Bulwark Takes - LIVE: Did Trump Just Order A Murder at Sea? | Bulwark on Sunday

Episode Date: September 7, 2025

NOTE: The guest had some technical issues with his audio. Join Bill Kristol and Ryan Goodman live as they discuss the U.S. military strike on a boat in the Caribbean, the fallout, and whether it violates international law.

Hi, Bill Crystal here from Bullwork on Sunday. Very pleased to be joined by Ryan Goodman, Professor of Law at NYU, editor of the indispensable just security.org website, expert in many aspects of constitutional law, international law, but also, well, national security law in general, and obviously you served at the Defense Department for a year or two on these matters, so you have actual experience. on it, and I thought we would talk about the blowing up by the U.S. military with, I think, a half-fire missile of a drug vessel in the Caribbean on Tuesday. Structs me as, well, I really would love to get your thoughts on legality of what happened, why it might have happened, what the implications are and so forth. So, Ryan, thanks for joining me. Yeah, thank you.

I'm really looking forward to the conversation. So on Tuesday, I think we, what we know, I think, is that this drug vessel, well, alleged drug vessel, a vessel, certainly, was blown up. The administration released video of it, apparently by a hellfire missile, many hundreds of miles away from the United States, I believe, in the Caribbean. And what else, what do you think, what do you think happened? What do we know, what's, what are the big questions about what happened? What do we think, what do we think we know what happened? my English isn't any good, but what do we think of the big questions about what happened? Yeah, I guess the two of the biggest questions are three.

It's a one, under what legal authority or who signed up on this? That's a big question number one. Two, I think he's actually who was on that vessel. So there's some indication from former officials. It's doubtful that 11 people on a boat that size would be transporting drugs rather than smuggling people. So who's on the boat? Because number two, number three, is this just the beginning to me? Is this part of a new campaign against similar vessels or even escalation towards kinetic warfare inside?

have been as well. So that's amazing of the biggest questions. And also, I suppose, or relatedly, I mean, we stop boats all the time, the Coast Guard does and apprehend people if they're swuggling drugs. And that seems not to have been considered this time. Yeah. I mean, taking Marco Rubio, Senator, Secretary Rubio's words at face value, which seemed very plausible, they could have interdicted the vote and they decided not to because they being the president of the United States said just blow it out of the water I don't want to try to stop the vote or apprehend the individuals just basically destroy it and kill them according to the secretary yeah that is striking I mean their own well I want to

get the second to their own explanations and justifications which was somewhat confusing and a bit self-contradictory but I mean say we're just about the the basic legal authority or lack thereof of what happened. Yeah, so I think that one way I want to kind of put this is we talk about the law a lot. I talk about the law day in, day out, and I'm definitely going to say bottom line up front, this is patently illegal, but just it's one of those moments in which knowing what seems to have happened here, it's just murder. I mean, murder, even if one never,

picked up a legal dictionary it just it seems like it's murder and it seems like it's murder and then just to drill down in the very way in which the defense department would define murder based on the defense department's pretty narrow but well-settled views of international law so under international law under any scenario it's hard for me to think how the lawyers could have signed off on that and that's that's part of that why that's one of my questions like who who signed up on this because basically either take the White House's attempt, it seems, to put the framework of this around war that we're in an armed conflict. In an armed conflict, you can't kill civilians, you can't

kill people who are just transporting drugs, and it would be murder under international law, Geneva Conventions, and the U.S. War Crimes Act, and Article 118 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. in the best case scenario for them, assuming we're in an armed conflict. And if we're not in an armed conflict, then you've still got murder under U.S. federal felony law, and you've got murder in the way the Defense Department acknowledges applies to extraterritorial U.S. military actions under international human rights law and the foreign restatement under U.S. law.

