Tuesday, January 6, 2026

Interview on the Venezuela situation

In an interview with Edward Pentin published at his Substack, I discuss just war doctrine, the Venezuela situation, and the false choice between globalism and jingoism.

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36 comments:

  1. AnonymousJanuary 6, 2026 at 2:53 PM

    Can we at least rejoice with the Venezuelan people who have longed to see the day that Maduro is removed from power? The results from the Trump administration's action will have more good than bad. Removing Russian and Chinese involvement from the Western hemisphere will be a good thing. The Trump administration will make war on the drug cartels in Mexico and Columbia and the results will be good. Communism will end in Cuba and that will be good. I grieve that you are unable to rejoice when so many of your political allies are rejoicing.

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    1. AnonymousJanuary 6, 2026 at 8:34 PM

      Perhaps you didn't read the interview -- or even the news, for that matter -- but so far only Maduro is gone, not his government. So the situation for the Venezuelan people hasn't actually changed. That's the whole point. Maybe things will work out -- I certainly hope so -- but until we hear of a concrete plan for making that happen, victory dances are premature, to say the least.

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    2. AnonymousJanuary 7, 2026 at 2:21 AM

      There's no rejoicing with an immoral act. A Catholic should know this.

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    3. AnonymousJanuary 7, 2026 at 6:34 AM

      Does the end justify the means? Not in Catholic theology.

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    4. AnonymousJanuary 7, 2026 at 11:08 AM

      Apprehending Maduro was not an immoral act. Further, there is the following. Assertion 1: The end does not justify the means. Assertion 2: We must never celebrate an end achieved by unjust means. Assertion 2 simply does not follow from assertion 1. It is a non sequitur.

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    5. Edward FeserJanuary 7, 2026 at 3:40 PM

      Anonymous at 2:53,

      You are entirely missing the point, which is that until we are given specifics about exactly how all that is going to be realized, this is all just wishful thinking. Happy fantasies cannot constitute a fulfilment of the just cause condition.

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    6. AnonymousJanuary 7, 2026 at 5:08 PM

      Ed,
      Venezuelans rejoicing at Maduro facing justice for his crimes is not a fantasy; it is a reality.

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    7. Edward FeserJanuary 7, 2026 at 6:35 PM

      For goodness' sake, when did IQs drop so precipitously?

      Yes, they rejoiced, quite rightly. But it doesn't mean anything unless he's replaced by something better, and so far we've had no explanation of exactly how that's going to happen, only fantasies about how nice it will be.

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    8. AnonymousJanuary 7, 2026 at 8:23 PM

      Do you think that the present government in Venezuela will continue to be as much of an adversary to the U.S. as Maduro was? I do not. There are lots of reports that the Islamic regime in Iran may be coming to an end (partly as a result of another brilliantly successful military operation last year in Iran, but the Maduro operation also gives hopes to those who oppose Ayatolla Khameni). Russia and China are losing key allies. The flow of harmful drugs to the U.S. which causes thousands of deaths has already significantly slowed--that is a reality. I am willing to bet that the Trump Administration will continue to reduce that flow of harmful drugs dramatically and that the net results will be beneficial, even if some of the actions taken don't meet the criteria of Catholic just war doctrine.

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    9. Edward FeserJanuary 7, 2026 at 11:32 PM

      All kinds of things are "beneficial" but immoral, so unless all the conditions of just war doctrine are actually met, such realpolitik considerations are irrelevant to the morality of the conflict.

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  2. Miguel CervantesJanuary 6, 2026 at 3:23 PM

    There is nothing more pathetic than seeing sanctmonious bullies getting their deserts. Trump and Vance have lowered the bar to piracy, denigration of others and jungle logic. They are going to look a lot less dignified than Maduro when they get treated as they deserve. The corollary of unjust aggression is legitimate defence. Down with the pirates say I.

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  3. AnonymousJanuary 6, 2026 at 7:44 PM

    And the Republican Party is solidly behind Trump.

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    1. AnonymousJanuary 7, 2026 at 2:15 PM

      Republicans will not support him if he tries to use "military options" to acquire Greenland, as he was saying yesterday.

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    2. Edward FeserJanuary 7, 2026 at 3:37 PM

      Judging from some of the psychotics I'm seeing on X, many of them will support it. But yes, probably most will not, including most GOP politicians.

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  4. NormJanuary 7, 2026 at 12:45 AM

    Prof in your opinion how would the proportionality criteria be evaluated here, are we measuring the number of unintended casualties it took to get Maduro against Maduro's crimes as a dictator?

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    1. AnonymousJanuary 7, 2026 at 11:02 AM

      You do realize that the thirty-two Cuban guards who died are not innocent victims, don't you? Maduro hired Cubans because Venezuelans hated him.

