Review by Bill Doughty
In the days following Trump’s military attack on Venezuela, he threatened Colombia and its president, described Cuba as “ready to fall” and saber-rattled about our southernmost neighbor: “You have to do something with Mexico,” Trump said. “We’re going to have to do something. He also restated his desire to take control of Greenland. Canada is still on his wish-list, as well.
Has "America First" become The Americas first?
The current commander-in-chief who promised an “America First” non-interventionist foreign policy started in Venezuela what he calls the biggest military intervention since the Second World War:
On Jan. 3, 2026, at a Mar-a-Lago press conference, Trump said, “This is big stuff. We appreciate you being here. Late last night and early today, at my direction, the United States Armed Forces conducted an extraordinary military operation in the capital of Venezuela. Overwhelming American military power, air, land, and sea was used to launch a spectacular assault, and it was an assault like people have not seen since World War II.”
In less than one full year in office Trump has bombed Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Iran, Nigeria, and Venezuela. And he has deployed the military into U.S. cities, something the founders and framers of the Constitution, not to mention historians, would call an abuse of power.
Heady with what seems like an easy win against Venezuela thanks to the skill of the military, Trump sees has power only growing, especially his power over the armed forces.
“Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power” by Rachel Maddow (Crown Random House, 2012) examines a history of military interventions including in Vietnam, Central and South America, and the Middle East. Maddow outlines the views of founders who foresaw the misuse and abuse of the military by power-hungry or misguided leaders.
For example, the book opens with an excerpt by James Madison, who warned that war leads to more debts, taxes, “inequality of fortunes and the opportunities of fraud,” and “degeneracy.” This is from Madison’s “Political Observations” of April 20, 1795:
“Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.
War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes and the opportunities of fraud growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could reserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Those truths are well established. They are read in every page which records the progression from a less arbitrary to a more arbitrary government, or the transition from a popular government to an aristocracy or a monarchy."
Maddow presents the views of various framers of the Constitution as well as the words of seminal American leaders such as President Lincoln. Maddow writes:
“The framers had been voluble in their rationale for and in their defense of Article 1, Section 8. ‘The Constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates,’ wrote James Madison, ‘that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the Legislature." Even that suspected monarchist Alexander Hamilton saw the wisdom of keeping the power to declare war out of the hands of a single executive. Madison, Hamilton, and their fellow framers were building structural barriers against what they saw as the darker aspects of human nature. The lures to war-personal hatreds, political glory, material spoils, and the simple atavistic enthusiasm for violence –– might be too enticing for one man to resist, and might be too easy to promote ‘by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory,’ as a later congressman, Abraham Lincoln, put it, ‘that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood –– that serpent's eye that charms to destroy.’”
“Drift” spotlights the Executive branch’s circumvention of the Constitution and Congress by Presidents Johnson, Reagan, Clinton, Bush 1 and Bush 2, among others. This never-more-relevant book includes the history of the murky “unified executive theory,” which ostensibly gives the president unfettered power; the theory Reagan employed in his arms-for-hostages scheme in the Iran-Contra scandal.
We read about misadventures in Vietnam, Grenada, Iraq, and Afghanistan and circumstances where military service members are put in positions of carrying out unlawful orders or otherwise violating international rules of law and rules of war.
Maddow wrote the book three years before Trump first declared his candidacy for the presidency, so there is no mention of the 45th and 47th commander in chief.
There is, however, a prescient quote about Reagan by then-Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, who pushed Congress to invoke the War Powers Act that forced the troops to leave Grenada after 60 days without congressional approval.U.S. Marine Barracks, Beirut
O’Neill recognized that Reagan went to war in Grenada as a stain-remover in the post-Vietnam era and in the wake of the October 23, 1983, suicide bombing of the U.S. Marine Barracks in Beirut, Lebanon (which killed 241 service members, mostly Marines and Navy Corpsmen).
O’Neill decried Reagan’s invasion of Grenada. “You can’t justify any government, whether it’s Russia or the United States, trampling on another nation,” he said to New York Times reporter Scotty Reston. “I’m worried about the effects of this.”
Maddow then captures more of what Tip O’Neill told Reston about Reagan:
“And that was just on policy; then O'Neill got personal: ‘He only works three and a half hours a day. He doesn't do his homework. He doesn't read his briefing papers. It's sinful that this man is President of the United States. He lacks the knowledge that he should have, on every sphere, whether it's the domestic or whether it's the international sphere.’ It was time for Reagan to pack it in and take Nancy back home where she could be the ‘Queen of Beverly Hills,’ he told Reston. Damn.”
O’Neill was angry that Reagan acted unilaterally and against the Constitution. The War Powers Resolution compels the president to consult Congress and “secure specific statutory authority for the war” unless there is a “national emergency created by an attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”
Wyoming Representative at the time, Dick Cheney, former chief of staff to President Gerald Ford and future future VP to President George W. Bush, defended Reagan’s use of executive power (including in Lebanon), as did other republicans –– just as republicans in Congress publicly defend most of Trump’s actions and criticize the Biden Administration's withdrawal from Afghanistan and loss of 13 U.S. service members.
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| Rachel Maddow interviews International Security Assistance Force Command Sgt. Maj. Michael T. Hall on "The Rachel Maddow Show," July 8, 2010. (DVIDS) |
Trump ridiculed the Bush administration’s decision to not claim Iraq’s oil reserves after the administration removed Saddam Hussein from power. Now, Trump claims Venezuela’s oil and says he, himself, runs the South American country and will support rebuilding the oil infrastructure there for American oil corporations.
Maddow’s epilogue in “Drift” is titled “You Build It, You Own It,” a variant of the Powell Doctrine and Pottery Barn adage, “you break it, you buy it.’”
But the key point is saved for last:
“And finally, there's the Gordian knot of executive power. It needs a sword something fierce. The glory of war success will always attach itself to the president, so presidents are always going to be prey to the temptation to make war. That's a generic truth of power, and all the more reason to take decision making about war out of the hands of the executive. It is not one man's responsibility. The ‘imperial presidency’ malarkey that was invented to save Ronald Reagan's neck in Iran-Contra, and that played as high art throughout the career of Richard Cheney, is a radical departure from previous views of presidential power, and it should be taught and understood that way. This isn't a partisan thing –– constitutionalists left and right have equal reason to worry over the lost constraint on the executive. Republicans and Democrats alike have options to vote people into Congress who are determined to stop with the chickenshittery and assert the legislature’s constitutional prerogatives on war and peace. It would make a difference and help reel us back toward balance and normalcy.”
Maddow writes, “None of this is impossible. This isn't bigger than us. Decisions about national security are ours to make.”
She concludes, “We just need to revive that old idea of America as a deliberately peaceable nation. That's not simply our inheritance, it's our responsibility.” We have a right and need and freedom to speak –– and then vote. It’s in the Constitution.
Americans’ "First."