So our interpretations of it through the United States lens. So it's just, it's so, this is such a gigantic change. And I put it this way as well, having worked in the Defense Department, having worked on the law of war issues for decades now, I've never seen the Defense Department have a policy action of killing civilians. Like that's what we're talking about today. And that's why, yes, there's the legalities of it

and it's easy to make the legal argument, because I can't think of what, I always try to articulate what the strongest argument is on the other side. I don't know it. I don't know how they could even come to the conclusion that this is going to call. Now, that's very helpful, I hate to, powerful, I mean, what hates to hear, that this might have been an act, you know, a murder committed by the U.S. government. And we have, and you're bracketing even the question of how they assessed apparently, or claimed to have assessed that these were drug smugglers and members of a terrorist, again, as opposed to people swuggling in, you know, people who wanted to come to the U.S., and which would mean the most of the people on the, of the 11 people on the boat, perhaps

were just people who wanted to illegally enter the U.S., including children conceivably. I mean, it really is, and that seems, honestly, just from reading it, and the odds are probably a little greater on that side of the equation than the drug smuggler side. Yes. So a former official speaking to the New York Times in a byline piece by multiple New York Times, Times reported some of the best in the business said that it is more likely in their estimation that what you just said, that there was a smuggling human beings rather than smuggling drugs because when they smuggle drugs, the modus operandi is to have as few people on board as

possible, so as much of the cargo can be used for the narcotics. And then if you just take the next step from that, what you just said, which is if they are smuggling people, then part of the 11 people that were killed of the migrants. It's not even the drug smugglers. And that's just god awful. And we do have a new statement, as you've said, Bill, it's been changing over time, but we have a new statement, very official from the executive branch to the Congress

as a war powers report. And it notably fails to identify who those people are, and even notably fails to say that they were trend to Araagua. and it says in fact that they were affiliated with a designated terrorist organization and coming from my background at the DOD and the like affiliated with usually does mean one ratchet out it does not mean the membership in the group it does actually it's very meaningful to say something like that so do they really really know who they were if they knew who they were you would leave with that you would have it in the war powers report and then

my colleague test bridgman she tweeted this out i'll put it out on blue sky she said that she's read every War Powers report that's ever been published. She means that. She's the head of the War Powers Report project that's based at the recent Law and Security. They read and coded every single War Powers report that has ever been issued in U.S. history. And she said this one is lacking. There are conspicuous absences in this one that seem to suggest they have a something is very suspicious.

And I would say, and I think she would say they seem to just have a lack of knowledge of who they actually killed. And I would say just for me, watching from the outside, having been in the executive branch many years ago, but maybe having a bit of the ability to sense when people are saying things with confidence that they know are true or throwing out things that they hope will deflect or think possibly can be true. And we've had so many statements that have sort of thrown out and then not backed up, right? Well, we know exactly who these people are. I think one of them, was that hexath maybe you said? We know their names.

We had intercepts that prove that it's a drug, prove that they were. transporting drugs, imminence, there was an imminent threat. I think maybe that was Rubio, who throughout that phrase, you know, kind of remembering that that might be, hoping that might be a justification for this kind of preemptive and fatal military strike. Collective self-defense, it just feels to me, and I'd like you to go through some of these in their applicability or not applicability, but that just feels me where people are saying phrases they think will help them

either legally or obviously in terms of the public relations on this, but it almost seems like none of them applies, or at least they haven't been followed up on, when you would expect, as you say, when you have the official war powers, where that's the moment to say there are these individuals. We know some of the names, not all the names, perhaps, or at least we know the names, that's classified, but we'll tell you privately about those names, and we know we have this kind of intelligence. We're not going to give away sources and methods, but, you know, we've all seen many of these kinds of reports and free things. And we've seen a final point. why not just make and let you comment on all of it is we've also seen many times after military action

an actual briefing by uniformed officers and by the secretary of defense or spokesman and where they go into some detail about what happened and explain both the legal justification but also just why they know what they know and why they did what they did the iran attack would be a good example the chairman of the joint chief secretary of defense uh i mean there's been absolutely nothing i guess Isn't that right? I mean, there's been comments and, you know, random, you know, when people were shouting questions by Heck Seth, Rubio, and Trump, and President Trump.