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    2. NormJanuary 8, 2026 at 5:28 AM

      You could briefly respond to my query also Prof :)

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    3. Edward FeserJanuary 8, 2026 at 9:23 AM

      Hi Norm, that’s another example of how we have not been given a clear and thought out explanation of the scope and rationale of the conflict. Given that the regime has plausibly been accused of extrajudicial killings, torture, and the like, as well as narco-trafficking (which puts lives at risk), some loss of life among the military personnel protecting Maduro would in principle be justifiable. But the regime’s crimes are not anything like what (say) Saddam was guilty of, so that a full-scale invasion (were that to occur) could easily spiral into something way out of proportion to the evils the U.S. would be responding to. As to the deaths that occurred in nabbing Maduro, if the end result of U.S. engagement were the end of the regime’s human rights violations, those deaths would arguably be justifiable. But so far the regime is still there, and the person in charge has herself been accused of being complicit in those human rights violations (https://reason.com/2026/01/06/who-is-delcy-rodriguez-venezuelas-acting-dictator/). It should also be added that a military raid in which around 75 people die is difficult plausibly to characterize as a mere law enforcement operation rather than an act of war (as many of the administration’s defenders have been doing).

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    4. NormJanuary 8, 2026 at 6:05 PM

      Thanks Prof

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  5. OA PoliceJanuary 7, 2026 at 4:44 AM

    One finds a certain irony in speculating how the U.S.A. in general and the Trump administration in particular would react if some other country took it upon themselves to execute the outstanding arrest warrant against one Benjamin Netanyahu.

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  6. David McPikeJanuary 7, 2026 at 3:24 PM

    I'm wondering why Pentin and Feser have framed this operation as a war. It looks like the arrest of a criminal dictator to me, not a war -- which seems to render the whole analysis in relation to JWT moot. In any case, I think an explanation of why this should even count as 'war' (just or otherwise) is certainly needed. From what I've read about Venezuela's recent history, Chavez and Maduro were massively destructive leaders and horrendously unjust from the standpoint of Catholic (or any sound) social justice doctrines. Effectively comparing the massively destructive crimes perpetrated by those two to the triviality of the 'mass destruction' incidental to the use of automobiles seems beyond silly.

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    1. Edward FeserJanuary 7, 2026 at 3:34 PM

      I explained why in the interview. You cannot look at the operation to nab Maduro in isolation. The actions that led up to it, and the military actions that Trump has said might follow, are characteristic of war, and Trump himself has explicitly characterized what he is up to as war. Also, as to just the operation itself, sending the military in to abduct another country's head of state is of its nature an act of war, whether or not our government calls it that and whether or not there may have been some legal basis for doing it. If another country tried doing that with Trump, nobody would say "Well, I disagree with their legal argument, but since they gave one, it isn't an act of war."

      Also, re: "mass destruction," you are completely missing the point of the automobile analogy, and the issue has nothing to do with how awful they have been. I was talking about characterizing fentanyl as a "weapon of mass destruction," which it is not in the legal sense, in part because it is not a weapon in the legal sense in the first place. The car analogy was meant to illustrate that the number of people killed by some object does not by itself entail that it is a WMD.

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  7. ChrisJanuary 7, 2026 at 7:30 PM

    In three elements of morality, circumstances are secondary to moral object and intention. As mentioned by Catechism of the Catholic Church,

    "1754 The circumstances, including the consequences, are secondary elements of a moral act. They contribute to increasing or diminishing the moral goodness or evil of human acts (for example, the amount of a theft). They can also diminish or increase the agent's responsibility (such as acting out of a fear of death). Circumstances of themselves cannot change the moral quality of acts themselves; they can make neither good nor right an action that is in itself evil."

    https://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s1c1a4.htm#I

    This is also affirmed by St. Thomas Aquinas saying (just pasting some excerpts),

    "Article 11. Whether every circumstance that makes an action better or worse, places a moral action in a species of good or evil?

    Reply to Objection 1. In things which can be more or less intense, the difference of more or less does not change the species: thus by differing in whiteness through being more or less white a thing is not changed in regard to its species of color. In like manner that which makes an action to be more or less good or evil, does not make the action differ in species."

    https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2018.htm#article11

    One of my comments when reading the interview is that even if there is not that much of realistic hope of success or concrete plan, it seems that it falls under circumstances, not moral object. That is, the moral object is not intrinsically evil, and the action done as led by President Trump (note, I am a Filipino that is trying to understand this situation from Catholic moral theology perspective) is justified under moral object. It seems that not all conditions in just war fall under moral object since others fall in circumstances and intention.

    If that is the case, the lack of realistic hope of success or concrete plan doesn't mean that what President Trump did is morally wrong. Rather, it's morally good, but it may be less good (just as less white is still white based on analogy by St. Thomas Aquinas).

