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Last week, the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado made a daring escape from her home country to Norway, where she was honored as winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. The team that extracted her had several worries—including the risk that American forces in the Caribbean would strike the boats used in the operation, members told The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
Luckily, Machado avoided F-16s and drones on her way to Oslo, but the outcome her rescuers feared would have been remarkable: the man who campaigned frantically to win the Nobel Peace Prize inadvertently killing the woman who did, as part of a likely illegal series of boat strikes that may climax with a land war in South America.
Yesterday, Trump—who has deemed himself the “peace president”—escalated his belligerence against Venezuela, announcing a blockade of sanctioned oil tankers and demanding that the government “return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” This is difficult to parse, but the Trump aide Stephen Miller suggests that it refers to past nationalization of the petroleum industry. In any case, a blockade could be an act of war under international law.
This past Friday, Trump said the United States would launch land strikes within Latin America. “We knocked out 96 percent of the drugs coming in by water, and now we’re starting by land, and by land is a lot easier, and that’s going to start happening,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Friday. The 96 percent mark is unrealistic and backed by no evidence, as is the notion that land wars are easier than drone strikes at sea.
Congress has neither authorized nor been asked to authorize these actions. The White House has relied on the tortured argument that because it has deemed that U.S. troops are not in active danger, the law doesn’t apply. Nor is it clear what the strategic rationale for such a strike on sovereign countries would be—much less the legal justification. (The administration insists its boat strikes are legal, but officials have been vague about their legal arguments and experts disagree.) Trump has claimed that drug interdiction is a goal, and said Friday that strikes might hit countries other than Venezuela.
But he has also been moving to force Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of power, as White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles told Vanity Fair in an article published this week. Although Trump claims that Maduro is a drug kingpin, American intelligence assessments contradict him, and my Atlantic colleagues have reported that the administration’s real goal is to gain access to oil and rare earth minerals. This apparent drift toward a 19th-century-style imperialist war is notable for a president who ran in 2016 criticizing both parties’ embrace of foreign military interventions. (Trump has said for years, however, that the U.S. should have taken Iraq’s oil—whatever that means.)
In the places where Trump is not on the verge of starting a new war, some of the many conflicts he claims to have resolved stubbornly refuse to stop. On the border between Thailand and Cambodia, both countries continue to fight, part of hostilities that have killed at least two dozen people and forced half a million to flee. Although Trump announced a cease-fire this past Friday, both governments said no such agreement has been struck.
In Africa, fighting also persists between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and a rebel group understood to be backed by neighboring Rwanda. In that case, Trump did manage to bring together the leaders of the DRC and Rwanda for a ceremony two weeks ago. The problem is that the peace hasn’t held; instead the rebel group has continued fighting. Secretary of State Marco Rubio described its actions as “a clear violation” of the cease-fire. A cease-fire in Gaza, achieved this fall, is also very tenuous. Israeli air strikes have continued sporadically, and Palestinian officials have said that at least 391 Palestinians have been killed since the agreement. The Israeli and U.S. governments sometimes question those figures, but Axios reports that the White House scolded the Israeli government for a strike over the weekend, which it said was a violation of the cease-fire.
Meanwhile, an end to the war in Ukraine, which Trump seems to want badly, remains elusive. On Monday, American officials said that the United States, Europe, and Ukraine have agreed to security guarantees for Ukraine, though it’s not clear whether Russia will accept the cease-fire plan. The larger problem is still land: As part of a deal, Trump is reportedly pressuring Ukraine to surrender territory that Russia has not managed to capture through its yearslong, grinding war of aggression involving frequent war crimes. For obvious reasons, that’s a nonstarter for Ukraine. But Russia—which knows that Trump likes and often caves to President Vladimir Putin—shows little interest in concessions.
There’s no shame in a president failing to resolve every conflict around the globe. Trump shouldn’t be expected to find solutions that have eluded previous leaders or bedeviled the world for decades—though he should be celebrated if he does; the Abraham Accords and the Gaza cease-fire are positive achievements. The problem is claiming to have resolved conflicts that aren’t over and announcing agreements that aren’t real. Trump doesn’t want to do the work, but he still wants the world to recognize his putative achievements with a Nobel Peace Prize. That honor seems out of reach barring some major developments, but at least he’s got the FIFA Peace Prize.
Related:
- Trump knows what he wants, just not how to get there.
- What explains Trump’s aggression toward Venezuela? Who knows.
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
- $1,776 checks for the military
- Americans can’t believe how rich they are.
- Arash Azizi: “Nobody knows what to do about the future.”
Today’s News
- A small group of House Republicans joined Democrats to pass a discharge petition that would force a vote early next year on extending expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies. The measure is not expected to reach the floor before December 31, when the subsidies are set to expire for about 22 million people.
- Former Special Counsel Jack Smith told lawmakers in a closed-door hearing that his team had found “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that President Donald Trump had “engaged in a criminal scheme” to overturn the 2020 election and that Trump had “repeatedly tried to obstruct justice” in the classified-documents case.
- Trump ordered a “total and complete blockade” of all sanctioned oil tankers moving in or out of Venezuela and declared President Nicolás Maduro’s government a foreign terrorist organization in a Truth Social post last night.
Evening Read
Matteo de Mayda for The Atlantic
Henry James’s Venice Is Still Here
By Anne Applebaum
In a quiet, almost empty part of Venice stands a Renaissance palazzo with an unusually large garden. The garden is invisible from the outside, blocked by a high brick wall that I recognized when I saw it. In The Aspern Papers, a novella serialized in The Atlantic in 1888, Henry James lets the narrator, a literary scholar whose name we never learn, describe the wall. “It was figured over with the patches that please a painter, repaired breaches, crumblings of plaster, extrusions of brick that had turned pink with time,” he writes. “It suddenly occurred to me that if it did belong to the house I had my pretext” …
I arrived in Venice with a similar goal: to get access to that same garden.
Read the full article.
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Culture Break
Illustration by Shawna X
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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