But no official account of what happened. That's right. Yeah, I think there's, I agree with all of that, there's an absence in coming forward in a forthright manner. And the way in which you would think they would want to, just here's, we're going to present our strong guest argument or strong argument. I also thought it was notable that the first

leadership on this seem to be, the Secretary of State rather than the Secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That's also notable. What you said in terms of the White House puts out the statement that it was in collective self-defense, which sounds like they got some lawyer, maybe it's Stephen Miller with some legal background to use the terms that lawyers would think, okay, they might justify something, but it was deeply suspicious. Collective self-defense technically means that there's another state out there. that thinks it was subject to an armed attack and has asked the United States specifically

to come to its defense against that armed attack, which seemed very implausible. And then like you said, Bill, lo and behold, when they submit the War Powers report to Congress, it's not in there. There's no reference to it. And that's in comparison to prior War Powers reports where if it's in collective self-defense,

you put it in the War Powers report because it puts you in such a stronger footing. If the President of the United States is using military force in order to protect some ally or partner because they require it in an armed attack, it would be in there. So that's part of it. And then the one, you know, I think others who are not following it as closely might have still seen that President Trump said that the vessel was coming to the United States. And Secretary Rubio said, you know, they're heading. They were headed to Trinidad and Tobago, which is still 1,600 miles away from Miami. It's just, it's like, and they took the monumental decision of ending these people's lives based on, they can't even get their story as to what they knew or what about it.

And even and they think obviously saying that, well, drugs kill a lot of people in the United States, which is true, and we should be very tough on drugs modeling and so forth, that that somehow justifies it. But they sort of threw in the phrase imminent threat, I suppose, they thought that also helped. yeah i mean is it an imminent yeah so it has to be exactly the imminent threat is legal it's not just sounds legal is legal but it has to be an imminent threat of an armed attack or in certain situations an imminent threat that this individual poses to uh american lives but imminent in the sense of they're about to pull the trigger uh not that they're about to bring in drugs to the the United States which will be used by U.S. citizens and the population and people will potentially die from the use of those strokes down the line. Like inconceivable. And so that's

why it would boil down to like this is not murder and self-defense or killing in self-defense. It would blow it down to a very strong case under US federal law of murder and under the UCMJ unless there are other pieces of information that we don't know about. And under the UCMJ, Also, just to put a finer point on it, people within the military cannot claim the defense of following orders if the order itself is patently unlawful. So I think we really want to know what they were told and who signed off at it. And just by way of background, I am also thinking that there is this executive order that was super unusual past a few weeks ago that said the President of the United States and

the Attorney General shall declare for the entire executive branch, where is the law? Is that what happened? is it similar to what we think might have happened with the airplanes that were being sent to El Salvador Cicott Prison in which it sounds like the senior officials in the Justice Department, Emil Bove, and some of the reporting, Pan Bondi and Stephen Miller cooked up some legal argument

that they sent down. It's the most plausible explanation, I think, that people in the military can have that we were told by somebody that it was legal. That's what's so hard to figure out. figure out um because i think that people are putting themselves at risk legal risk and just i want to get back to that a second but the the i just seen it out of the boats a thousand miles away it's a little fishing boat um we have pretty good capabilities for stopping those boats

boarding them if they fire obviously we have the right to fire back or if they look like they're going to fire even but none of that has even tried i guess i can't quite get over that you know it's not if we don't have a lot of history of doing this in the Caribbean and the ability to do this. Yeah, so to me, it does raise, because I want to try to think of what the strongest argument on the other side, I do think it does raise potentially the strongest argument that Secretary of Rubber has articulated as a policy matter, but it also shows you the rationale. So it sounds like he's saying, yeah, we could have interdicted them, as we've always done, and my understanding from speaking to people with the postcard and the like, and we have a

