America And Venezuela: Can It Be Considered A ‘Just War’?
(ANALYSIS) The Religion Guy’s Answer: As the complexities in Venezuela continue to evolve, President Donald Trump held his first face-to-face meeting on Jan. 16 with democratic opposition leader Maria Corina Machado. Universal consensus says her party won the 2024 presidential vote by two-thirds or better, whereupon despised dictator Nicolás Maduro, now imprisoned in New York City, stole the office.
However, Trump has submerged hopes for eventual elections and is working in tandem with those who ran Maduro’s spurious regime, now led by Acting President Delcy Rodríguez.
Trump considers himself to be the “acting president,” according to an Internet item he re-posted, and says the U.S. is “in charge” of the nation. He told The New York Times the only constraint on his international actions is “my own morality. My own mind.”
The Guy here takes no position on Trump’s military strike to seize Maduro, or on America’s ongoing involvement with this important, oppressed, and oil-rich yet economically failing nation.
Instead, we‘ll look at some current religious discussion on the morality of America’s Venezuela actions, which has potential reverberations for Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, Greenland, Iran, Gaza, Nigeria, Russia, or China.
Moral reasons, moral methods
The Catholic Church has a long heritage of analyzing what constitutes a “just war,” waged for moral reasons by moral methods. Venezuela is 80% Catholic, so followers of that faith are central in the debate, though New York Times columnist David French, an evangelical Protestant, critiqued Trump policy on “just war” grounds.
In the early church, most Christians shunned military service or believed in total pacifism. But after the Roman Empire halted persecution of the church in AD 313, believers began to assume public office and needed to weigh the ethics of their decisions. In that transitional era, St. Augustine originated “just war” thinking, which was elaborated in the 13th Century by St. Thomas Aquinas.
In the classical tradition, “just” warfare has three aspects. Jus ad bellum (the right to war) means combat must be authorized by a legitimate political entity (thus barring terrorism), for legitimate and serious reasons, undertaken only as a last resort, and showing a reasonable chance of success. Jus in bellum (proper conduct in war) includes restricting the damage and protecting non-combatants. Jus post bellum, which gets less attention, means justice in concluding a war through compensation, restoration of rights, and prosecution of war crimes.
Though the Catholic Catechism allows for defensive war-making (see details in sections 2302–2317), official Catholicism has been floating toward a form of semi-pacifism. Building upon assertions from prior pontiffs, Pope Francis’s 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti states, “We can no longer think of war as a solution because its risks will probably always be greater than its supposed benefits. In view of this, it is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a just war.”
The American pope
Without naming Trump, Francis’s American successor Leo XIV has called for “the pursuit of paths of justice and peace, guaranteeing the sovereignty of the country, ensuring the rule of law enshrined in its constitution, respecting the human and civil rights of each and every person, and working together to build a peaceful future of cooperation, stability and harmony, with special attention to the poorest who are suffering because of the difficult economic situation.”
Other reactions to Venezuela reflect prior political commitments. As cheers erupted among the millions of Venezuelans in exile, Tom Cotton, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, joined many Republicans in saying “I commend President Trump and our brave troops.” The Rev. José Durán, a Machado advisor who organizes Protestant urban missions in Latin America, asserts that “God is using Donald Trump to liberate Venezuela from the 27-year chains of oppression.”
But Father Thomas Reese, the Catholic columnist with Religion News Service, thinks “Trump’s war is illegal, unwise, immoral, and a waste of money.” The liberal National Catholic Reporter condemned “another act of lawless chaos” by Trump, while Jewish Forward columnist Robert Zaretsky contended that Trump is fighting an unjust war “in an unjust fashion” and “without plans for the day after.” Officials of the World Council of Churches and U.S. “Mainline” Protestant denominations are similarly opposed.
There’s special interest in the assessment by Carrie Filipetti in Providence, a journal devoted to theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Christian realism” on foreign policy, because she was the State Department specialist on Venezuela and Cuba in the first Trump administration. She fears “President Trump now runs the risk of losing” America’s two major advantages, Venezuela’s democratic past and then Machado’s effective grass roots movement.
American weakness
At the interfaith conservative magazine First Things, Editor R.R. Reno thinks pre-Trump American weakness damaged the international order. Yet he’s uncertain whether the “muscular approach” as shown in Venezuela will undergird “a relatively stable global system” or turn out to be “an ill-considered step down a fateful path.”
Among the most substantive articles are two from conservative Catholic news outlets, which took opposite sides. Both were published in December just before America’s Venezuela incursion as Trump was signaling that action was imminent.
CatholicWorldReport.com re-posted a blog item by Edward Feser, a philosophy professor at Pasadena City College, who applied the Aquinas tradition to oppose Trump. Among his contentions: Defense against trampled rights or aggression can be proper reasons for military action but only as a “necessary” condition, not “sufficient” ones.
It’s not clear that regime change is a “proportionate” response to the regime’s evils, or that it “would remedy rather than exacerbate” the problems. America’s pressing drug problem is fentanyl from China and Mexico, not Venezuela’s cocaine. Regime change won’t necessarily improve the nation’s plight and might worsen it. The U.S. did not explain why different steps short of outright combat would not suffice.
Feser expected that Trump would act without “some kind of Congressional approval,” as indeed happened, which is “contrary to the rule of law.” As for moral intention, Feser figured intervention would mostly be about “access to oil,” or the President’s “egotism” and wish “to make his mark on history.” Based on Trump’s “dubious attempt” to justify killings of crew members on drug trafficking boats, Feser worried that innocent non-combatants would die in any incursion.
Burden of proof
“Given the unique gravity of war and the potential unforeseen harms of even justifiable military actions, the burden of proof is always on those who want to go to war, not on those who recommend against doing so,” Feser concluded, and the Trump Administration had failed to make the case.
Alberto Fernandez, a veteran U.S. diplomat under both Democratic and Republican administrations, then responded to Feser in the National Catholic Register. He especially objected that Feser “seemingly ignores the nature of the regime in question.” Venezuela and its allies Cuba and Nicaragua have “unjust regimes in every sense of the word.”
They have created “thousands of political prisoners” and “hundreds of thousands of political exiles.” They oppress the church. Their “illegitimate”’ and “criminal” rulers rig elections and maintain power through “brute force and repression” while condemning their “impoverished and hungry citizens” to “a wretched existence with little hope.” Intervention is just, and justified.
This piece was originally published at Patheos.
Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He is a recipient of the Religion News Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.