On Venezuelan Drug Boat Strikes

President Trump has been ordering strikes on Venezuelan drug boats. I see two types of reactions. The first is the guy who says, "Good! It's about time." That's my category. The second asks, "How is that legal?" We'll talk in a moment. I started writing this post as a rant, but it devolved into something like a Socratic dialogue. With that in mind, I'll be bolding Mr. Strawman's lines. Okay, let's take a look at the question.

Dealing with the Law

How is that Legal?

The law isn't the right framework to judge the attacks. Trump is ordering strikes on foreigners. That can be a question of war, that can be a question of right and wrong, that can be a question of realpolitik or principles. It's not a question of law. Not even international law, because international law is not a thing. At least not in that sense.

But okay, for the moment let's treat it as a question of law. Who has standing to complain? If you're having heart palpitations because I'm blaspheming against the Rule of Law, I'm really not. If you want to follow the law, follow the law. Find someone with standing to complain, put them before a judge who has jurisdiction, and have that judge issue an injunction. Before that happens, Trump can't be legally made to stop.

You're quibbling.

Those aren't quibbles. Or, if they are, they're quibbles that nevertheless need to be addressed. Because if you're not playing by the rules, then you aren't really defending the Rule of Law. Hold on, Jefferson said something about this in the Declaration:

He has combined with others to subject us to a Jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution and unacknowledged by our Laws, giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation.

The 'others' in the original refers to Parliament. They had a better right to legislate than just anybody, but because we weren't represented in that representative assembly, their laws were illegitimate. Today I'm using it to refer to the legal class. Not the laws and precedents that bind us, but the hazy penumbra of assumed rules that cause people to exclaim things like, "That can't be legal."

Okay, but blasting people; that's not a shadowy thing, that's pretty cut and dried.

Hold your horses; I'll get there in a minute. The point first is that if you let yourself be bound in all cases whatsoever by that shadowy realm of things that might be illegal if someone sues, you're not living by the Rule of Law. You're living by the Rule of Lawyers. Lawyers don't get to set the rules because they're lawyers; that's what congressmen are for. So thank you kindly, sir, but please jump through all the hoops first. If the Supreme Court says to the president that he should stop, then yes, he should stop—and I'll oppose strikes then. But I won't do so on the say-so of learned journalists and other loudmouths.

But the blasting...

Yeah, okay, you've got a point there. If ever you should pause before doing something and consider if it might be illegal or not, killing folks ought to be that occasion. All the same, I remember being told that no one had standing to challenge Biden's one-man attempt to forgive student loans or the voting irregularities around the 2020 election. If I'm to play by those rules, then you must too. You don't get demand strict adherence when it favors you and still play fast and loose when you prefer things that way.

But is it a Good Idea?

Still, when you talk about killing people like that, do you really want a government that presumes it can kill anyone, slaying at it pleases, until the rusty courts can do something? At a bare minimum, you can't un-kill people.

That's a fair point. Let's look at the circumstances. Trump is targeting drug runners, who are easily identifiable as the guys in the power boats leaving Venezuela for open waters. I find the idea that they're just fishermen unpersuasive, and I don't particularly care that the helicopters aren't stopping to make 100% sure these folks aren't taking their barrels of pancake mix out for a nautical jaunt. If he were doing it in more dubious circumstances, if he were catching Americans in the blast, I'd be more hesitant. But don't let the hypotheticals swallow the facts.

There's a principle at stake here.

Sort of. I agree that the government shouldn't shoot people without a good reason, even foreigners. There's a useful comparison here. Pirates. You can hang pirates without repatriating them. I don't like adding exceptions like that, but I think I'm okay declaring drug cartels on the high seas to have put themselves outside the laws of civilization and thus legally prey for any man o' war that finds them.

Aren't you dodging the legal quibbles you were just insisting on?

I still don't think it's a legal question. It's an act of war. That pulls things into the realm of international relations. The US government does not have the same duty to protect foreigners that it does to protect American citizens. Those drug dealers are under the protection of the Venezuelan government. Maduro would be fully justified in declaring war on us to get us to stop killing his citizens or imposing any level of sanctions up to that point.

Pretty slick suggesting that Maduro seek redress in war when you know darn well he can't win one.