He's published a just security by Mark Nevin. It's so routine the ways in which they're able to fairly straightforwardly apprehend these kinds of votes and then arrest the individuals and confiscate the narcotics. And Rubio has said that, no, the president just wanted to send a signal by blowing it up. And then the policy argument that he's making is, look, yes, it is true that we can apprehend and confiscate the product, but that is already part of the drug smugglers, Trenda, Aragua business model. They priced that in,

and it's only like a small percentage in which we're really ever going to intercept the boats and the confiscate the product and the rest of the individuals, and they price all of that end. What they don't price in is that we'll just blow them up. And that's why we took the decision. So he's actually giving us the policy justification. And just to articulate it,

so there's something to that, if you do the think about the math that way, but that's not an imminent threat. That's not an imminent threat. So it's like it shows you the fluctuating rationales that they're using and none of that gets to, you can't kill people, outright murder, even if that's your policy bill.

Yeah, that's well said. What about the Coast Guard? We talked about this a little bit when we were chatting the other day. I mean, where is the Coast Guard? Do we know this? No. And that's, so we don't know, and the piece by Martin Abbott is very good because he was a Navy JAG and worked alongside Coast Guard. And he basically explains what the baselines operations are, that you would assume that there would be Coast Guard very much involved in the Coast Guard would take the lead. And they had the authorities to conduct boarding and seizure and warnings and all the rest of it. But they don't seem to have been involved in this. It seems to be a purely military Pentagon. operation. And the one of the piece I've put onto that is, based on some of the reporting New York Times and elsewhere, it seems as there now for at least a couple of weeks that the

Coast Guard has been excluded from the military operations that are happening just outside the Venezuelan coastline. And so that does raise for me the one big question, one of the big questions back to the like who authorized this, was this pre-planned? Like to actually have the situation where you've got military assets in this, in this. in the area, but you don't have Coast Guard assets, sounds like this is more deliberate and you'd maybe think that more people signed off and that I knew it was coming,

rather than something that happened in the immediacy of the moment, like the airplane is going to El Salvador or in a secret prison. So that, and that troubles me more, because it means more people in the loop that would actually authorize something like that. Right, I mean, it was planned to be,

and Hellfire Missile was apparently shot to kill these people, there was no question is sometimes there are things that happen in war that are unfortunate and maybe deserve punishment maybe under the pressure of the occasion they don't deserve punishment because it's understandable but you know where you're at a conflict you know you think you've been fired on you haven't been fired on you fire back it turns out it was a mistake or you killed civilians but you know authentically believed you were at risk or your your your colleagues your fellow troops were at risk this is nothing like that and this is that well that's actually i haven't really focused on this. I think you're really right to raise that the Rubio justification, which is

sort of plausible, as you say, as a policy matter, kind of, you know, they'll only really listen if we kill them is, of course, also extremely revealing as to the absence of imminent threat, the absence of the normal defenses of why you have to kill people, especially if you don't really know who they are, it seems to me, which they haven't, which isn't at all clear they do. Right. Absolutely. And I would just, you know, suggest to anyone who's thinking along the lines of, well, this is the, this is, the rubier's right as a policy matter and this is what we need to do to stop the scourge and that members of Trenda O'Ragua have killed more Americans through narcotics and the like

than the al-Qaeda offshoot, al-Shabaab in Somalia, I would just suggest that what's, you know, where's your limiting principle? Why wouldn't you, would you allow the use of force, like this inside the United States. We do not allow, we've never allowed law enforcement to just decide they're going to kill drug traffickers. I can't find a distinction morally between what just happened on the high seas versus why not just start having, why not just start doing that inside the United States. And as you say, part of the reason behind we don't do things like that is also due process. So to me, it's the same kind of due process that I think triggered it for Joe Rogan as to the deportation of people to seek our prison without actually

