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Did Trump Just Start World War III? [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-09-03

There are a lot of diaries here and elsewhere about what Trump did yesterday in ordering the destruction of a boat near Venezuela and the death of the 11 people on board. Much of the concern is about what it signifies domestically — because Trump, like all autocrats, creates foreign enemies in order to seize and maintain control his domestic situation. But I want to ask those assembled here to think about a different aspect: What will world leaders take away from Trump’s latest action?

First, consider this: Trump ordered his — our — military, the mightiest in history, to take out a small boat that was unarmed and that posed no immediate threat even if it was carrying illegal drugs. As Chris Hayes pointed out tonight, that boat was a thousand miles from the US and could never have come anywhere near us.

Second, we have only the word of an absolute liar that the boat was carrying illegal drugs AND that they were destined for the US. No evidence, no records . . . nothing.

He posted on social media that Tuesday's US military operation had targeted members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Trump said the vessel was in international waters and was transporting illegal narcotics bound for the US. . . . Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump said that US forces had "shot out" a "drug-carrying boat" in the vicinity of Venezuela. "A lot of drugs in that boat," he said.

How does he know? Did his gut tell him this? Did his need for something, anything, to distract from Epstein! Epstein! Epstein! lead him to order the strike? How will we know? If there was any evidence, it’s now at the bottom of the sea and burnt to a cinder.

Any competent adviser (and he hasn’t fired them all yet) would have told him that if we did suspect drug running, we should track the boat, since it would clearly have been heading toward a collection point, and then track the mother ship until it entered our waters, where the Coast Guard would capture it and we would be able to interrogate the crew and get more intel with which to truly fight the drug war.

So that’s the third thing that this act will lead world leaders to consider. Trump acts impulsively, without thinking about the consequences, without looking at the next steps needed. And when he orders the most powerful military in the history of the world to carry out his impulses, they salute and carry them out.

This is not the first time Trump has acted violently against a sovereign nation, but it is the first time, so far as I can think of one, that he has committed an act of violence far from the United States against another country’s nationals without even a pretext of justification, and moreover an act clearly to the detriment of his stated goal (in this case, stopping drugs from coming into the US).

Leaders of Europe and other countries have gamed out how to deal with Trump — the Trump of last month, or last week, when he could be counted on to at least hesitate before doing something crazy. They knew how to flatter him, how to play to his vanity, how to make him think their reasonable proposals were really all his idea. I don’t think they know how to deal with the Trump of this week, and they absolutely have to be terrified of the Trump of next week and the one after. And I am sure their intelligence services are giving them more accurate information about Trump’s accelerating physical and mental decline than we are being told.

How long will it be before some group of nations decides that, for their own survival, they have to stop Trump any way they can?

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