Donald Trump's latest idiotic foreign policy idea is a total naval blockade of Venezuela, which would be not only immensely impractical, but an act of open war. Axios's Jon Swan:
President Trump has suggested to national security officials that the U.S. should station Navy ships along the Venezuelan coastline to prevent goods from coming in and out of the country, according to 5 current and former officials who have either directly heard the president discuss the idea or have been briefed on Trump's private comments.
Driving the news: Trump has been raising the idea of a naval blockade periodically for at least a year and a half, and as recently as several weeks ago, these officials said. They added that to their knowledge the Pentagon hasn't taken this extreme idea seriously, in part because senior officials believe it's impractical, has no legal basis and would suck resources from a Navy that is already stretched to counter China and Iran.
Trump has publicly alluded to a naval blockade of Venezuela. Earlier this month he answered "Yes, I am" when a reporter asked whether he was mulling such a move. But he hasn't elaborated on the idea publicly.
In private, Trump has expressed himself more vividly, these current and former officials say.
"He literally just said we should get the ships out there and do a naval embargo," said one source who's heard the president’s comments. "Prevent anything going in."
"I'm assuming he's thinking of the Cuban missile crisis," the source added. "But Cuba is an island and Venezuela is a massive coastline. And Cuba we knew what we were trying to prevent from getting in. But here what are we talking about? It would need massive, massive amounts of resources; probably more than the U.S. Navy can provide."
Hawkish GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, has a different perspective about the value of a show of military force. "I've been saying for months that when the Venezuelan military sees an American military presence gathering force, this thing ends pretty quickly," he told me.
"This thing" being the government of Nicolas Maduro, of course. The US Navy wants nothing to do with this stupidity, but they're already being portrayed as not sufficiently patriotic to Dear Leader Trump and giving the Navy a major boost in Pentagon spending in swing states in order to get them on board with the war effort is seen as a worthwhile endeavor by right-wing goofballs like Hugh Hewitt.
When the Air Force decided in 2017 not to base F-35A fighter aircraft at Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Michigan, it missed an easy way to achieve some equity in the distribution of defense-industry dollars in the states. Trump could direct the Pentagon to reverse that decision.
The Navy’s plans for a new “large unmanned surface vessel” calls for a ship which could be built at a Great Lakes facility; near Detroit makes sense, if only out of fairness to a state that has been largely ignored in the Trump military rebuild. Given the likely long-term need for many of these ships in the future, a new facility could be planted and grown along with the program. It pains this Buckeye to say so, but somewhere along the Michigan coast next door to Ohio would be equitable.
A focus on Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin need not be limited to the Defense Department. Recently, Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) pushed successfully for the planned relocation of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management to Grand Junction, Colo., in a brilliant move to bring bureaucrats closer to the citizens they regulate and whom they are supposed to serve. Sending large parts of the Environmental Protection Agency to Flint, Mich., or nearby locations would drive home the same message.
Trump has the chance to drain the swamp while making government agencies much more attuned to the people in flyover country. But he must act soon.
Yet, it is really the Navy’s utter failure to deliver even a bare-bones plan to realize the president’s promise of a 355-ship Navy that ought to rankle the commander in chief. A new chief of naval operations will arrive soon. The president ought to have waiting on his desk copies of the speeches in which he promised, and then promised again, a 355-ship Navy, along with the slogan famously used by Winston Churchill scrawled with the black Sharpie that Trump likes to use: “Action this day!”
The pressure on the US Navy to make a blockade work is on...and the result will be yet another option to get us into a war at Trump's convenience.
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