figuring out, do you have the right person? We have criminal trials to figure out was that person actually a drug trafficker? And just to put another final point on it, and inside the United States, if they were convicted by a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, they would not get capital benefit because it's not capital events. So the road that folks are going down by thinking that this is palatable or smart idea is really atrocious. And just to put one more final point on it, President Trump has said that he deeply respect what the former president of the Philippines of Tartay had done in executing in the way in which he carried out his quote-unquote drug war, which included extrajudicial

killings and the like. And notably, one of the most vocal critics of Dutarte was Senator Rubio writing letters about how we should suspend financial assistance to the Philippines because it's extrajudicial killings, and that's not how you handle a drug problem. And Dutarte, where is he now? He's in the Hague because he's being charged with extrajudicial killings by the International Criminal Court. Do you have any insight as to how the chain of command allowed this to happen, or made this happen, I guess, to make it more accurate? And normally there's obviously people look at the justification they're being given from above, and then, of course, lawyers are involved. Do you have any sense of what might have happened in the Pentagon or when the White House usually gets involved too, right? Yeah. I mean, this is maybe a strange thing to say in a way.

I'm heartened by the idea that the career lawyers inside the DOD were potentially excluded from the process. I'm heartened by that in the sense that, not really, but that they, it's very hard for me to imagine there's people signing off on this. And it's a better world in which they didn't in a sense. But there's a line in Charlie Savage's reporting and Charlie's invest in the business, which seems to be. to indicate that career lawyers were excluded from the process, which also shows you consciousness of guilt. Why would you exclude the career lawyers from the process? So that's part of the, to me, what I meant at the outset about I really want to know who signed up and how that went down the chain. And one of the articles said that the Pentagon is looking for, you know,

is debating or looking for the right legal justification for what happened after the fact, right? I think that, yeah, yeah, the only piece of that that I'm not sure if it, and maybe I'm reading it just too literally, is that you could say they're looking for the right legal justification to tell the public. Yeah, fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the most charitable thing to be said is maybe they have a legal justification in their heads that they're thinking, well, what should we tell the public?

But I think it sounds like what was reported in the past about the strike against Salamani in the first Trump administration, that it might have been in strike first and then trying to come up with a legal justification later. But now, what, five days later, we were speaking on Sunday, midday. There's been no briefing, to my knowledge. I think there hasn't been, well,

I don't think there's been reported a briefing of the gang of eight, the congressional leaders on this, which they are supposed to do, obviously. There's been this literally one-and-a-quarter page letter to Congress on the work required, under the War Powers Act, which is extremely vague, and which seems to imply that the legal justification is the President's Article II powers.

I mean, there's no other, to my knowledge, there's no actual like law cited in it, you know, or anything like that, USC, this and that, you know. So anyway, yeah, I mean, and they're not having the public press conferences, as I said earlier, and the military hasn't stepped forward, and they're not going on shows to explain what happened after this alleged victory in the war on drugs.

So all of that just feels to me as if they're either very worried about, I mean, they're worried about what they did. They are not very confident in the justification. It may be either policy or legal for what they did. I don't know. This is not the way this administration really, to be fair, almost any administration behaved after what they think is a successful and defensible military action that would be popular

if it were what they said it was. Absolutely. And that's also the other piece, you know, just in terms of the various things that haven't happened that would ordinarily happen, is the reporting that things on Friday, they were scheduled to do a classified briefing of it seemed like a gang of eight or members of Congress

and then they canceled it. So that's also not something you do if you think you have a strong case, even or a plausible case to be made. And then, and maybe it's because I would imagine that there must be some outset inside the DOD, subsequent to the strike of people, especially we're not in place.

included in the process, but to be able to satisfy folks that they are not in legal jeopardy. And Jack Murphy, who seems like a very well-networked and resourced individual, has said on social media, at least, that people at Southcom are looking for lawyers because they're worried about that. So maybe that goes into, you know, you've got to have a public explanation

of what the legal rationale is coming out of the White House and out of the Secretary of Defense. That also satisfies an internal audience, not just the public audience and not just U.S. allies and the like in Congress, but an internal audience that's extremely important, which is members of the Defense Department and the U.S. military. So I think that's one part of it. And then I think maybe it's just worth my saying one other line or two about what you just

touched on Bill in the sense that they did not cite any domestic authorization in the War Powers report, and it seems like they're relying on Article 2. just in case it's helpful for people know this, there is no congressional statute that authorizes this. One does not even need to enter, and I even am building even saying the words, enter any discussion or debate about the 2001 AEOMath following September 11th.