    After all, we can also make other situations like being kidnapped by many people, and defending oneself by hurting and restraining other people even if, after doing so, I was still not able to escape where I was placed. Even if this is not "just war", but the point here is that my lack of success in actually escaping falls under circumstances, not that I did a morally wrong action based on moral object. The same can be said about the actions of President Trump.

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    1. Edward FeserJanuary 7, 2026 at 11:28 PM

      It does not seem to me that you properly understand the relationship between object, intention, and circumstances, but I’ll put that aside for present purposes, because the more straightforward problem here is that you misunderstand just war doctrine. You seem to think that as long as the “just cause” condition is met, then a war is morally legitimate and that a failure to meet the other conditions somehow doesn’t change that (but perhaps just makes it ill-advised or something). No. Just war doctrine says that ALL the conditions must be met in order for a war to be morally legitimate. For example, if Bush had said “I have no real plans for what happens after Saddam is gone, and Iraq may well fall into a civil war that costs hundreds of thousands of lives,” he couldn’t have claimed that the war was still morally acceptable merely because the cause of removing Saddam was just.

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    2. ChrisJanuary 8, 2026 at 4:57 AM

      Thank you, appreciate your reply. It helped me to reflect more on just war, and some issues perhaps with my understanding of three elements of morality. If you have a blog post regarding object, intention, and circumstances, it's something I may also consider reading.

      Thanks!

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    3. NormJanuary 9, 2026 at 7:16 AM

      Hi Chris

      Although not related to Just War, Thomistic writers like Fr Stephen Brock and Dr Steven Jensen have done really good work on this topic of Object, Intention and Circumstances. You can find their books on Amazon. Good and Evil actions is a great book by Dr Steven Jensen, so is Fr Brock's articles which I think you can find online.

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  8. TonyJanuary 7, 2026 at 10:02 PM

    Because the president and some of his allies so freely engage in this sort of irresponsible rhetoric, it is very hard to take seriously the suggestion that they are concerned to act justly where war is concerned. They have done enormous damage to their own credibility on these matters, and have no right to complain when critics question their motives.

    This may be the most telling point made in the interview: Trump lies so often, and mashes up claims into half-truths and absurdities, that nobody can well trust him when he asserts a motive as being the real motive. But this is needed in order to enter into war justly (or, frankly, to transact business as a nation's leader justly).

    Unfortunately, Prof, about half of your other points are weakened by several defects. (1) Sure, Trump has not yet said how he expects to get rid of the remaining socialists in charge and return V to an orderly state instead of a(nother) failed socialist state. But it's early days, and there's no special reason he MUST telegraph his moves to opponents. The Maduro nab was an extremely complex maneuver involving many dozens of separate force units and timing constraints met, which undoubtedly took the input of many dozens of planners: do you REALLY think that none of them asked (or was charged with planning for) "what about after Maduro is gone"? Odds are, Trump has some sort of plan. It might not be just, but he probably has one, and simply isn't telling his enemies what it is.

    (2) Just authority: in the US, the president's authority to engage in warlike actions is complicated by the 1973 War Powers act. In addition, the operations prior to the nab Maduro (taking out drug boats and seizing oil ships) almost certainly fell under policing authority, not war-making. Pres. Biden is the one who posted an award for information leading to the arrest of Maduro, also a policing action. And international law does permit one country to enter into another non-enemy country to pursue a terrorist if the non-enemy country can't or won't handle him.

    (3) Though Trump's assertions about fentanyl being a WMD are silly, his assertions about the cartels being terrorists is NOT silly. Not because the drugs "terrorize" US families who worry that their teens might get them, but because the cartels literally use terror methods to undermine judges, juries, witnesses, prison guards, and police here in the US, and use even worse methods in other countries to force peasants to work for them, to alter voting, to buy politicians.

    I don't for a minute think Trump's methods here are above reproach, not at all. But half the complaints raised are inadequately formulated or researched.

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    1. Edward FeserJanuary 7, 2026 at 11:05 PM

      Hello Tony, to reply to your points:

      1. The problem is that the more ambitious the aims for a post-Maduro Venezuela, the more implausible it will be that one could achieve them without a major U.S. land force commitment and the possibility of chaos and massive loss of life. To be sure, at the most non-ambitious extreme, they could just leave the current regime in place and require of them merely that they cooperate more on things like oil. That would be easy enough to do, but it would expose the “We’re liberating Venezuela” propaganda as a lie, and the war won’t meet the “right intention” conditions – or, for that matter, the “just cause” condition, because (for reasons I’ve explained in earlier commentary on this topic) oil access is not a plausibly just casus belli.

