In January 2023, J. D. Vance had just arrived in the Senate. One of the first things he did was to pen an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal endorsing Donald Trump for the 2024 presidential nomination. His primary argument was that Trump, “started no wars despite enormous pressure from his own party and even members of his own administration.” This is a “low bar,” he granted, but “that’s a reflection of the hawkishness of Mr. Trump’s predecessors and the foreign-policy establishment they slavishly followed.”

In January 2026, Vance is vice president of the United States, and Trump has carried out regime change in Venezuela. At a press conference this morning, Trump announced an open-ended commitment by the United States to “run Venezuela” until a regime more to our liking could be installed. Vice President Vance took to social media to crow about Trump’s toughness and resolve.

The president offered multiple off ramps, but was very clear throughout this process: the drug trafficking must stop, and the stolen oil must be returned to the United States. Maduro is the newest person to find out that President Trump means what he says.

Kudos to our brave… pic.twitter.com/b1fqkdbB4x

— JD Vance (@JDVance) January 3, 2026

In a follow-up post, he reiterated the accusation of “narco-terrorism” that the Trump/Vance administration spent much of last year trying to push (though with remarkably little public buy-in). What’s truly remarkable, though, is that the vice president is openly and unabashedly saying that part of the casus belli for regime change is reversing the Venezuelan state’s nationalization of the country’s oil industry in 1976, decades before Nicolás Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez was first elected to office.

When George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, many things were the same as they are now. Then, too, the regime being toppled was accused of ties with “terrorism” on the basis of extremely dubious evidence. Then, too, left-wing antiwar protesters faulted a Republican president for waging a “war for oil.”

But the differences are as striking as the similarities. In 2003, those protesters were routinely told they were unserious for tying Bush’s motives to Iraq’s oil reserves. Vice President Dick Cheney wasn’t publicly agreeing with them. And in 2003, the “terrorists” Saddam Hussein was spuriously accused of connections with were al-Qaeda. In 2026, it refers to drug cartels. The new line of scrimmage is that, since Americans die of drug overdoses, running drugs amounts to killing Americans. Taken literally, this would mean that every street corner drug dealer could be treated as a War on Terror “enemy combatant.” In this case, though, Trump and Vance don’t seem to care much if anyone even takes the charge seriously. It’s a kind of placeholder, something to say because they need to say something.

The “cartel” that Maduro is supposed to lead is Cartel de los Soles (“Cartel of the Suns”). The problem is that this isn’t actually the name of a drug cartel. It’s a colloquial term that journalists and think tankers started using in the 1990s, before Chávez even came to office, to describe allegations that drug-running was common in the Venezuelan military. The phrase is a play on the sun insignias on the uniforms of Venezuelan military officers. Even the people who coined the phrase weren’t alleging the existence of a literal, hierarchically organized cartel with a single leader. And the connection to overdose deaths is even stranger. A tiny fraction of the cocaine in the United States seems to come from Venezuela, and apparently none of the fentanyl that actually drives overdose deaths.

Again, though, this is a paper-thin justification. There’s little effort to obscure the reality that this is a raw assertion of American power in part of the world that interventionists have always regarded as “our” right and proper sphere of influence.

The ambition of powerful hawks in the Trump administration like Secretary of State Marco Rubio isn’t just regime change in one country. Rather, like predecessors such as the Dulles brothers who carried out regime change in Guatemala in 1954, or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who bragged about helping overthrow Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, it’s the eradication of the entire Latin American left, from social democrats in Brazil to communists in Cuba.

In 2003, there was a sustained and serious effort to convince the American public that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction that he might decide to share with al-Qaeda. In 2025, the effort to convince anyone that Venezuela needed to be conquered to stop “narco-terrorism” causing overdose deaths felt half-hearted. Nor does it seem to have convinced very many Americans. At the end of last month, an Economist/YouGov poll found that only 22 percent of respondents “support the U.S. using military force to overthrow Maduro.” Instead of spending six more months trying to manufacture consent for the operation, the Trump administration decided to just go ahead and do it. The overwhelming impression given by the pronouncements of Trump, Vance, and Rubio is more like, “We’re doing this because we can. Who’s going to stop us?”

Remember that, if American service members start coming home from Caracas in flag-draped coffins. Trump and Vance didn’t even try to sell this as a war of necessity. They just did it because they could.