It has nothing to do with this. That was about al-Qaeda and the attack on September 11th. There's no, I can come up with lots of creative legal ideas. There's nothing that can tie that authorization to this. or any other authorization to know it. We'll have a piece of just security in all likelihood soon from Marty Viederman, who is also an expert in this area. There's also a very weak Article 2 authority

for them to complain this, because here's the argument. Do you think the president of the United States has the authority to kill people anywhere around the world that he suspects of crimes? He or she, just any future president. Do you think that's an Article 2 authority? Right? So I don't know what they're going to come on.

Yeah. No, it's really astonishing. Now, they do say in the letter, I believe, under the War Powers Act to Congress, that this is not, there could be future such actions. I can't remember exactly how they put it, but it's, they imply, well, they don't apply, they say. They may, this is part of an ongoing effort or something like that. So, I don't know if that makes it, that's even more startling, I guess. They just think they have the right to do this repeatedly with no more explanation than they give in so far. Yeah, and the Wall Street Journal reporting right around Tuesday suggested that there were actually plans to carry out more strikes like this. I think see that the journal at the Times, one of the two are both right around then on Tuesday, we're also saying to carry out more strikes like this this week. And to me, that might actually be a good indication that there is now resistance internally to doing so, but who knows, and if anything, they might be taking this to the next level. level of escalation with respect to using lethal operations inside or any military operations

inside Venezuela itself. Well, let's talk about that because it seems to me, I can sort of see from their point of view, they'll take a little hit if they are taking any hit from, you know, on the questionableness of this attack. But if it's the precursor to a big assault on the Maduro regime with, you know, bombing of sites inside Venezuela or whatever, that'll get sort of forgotten, you know, as the kind of this was the opening operation of a much larger operation. But what is the, so A, do you think that's plausible, I guess,

just based on the reporting that we've seen? And B, what would the status of that be? I mean, what's the authorization for us? I mean, I guess Trenda Aragua is a designated terrorist organization. Does that give any kind of, and well, just talk about what is, what could be happening with respect to that as well as a whole? So I do think that we might be, it looks like there's lots of indications, that we might be going down that path.

I do wonder about it in the sense that I thought that a large part of the base of support for President Trump's agenda was ending forever wars, and this would be taking on in terms of counter-narcotics wars or drug wars, a potentially completely endless war with amorphous enemies. So it's very puzzling, to say the least.

And there's already some fracture coming on that Senator Rand Paul criticizing the vice president on the vessel itself blowing up with the vessel but that seems to be with the military assets that are in the region seems to be potentially where they go and then that is also a massive change from just blowing up the vessel i do think that under international law the united states government has a pretty good argument as to why blowing up that vessel was not a violation of the human charter if the vessel for example was not officially a flagged uh vessel by by the Venezuelan government or any other government.

But it doesn't seem to be the case, it seems to be a hapless boat with the members of these individuals on board. So that would not necessarily be a UN charter violation, et cetera. Going inside Venezuela, taking the fight directly onto Venezuela and Maduro, we're in a totally different category. And the authorizations of that both domestically,

in terms of unique Congress or something like that, and internationally is of a very different order. and under international law, at least, but I think even just in terms of public justification, what would be said is that there's this direct link between Maduro and Trindaragua. I think that's where they need to go. They need to go that way, at least for international law, I think in terms of public justification. And that has been under the Alien Enemies Act and the proclamation and the litigation, their argument, which is that Trend Deirago TDA is being directed by Maduro,

