Last May, President Donald Trump decried “nation-builders” who, he claimed, “wrecked far more nations than they built.” Just eight months later, he dispatched the U.S. military to capture the dictatorial president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, and declared: “We are going to run the country.” The invasion of Venezuela was presaged by the Trump administration’s deliberate dismantling of civilian foreign policy tools and contempt for international order. Absent these capabilities and the support of the international community, the Trump administration has few tools but the use of force to address threats, real and imagined. While some of Trump’s allies, disillusioned by the failures of the so-called “forever wars,” consider Trump’s about-face on military adventurism a betrayal, it was neither an anomaly nor surprising. Nor has the president’s increasing resort to military force been judicious or in the national interest. Instead, the interventions in Venezuela and other countries reflect a pernicious militarism and imperialism at heart of President Trump’s foreign policy.
Whatever the purported rationale, Trump’s appetite for military action has not been confined to Venezuela. Over just the past year, the president has also ordered attacks in Iran, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and Nigeria, as well as in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. Administration officials argue that these strikes were limited in time and scope. Nevertheless, since the original strikes, Trump has threatened to repeat attacks on several of these countries. With the president continuing to greedily eye Greenland and the Panama Canal, others could join the list in the new year.
The administration’s reliance on military action over civil foreign policy tools reflects a costly and dangerous misallocation of resources
As experts on Venezuela and Latin America have argued persuasively, Venezuela does not pose a national security threat to the United States that justifies Trump’s use of force. Of course, the United States has legitimate interests in addressing trafficking of cocaine and irregular migration flows of Venezuelans fleeing the conditions Maduro created, among other issues. These U.S. objectives are, however, best advanced through the use of civilian means. This is not to question the skill, dedication, or tactical excellence of the U.S. soldiers who carried out the operation to seize Maduro, but rather to underscore that civilian national security tools are often cheaper and more efficient.
Civilian foreign policy approaches that rely on diplomacy, negotiations, and aid are less expensive than their military substitutes. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, the post-9/11 wars cost the United States a total of $8 trillion, with the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) accounting for 56 percent of spending ($4.5 trillion) in contrast to the U.S. Department of State’s 2.4 percent of spending ($189 billion). This trend has continued, with the DOD’s fiscal year 2025 budget of $860.1 billion exceeding the combined $59.8 billion budgets of the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) more than 14 times over. (see Figure 1) Indeed, two of the three major armed services branches—the Navy and Air Force—each spend approximately as much, if not more, on weapons procurement annually as the entire State Department budget. (see Figure 2)
The human costs of using military tools are also greater, not just for the target country but for the United States as well. While Americans from a variety of agencies played critical roles and were affected by the post-9/11 wars, human costs disproportionately fell on the military. Brown estimates that 1.9 million to 3 million service members were deployed in the wars, incurring more than 7,000 combat deaths and at least four times that number in suicides.
This is not to suggest that civilian tools are a panacea or appropriate in all contexts. The use of military force has been, and will remain, an indispensable tool to protect the American people and advance U.S. interests. Continued investment in the U.S. armed services is vital to national welfare. All else being equal, however, both the intended and unintended consequences of a militarized foreign policy tend to be more severe than a civilian one. Given this reality, military action should only be authorized after careful consideration of the likely outcomes, risks, and legal authorities—and with the support of the American public who will bear the costs.
As a matter of responsible statecraft, any government facing imperfect choices should seek to multiply its options, particularly its most efficient. Instead, President Trump has irresponsibly narrowed them, preserving only the costliest. His administration spent the first six months of 2025 systematically destroying the civilian national security tools that could have been of utility in Venezuela. For example, President Trump closed USAID—an agency responsible for administering a wide array of programs, including some relevant to counternarcotics and migration—and eliminated 3,000 positions at the Department of State.
Not content to jettison employees, Trump is also proposing that U.S. foreign assistance funding be slashed by $24.4 billion from FY 25 to FY 26, cutting total American aid by more than half. (see Figure 3) By contrast, Trump is seeking as much as $1.5 trillion in the DOD’s FY 27 budget to fund projects of dubious value, such as the Golden Dome missile defense project that has drawn comparisons to President Ronald Reagan’s failed Strategic Defense Initiative. This marks an increase of more than $600 billion over the FY 25 DOD budget, or roughly the cost of funding the State Department for an entire decade. And in what can best be described as a display of bureaucratic demolition, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s dual appointment as acting national security adviser sidelined the State Department and the National Security Council staff in one fell swoop. It is now possible to count the number of American diplomats with any authority inside the administration on a single hand, literally.
The same pattern is observed in international organizations, where President Trump has eroded the strength of institutions designed to combat the very problems he invoked to justify the invasion of Venezuela. His administration has effectively declared war on the International Criminal Court, undermining the credibility of any U.S. action purportedly taken on legal grounds. Meanwhile, Trump’s withdrawal from the U.N. Human Rights Council forfeited an opportunity to mobilize pressure on the Maduro regime’s human rights violations. And the administration froze most funding for the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime while using sessions of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs to rail against “woke” hiring practices. Similarly, Trump has curtailed support for the International Organization for Migration.
President Trump’s foreign policy will continue to be shaped by his militarist vision
There is, unfortunately, good reason to believe that the president’s reliance on force will only grow. With limited American casualties, eye-catching headlines and videos, and tactical success, Trump may draw the conclusion that that the use of force is easy and cheap. One gets the impression he could be trapped in a Tom Clancy novel, in which a small number of technologically superior and better-trained U.S. soldiers always score strategic victories. Many U.S. service members are the first to acknowledge that is a deadly illusion, but Secretary of War Pete Hegseth apparently never received that memo, as evidenced by his focus on “lethality.”
More fundamentally, and contrary to the perception created by Trump’s first term, this is really how the president is as a leader. The confluence of President Trump’s disdain for civilian foreign policy, worship of military prowess, and covetousness for land and resources paints the picture of a classic militarist—and imperialist. It appears that the president enjoys dominating others and bending them to his will. This is a far cry from the millions of Americans who served this country in uniform during World War II not because they enjoyed hurting or killing others but because they loved their family and friends.
Trump’s actions in Venezuela do not reflect a solemn responsibility to protect Americans but an opportunistic seizure of oil wealth. Likewise, the president’s focus on acquiring Greenland is not motivated by security but instead by what can be characterized as an obsession with ownership—in other words, control and dominance.
See also
Conclusion
The United States is past the point where its citizens can realistically expect this administration to shift course from the militaristic approach it has employed. If this alarming trajectory is to be stopped, there is only one possibility: a Congress willing to reassert its constitutional authority over matters of war and peace. Success depends on a bipartisan, bicameral effort that can withstand Trump’s methods of divide-and-conquer.
With only one-third of Americans in support of the Venezuela intervention, this should be exactly the type of issue that can attract cross-aisle support, as demonstrated by the successful votes for Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA)’s War Powers resolution on Venezuela in the Senate before Trumps’s threats against Republican senators reversed the outcome. Congress should expand its sights to include other possible targets of aggression, including Panama, Greenland, and Colombia. As the United States deals with the fallout from this ill-advised military adventure, the time has come to begin reestablishing Congress as a coequal branch of government, bill by bill and vote by vote.