By Andreas Kluth

POSSIBLY, just possibly, Donald Trump just scored a foreign-policy success that could define his legacy. By striking Venezuela and whisking away Nicolás Maduro (along with Maduro’s wife), the US president removed a patently illegitimate dictator and, in theory, opened the door for a wretched nation to return to democracy and stability. And Trump appears to have done it without dragging America into another “forever war” of the sort that he promised his MAGA base to avoid. If all goes well, this American coup in Venezuela could became exhibit A of a newly proclaimed “Donroe” or “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.

That’s a big if. Any number of other scenarios can still mar this achievement and instead confirm the trajectory that Trump’s foreign policy has mostly taken since he began his second term — one that points toward regional and global chaos and lawlessness.

Trump, along with most Venezuelans and the world, obviously hopes for an orderly transition in Caracas to the democratic opposition. Instead, the Chavistas may remain in charge, and a new dictator may clamp down even harder. Or the country could descend into civil war among its warlords. As a former US secretary of state used to say, chaos would be down to Trump: You break it, you own it.

In a nightmare scenario, Venezuela, already a big exporter of tired, poor, huddled masses fleeing to the US and other places, could become a new sort of Libya or Afghanistan, a failed state that destabilizes its entire region to America’s detriment. “Our record of forcible regime change in general is not that great,” Richard Fontaine told me before Maduro’s capture. He’s the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security and a veteran of the National Security Council and the State Department. “It’s particularly bad in Latin America, and it often seems to invite a lot of unintended consequences.”

A bad turn in Venezuela would raise the same questions that have dogged the unlawful US strikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean: Why now, and why at all?

Trump’s stated aim has been that he is waging war against “narco-terrorism.” This can be dismissed as a pretext: The drug that kills most Americans, fentanyl, enters the US via Mexico from China. The cocaine on the US market largely comes from Colombia. By contrast, Venezuela is a minor exporter of drugs and sends them mostly to Europe. Yes, the US has indicted Maduro on drug charges in a New York court. But Trump already put an asterisk of risibility on this rationale last month, when he pardoned a former president of Honduras who was actually doing time in the US for his narcotics conviction.

The strategic rationale for intervening in Venezuela — as opposed to deploying all that military might in Asia or Europe, say — is no clearer. “There are a lot of dictators who have stolen elections and are running their country into the ground around the world,” Fontaine told me. Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus leaps to mind, with whom Trump is talking deals instead of regime change. For some hard-to-fathom reason, Fontaine added, Trump “seems to care about Maduro in a way that he doesn’t care about the other ones.”

In the best case, as represented by Marco Rubio, Trump’s national security advisor and secretary of state, the fall of the Venezuelan dictatorship will also undermine the regime in Cuba. In every other scenario, it will do nothing of the sort and merely distract the US from pursuing its more vital interests in resisting Russian aggression in Europe and Chinese expansion in Asia.

The cost that is hardest to quantify but has perhaps the longest tail is the damage that Trump has done to international law. Maduro was bad, but he had not attacked the US, and this intervention violated Venezuelan sovereignty. Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, drew attention to this lawlessness by posting Article 2 of the United Nations Charter, the one stipulating that “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” Even if the situations are very different, the coup in Venezuela is in effect what Russia attempted (but failed) to do in February 2022 in Ukraine.

The intervention probably also violates domestic US law. It comes well after the period (if one starts the clock on Sept. 2, when the US struck the first boat in the Caribbean) during which the administration, under the Nixon-era War Powers Resolution, should have sought Congressional approval. Democrats in the House and Senate have tried and failed to reassert the legislative branch’s constitutional authority over waging war, but the Republicans in the majority have shielded Trump. Whether they will continue to do so depends on what happens next in Venezuela.

As indeed does everything. “We are going to run the country” until a transition is complete, Trump told the press. That’s quite a non sequitur from a man who spent years accusing his predecessors of trying and failing to administer Iraq and other places they barely understood.

If Venezuela and its region instead spiral into chaos and suffering, Trump will merely look like a bully, a president who cowers when facing the mighty — in Moscow or Beijing, say — but bombs those who can’t return fire, whether in Nigeria, Yemen, or Venezuela. He will go down in history as an American president who buried international law and ushered in anarchy.

But if Venezuela, after inevitable turmoil in the near term, thrives, perhaps even helping to spread regional prosperity and security, those qualms won’t matter. Trump will have made one part of the world better, and freed resources that America can, if it is wise, redeploy to stabilize other regions. In that outcome, the costs will have been worth it, and Trump will deserve credit.

BLOOMBERG OPINION