He ran as an anti-war candidate. It turns out he doesn't have any convictions at all

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Donald Trump’s weekend airstrikes and the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro were not only a violation of Venezuelan sovereignty, they were a violation of the president’s long-standing opposition to unnecessary war and American military adventurism.

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In October, the U.S. president made no effort to hide the fact that he was miffed over the Nobel committee’s decision to award the Peace Prize to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, rather than himself. Less than three months later, Trump threw his pacifist bona fides out the window, attacking Venezuela and shunning its democratically elected opposition.

It has always been hard to find any sort of ideological consistency in the president’s words or deeds, but he has been steadfast throughout his two terms in his opposition to war, and it seemed genuine. At the end of his first term, in 2020, he boasted that, “We are ending the era of endless wars.” And during his inauguration in January, he said his success would be measured “by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”

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Perhaps his weekend attack on Venezuela can be chalked up to pragmatism. Trump has a history of backing up his bids for peace with the threat of force, and had the moral fortitude to assist Israel in bombing Iran’s nuclear sites in the spring, sending a warning to dictators around the world that they should think twice before calling his bluffs.

But Venezuela is not Iran. It is not developing nuclear weapons or sponsoring global terrorism. The Bolivarian regime — under former president Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro —

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