HuffPost
“The worry that we all have ... is the president, the man himself, who is sinking deeper into a dementia of some sort,” said a former senior CIA executive.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s military action in Venezuela is further isolating the United States from the rest of the world, was carried out with no strategy on next steps, threatens to destabilize Latin America and raises concerns about the president’s mental decline, warned a group of former senior national security officials.
In a Tuesday call with reporters, veteran former CIA and foreign policy officials struggled to convey the level of ineptitude and recklessness they see in Trump’s decision last week to send U.S. forces into Venezuela in the middle of the night to capture President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. Both are now in New York City, facing charges brought by the U.S. government.
“There’s no process in our foreign policy anymore,” said Luis Moreno, a former ambassador to Jamaica and former foreign policy official with years of experience in the Caribbean. “We’re doing foreign policy, and defense policy to a certain extent, via tweet at 3 o’clock in the morning, and everyone has to respond to that.”
Because Trump didn’t seek congressional authorization ahead of the military attack, which is required by the Constitution, Republican and Democratic foreign policy leaders on Capitol Hill are in the dark on what the U.S. is doing in Venezuela, a country of 28 million people who have already endured decades of political repression and corruption.
The Trump administration has yet to lay out a coherent plan for what happens now. Trump has claimed the U.S. will now ”run” Venezuela and be “very much involved” in taking the country’s oil. Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to walk that back, saying the U.S. is overseeing the “direction” of the country. Vice President JD Vance said the raid was about “narcoterrorists,” while Rubio linked it to Iran and Hezbollah.
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