Yeah, well, that old Athenian line still bears a certain amount of truth: "The strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must." Against that, we have simple prudence. History provides a long string of cases where we thought we knew who was strong and who was weak before the contest. We also have the claims of morality, of which more soon enough. But there are other ways Maduro could object.

He could go diplomatically to other nations, suggesting that America has become a menace to their interests by violently damaging free trade on the open seas. I don't think he'll convince France of anything, at least as long as Trump sticks to slaughtering obvious drug boats, but perhaps China would be willing to insist on a stupid point to challenge US naval dominance. China would be much more likely to make sanctions stick than Venezuela. These are all things Trump should have considered (and perhaps did; I don't know his mind) before starting something.

What about those Moral Questions?

Okay, you won't let legal concerns stop you, and pretty clearly Maduro won't be able to deter Trump through power politics. What about justice?

What moral framework would you discuss them under? Kantian? If everyone in the whole world went around shooting drug dealers, where would we be? The tenets of Islam? Not a Muslim. I'm sorry if I'm weak on Christian ethics; I went to public schools where they scrupulously didn't pray.

That's a cheap shot.

Is it? We've had a de facto separation of church and state for nearly a century now. You can't rely on me having Christian ethics as a matter of public policy. Stipulate that atheists can, through sheer reason, come to a moral outlook on life, you can't guarantee which moral outlook they'll have, or anyone else, for that matter. You can't say, "You should find this morally objectionable because ..." because there's no "because" to rely on. In a culture that warns me about the dangers of kink shaming, I find it odd that people are shocked when I don't object to the slaying of drug dealers the way they do.

You personally, though. You're a Christian even if you didn't learn it in the public schools. Why are you okay with this?

Guilty as charged. Being a Christian, I know that doesn't mean that I should be simply nice to everyone everywhere all the time. Warfare is licit, murder is not. I consider this to be warfare, at least until I'm persuaded otherwise by legal means or someone more persuasive than a straw man.

Aren't you supposed to pray for your enemies?

Yeah. Over the centuries Christianity has come to understand that precept to include a concern for the well-being of even those who hate us. It's the remnant of that concern in the general moral assumptions that causes honest interlocutors to worry about us blasting drug dealers.

Excuse me? I may be a simple straw man, but I won't stand for being called dishonest.

You do me wrong, my good sir. I trust in your honesty implicitly. I merely meant that there's a class of folks who care less about the merits of the case than about seizing any weapon at hand to bludgeon Trump. I wouldn't argue with those folks; there's nothing to be gained by trying to persuade those who won't listen.

But back to what I was saying, generic Christian niceness is, in this case, a misunderstanding of the virtue of mercy.

Mercy? How so?

Allow for the moment that this is a condition of warfare. (I know I haven't convinced you of that, but follow the logic.) Killing an enemy is the normal state of affairs. Capturing an enemy is a mercy. The action heroes shoot to wound; A soldier doesn't because he doesn't know the other guy will miss. You can only extend mercy if you do so from a position of strength. Mercy from weakness isn't mercy; it's forced, not a free choice.

You're getting a little too Socratic here. Can you speed this up?

Right. Treating drug runners like criminals is an act of mercy. Mercy can be given, but never demanded, never forced. Extending mercy is a virtue, but withholding mercy is not necessarily a vice. I could wish for a better world, but I'm not overly troubled by this question.

Why don't you work for a better world?

Because all my life I've been watching America take the high road. We get punched in the balls and laughed at for suckers for our trouble. The restrictive rules of engagement fighting the war on terror. The illegals pouring over the border coached into quoting lines from Supreme Court cases to make their refugee claims. "Free" trade with China. Being told that any expression of patriotism was harmful, while anyone else's patriotism is healthy ethnic pride. Being asked to pick up the tab for any sort of disaster, and cursed when we don't pay enough. America has been hopeful and idealistic, and that has wrought a lot of good in the world, but far too many people have been taking it for granted for far too long. I don't mind starting to readjust that by killing drug runners.

So, uh, I've never done one of these Socratic things before. How do they end?

Typically, by making Socrates drink hemlock.

...Buy you a drink?

Thanks, I'll stick with Mountain Dew. Just as lethal, but spread over more years. Socrates was seventy; he couldn't afford to wait.