and we know that to be false based on the U.S. intelligence community and the NIC report that was not leaked but declassified, which we have, we the public, that's not what the U.S. intelligence community says. They're not acting at the direction of Maduro. So it would be really going to war on the public knowing that the predicate is false. But I do think that things might be heading in that direction. And the president wouldn't even presumably go, would he, maybe you would go to Congress and say I want authorization to, you know, it's in our national interest and it's necessary for us to take action, strike first, as it were, or not strike first, you would say it's in response to everything they've been doing, like sending drugs into our country. But it seems hard to see how that's legitimate without getting congressional approval. Oh, I can't imagine it being legitimate without getting congressional approval.

It checks off all of the boxes that folks look to, including not just like, is this a use of force in national interest, which is the one where I was alluding to with, can the President of the United States decide to kill anybody with the U.S. military force around the world that he or she suspects of a crime. That's one box that's not satisfied. But the next box that's not satisfied is that really does mean that the United States is going to what the Office of Legal Counsel's Justice Department will call. in the constitutional sense like that is going to war with venezuela um yet you know would need congressional approval for that there's no there's no way around that um and despite all of the congressional acquiescence to this president i come from the senate the republican side i can't imagine to get that authorization especially given everything we're talking about here seems like it's baked it's the intelligence community is saying it's not the situation that they're

the White House is claiming it is. It seems like an endless war. Like, what is the goal? Who exactly were fighting? And who are the combatants in this war? I mean, do members of the Congress really want to sign on to that in terms of the direction that seems like that would be going? That's a political question, but as a legal question,

they would need to sign up. I suppose they might think it's only some bombing. It'll be like the Iran. Iranian thing, it'll go well, hope, you know, from the U.S. point of view, and that one will get killed and we'll destroy things we say were needed to be destroyed. And maybe that's what they think they can do. And I guess say a word about that. I mean, how does it compare to Iran was the most recent use of force by Trump. And he seems to have regarded it as a success. And the world hasn't gone crazy about the fact that we did it. And so why is this different? Yeah, no, I think that that's, I mean, I think it's not different. in the sense that they needed authorization for what they did with Iran as well. And he may have taken away, and Stephen Miller and others, the lesson that we can just go ahead and do this unilaterally.

And even if there's some murmuring in Congress, it'll die down the next news cycle. Now, that, though, was a one-off military operation against Iran. And like you said, I suppose maybe they think they could do it. you know, 24-hour bombing where they say we've destroyed all of these drug sites and TDA targets inside Venezuela. We've not gone after the Venezuelan military per se, and we're done. We've sent a signal. I can imagine that they would do that, and they would say one and done. And that's very dangerous. But, I mean, that's opening an armed attack against another country, so it still means we need congressional authorization for that.

But I can imagine that's their political calculation. Right, and the Iranian regime really was responsible for the deaths of Americans and so forth in a way that it's not, I don't want to, the last person to defend Maduro or the Rizura regime or anything, but it's not, doesn't seem quite comparable, but I suppose they could think they could justify it all as part of the war drug. Say one last thing on the, this relates to their domestic arguments, doesn't it, about the alien enemies act and their attempt to sort of unilaterally make Venezuela an enemy, which then allows them to. to, they thought, they claimed allowed them to send these Venezuelans off to El Salvador and so forth? Yeah. So, they are, I mean, everybody anticipates that the Alien Enemies Act case is going to go to the Supreme Court. And it's an open question how the Supreme Court's going to rule. And coincidentally, in the same day as the bombing of the vessel, the most conservative circuit in the United States, the Fifth Circuit, ruled against the Trump administration on the

