The U.S. assault on Venezuela confirms a long-standing historical pattern: the war on drugs has never ranked high in the actual hierarchy of U.S. foreign-policy priorities. It certainly does not matter in the Venezuelan case. Venezuela is a relatively minor player in global cocaine trafficking, much of which flows to Europe and Brazil rather than to the United States. If drug enforcement were the operative concern, Venezuela would barely register.

What makes this especially jarring is Trump’s pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president convicted in a U.S. court on narco-trafficking charges. Ostensibly justified as a gesture toward political stabilization, the pardon functioned more directly as an intervention in Honduran electoral politics. Read together, the release of Hernández and the pursuit of Maduro underscore a deeper pattern: law enforcement is no longer a constraint on executive power but a tool for advancing personalist rule.

Law has become politically fungible. This tendency was already visible during the first Trump administration; in the second, it has become the governing motif. As Bruce Green, a former federal prosecutor and professor of legal ethics at Fordham Law School, observes:

Trump thinks he can use federal criminal prosecutions for any purpose, which is to say to promote his foreign policy views, to promote his vendettas, to promote his self-interest and to promote his perceived political interests.

What this marks is a moment in which law collapses into movement. Law........

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