Washington is grappling with the aftermath of the dramatic operation to seize Venezuela’s longtime strongman, Nicolás Maduro. Lawmakers must consider how the latest use of military force affects the Constitutional balance of congressional authority with executive power. Brian Darling argues that the operation’s success on the battlefield has led to difficult political decisions about legitimacy, restraint, and constitutional balance.
Darling is the founder and president of Liberty Government Affairs and previously worked as a congressional staffer. His background includes communications work for Senator Rand Paul, whose foreign policy views emphasize restraint and constitutional limits. Darling also spent time at the Heritage Foundation and has written extensively on public policy, national security, and fiscal issues. He is skeptical about open-ended military commitments.
“There’s a lot of concern about what happens next,” he says. “It was a successful raid… it seems like it was a precise military operation, and the military should be praised.” Political leadership, however, now carries the burden. “Now it’s on the politicians to figure out what to do next. And that’s the hard part,” he says.
Darling contrasts Afghanistan and Iraq to underscore the danger of unclear objectives. “The hard part is not the toppling of the government. It’s what you do after,” he says. He warns against turning American forces into permanent enforcers abroad. “You don’t want to be the police force for the world,” Darling says. “You don’t want to have American troops now in Venezuela basically being policemen.”
Justifications for the operation trouble him because he says they lack coherence. “You’ve heard multiple justifications for the raid,” he says, citing a desire to arrest Maduro, counter drug trafficking, and access Venezuela’s oil. “When you have multiple justifications, it’s really hard to understand exactly why this act was taken,” Darling says.
This includes the fact that, “the person who is second in charge now running the country is just a hardcore socialist, also not elected,” Darling says. “That’s a problem that we’re going to have to deal with.”
And what about the Constitutional limits on presidential power? “Is seizing the leader of a country… an act of war?” Darling asks. “Yeah, common sense tells you that it is,” he says. That would mean congressional involvement matters. “You should go to Congress and get some sort of authorization for doing something like this because you want congressional buy-in,” Darling says, calling it “the American people’s buy-in.”
The Administration is good at deterrence, in Darling’s view. “This administration talks tough and they back up the tough talk,” he says. Adversaries notice. “President Trump is not a paper tiger,” Darling says.
Darling has concerns about the implication of national security costs on fiscal discipline. “One of my biggest concerns is our debt crisis,” he says. Congressional inertia frustrates him. “They’re doing nothing really to tackle this issue of fraud, waste and abuse.”
Power, Darling says, demands humility. “These are difficult questions,” he says. Success in Venezuela solved one problem while creating others.