      On the other extreme, they could go for a full Iraq-style regime change operation, which would almost certainly be a bloody quagmire. I doubt they intend that. Maybe they’re sincere about liberating Venezuela from tyrannical rule and they’ll carry out some intermediate level operation to further that aim. But that will be very hard to do without the whole thing spiraling into the highly problematic deeper commitment. Anyway, the problem is precisely that nobody knows because no clear and consistent explanation has been given of exactly what the overall point and endgame of the conflict is. The rhetoric is all over the place. You’re basically saying that we should simply have faith that, whatever they have in mind, the government has planned things out adequately. Sorry, the fact that not even the aim has been made clear – let alone the plan for realizing it – should make us less trusting, not more. Even apart from that, the recent history in Afghanistan and Iraq alone should prevent any rational person from taking such an attitude. And in this case we have the added factor that the ultimate decision lies with an erratic egomaniac given to chronic lying.

      2. The operations prior to nabbing Maduro were rationalized as responses to “terrorism,” which would put them under Congress’s “war on terror” era AUMF. The rationalization was bogus, but that was the rationalization. That would make them military engagements, not law enforcement. (Law enforcement doesn’t just blow boats up, for example.) Furthermore, acts like closing Venezuelan airspace and seizing a tanker are acts of war, whether or not one uses the word “war” in carrying them out. But there is also the fact that Trump has in fact used that word, as I noted in the interview. And he’s threatened further military action, which (since Maduro is already in custody) could hardly be characterized as a mere law enforcement operation aimed at capturing Maduro. So the question of congressional authorization is indeed very much to the point.

      3. I have myself said that cartel actions of the specific kind you mention do plausibly count as terrorism. Indeed, I said that in the interview, and wrote a whole article about it for Postliberal Order. But it isn’t relevant to the specific operations that have been taking place with respect to Venezuela (e.g. attacks against the boats).

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    2. bmillerJanuary 8, 2026 at 10:24 AM

      So it seems that if things turn out well, then the conditions for JWT had been met and if they turn out poorly then not.

      Since Trump has not revealed details of his plan, no one can know. So far, it appears the country is still stable, so not disastrous yet. And apparently there have been background negotiations with people within the Maduro regime before this event which indicates at least some planning had been done.

      We can hope that key Maduro holdovers have been offered a safe off-ramp and allow free and fair elections which includes allowing political dissent.

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    3. bmillerJanuary 8, 2026 at 10:56 AM

      I am wondering now if the US justly entered WW2. We declared war on Germany December 11, 1941 but the first plan put forward for post-war Germany was the Morgenthau Plan which was formulated in 1944.

      So it seems if a having a pre-war plan for a post-war victory is a requirement for JWT we failed.

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    4. Edward FeserJanuary 8, 2026 at 11:55 AM

      "So it seems that if things turn out well, then the conditions for JWT had been met"

      No, that doesn't follow. If I fire a shotgun into a crowded room in order to kill a housefly and by good fortune it turns out that no one is killed, that does not entail that my reckless action was somehow justifiable. I just got lucky, that's all. Similarly, if a country does does not try to meet just war conditions when going to war, but things by chance nevertheless turn out well, that doesn't retroactively make the initial decision morally unproblematic.

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    5. AnonymousJanuary 8, 2026 at 1:19 PM

      bmiller,
      The problem is that Catholic just war doctrine is an almost impossibly high standard (many of the crusades do not fit the criteria, yet Ed supports the crusades) and is not hugely relevant to the question of whether a war brings better results than not fighting it. Here we have the irony of leftist nations at the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States trying to advance a joint statement condemning Maduro's detention, the more conservative governments such as Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Trinidad & Tobago opposing and thus blocking the statement, and Ed apparently siding with the former rather than the latter. By the way, the new governments in Chile and Honduras will be allied with the conservative block.

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    6. bmillerJanuary 8, 2026 at 1:30 PM

      Sure. I agree with the analogy, but do we actually know that the plan is reckless?

      If it is not reckless, then is JWT being satisfied?
      What would make the plan not-reckless?

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    7. OA PoliceJanuary 9, 2026 at 6:53 AM

      @Bmiller, regarding WW2 surely the post-war plans of that kind are mainly relevant if one intends to destroy the opposing power—even before then the US must have had some idea of what acceptable surrender conditions would have been for the Germans even if they did not expect to be responsible for giving the defeated country a new government.

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  9. AnonymousJanuary 8, 2026 at 4:28 PM

    Trump said in the New York Times, " I have my own morality. " We don't a president. We have a king.

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    1. OA PoliceJanuary 9, 2026 at 2:41 AM

      I understand dislike of Trump, but that comment belies reasons for general Anti-American sentiment in the world.

      1. Through-out most of history royals did not have absolute scope in their actions, and certainly nobody thought were entitled to “make their own morality.” The only figures who claim were the world empire builders such as Napoleon, as read through the eyes of Hegel and Nietzsche.

      2. The President of the United Statements regardless of who they are has more power than any European monarch has had for centuries at home, and certainly does so abroad—Napoleon after all never got to become “World-Leader”

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