Alien Enemies Act saying that Trindaragua is not an organized force invading or engaging the creditor and incursion inside the United States and I'd say the Fifth Circuit is so conservative that's more conservative than the Roberts Court that's going up to the Supreme Court and therefore the government the Trump administration is in trouble legally um are they in such trouble legally if there's an ongoing war with Venezuela no so then they're on a different track and then they could say, you know, all this talk about Trendera-Waragua, this kind of organized gang and its linkages to Maduro and whether or not it is engaged in an incursion into the United States. Forget it. The United States is in an armed conflict with Venezuela, which would then trigger

the Alien Enemies Act. And in fact, to much broadly, much more broadly encompass any national Venezuela and then, of course, a subset of Venezuela nationals or TDA members. and we're off to the races. Now, there's some folks who are speculating that that might actually be what's behind some of the mechanations that are happening in terms of blowing up this boat and the deployment of US military forces

and the potential escalation inside Venezuela. I don't know as to what's wagging the dog. That's the tail wagging the dog or not. But it certainly would change the composure of the administration's legal arguments going into the Supreme Court in the way that would be much more favorable to the administration. And right now that looks like there's a darn good likelihood

that they're gonna raise at the Supreme Court. And one of their signature policies will be overturned. Yeah, interesting. And also the, I think there are reports now that the forthcoming national security strategy being drafted by the Trump administration, contrary to all the talk about China for years and during the campaign and the bluster, if I could say,

about how we're taking on China, is now going to pull back from confronting both, China and Putin's Russia and be focused on the Western Hemisphere, kind of a more, you might say, version of America First. America First actually wasn't that bellicose even to the Western Hemisphere. I mean, the 1940 America First, but there have been, there's a kind of jacksonian, we're going to, we're not going to avoid all these wars far away, but we're going to throw our weight around here.

And that would be, I mean, consistent, I suppose, with the rhetoric about Panama and sort of Greenland, depending on what you think that, what hemisphere that's in. and consistent with a certain kind of authoritarian, if I could say, what's what I'm looking for, you know, sort of precedent elsewhere in the world. You bully the weak neighbors, you don't actually stand up to the difficult cases abroad. So I'm a little more, I visually discounted

to talk about, oh come on, we're gonna bob that as well. That just seems crazy, but I guess I'm now a little, I don't know, I feel like that's not something that could be ruled out. Yeah, and, I'm, and, It does seem Putin-esque in a sense of thinking about the sphere of influence around the United States in relationship to how that has been thought of in terms of Soviet and Russian terms. And it's also the oddity of turning away from China as a threat when the Kasper-Tel is on the Joe Rogan show

talking about how much China is sending fentanyl into the United States. It just doesn't seem like the most rational set of policy choices. to keep the country safe from, you know, true adversaries. No, but maybe that's not the fundamental, you know, calculation here. It's terrible. Anything we haven't covered that people should be looking for. I'm giving you a little set. What do you think happens in the next days and week or two?

Do they really, does Congress have, I mean, can they just get away with the current level of lack of clarity and transparency about anything that's happened? I don't think they can outrun that forever. So there needs to at least be briefings that would be a secret. But I also can imagine that there will be multiple opportunities for members of the military, including the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to appear before Congress, in which usually their testimony is candid. And so I do think there are opportunities for both Congress and then the American public

to actually find out what happened here. I do think if the shoe drops that these 11 individuals were not, in fact, drug smuggling, that I think would be a big change in the national conversation. So I'm looking to see what happens with any information that comes about on that and that maybe we'll come through investigative reporting and the like, because there's also gonna be

enough disgruntled individuals to maybe push that information out to the public. If it's there, if that's the case. And so there's the kinds of things that I'm looking for. And the biggest one is like, are there going to be another series of these kinds of attacks? And as has been indicated was the intent of the White House. So I think if we see that that doesn't occur, then maybe there really is an opportunity here for a realignment and that there's resistance, hopefully, going on inside the Defense Department against taking their own

people down this path. Yeah, well, that's really something to watch for, and that's so interesting. Ryan, thanks so much. It's been very helpful, very clarifying of an unclear situation, but I think we now know how to think about it at least and what to look for in the days and weeks ahead. So Ryan Goodman, thank you for joining me today. Thank you. I really appreciate the conversation.

And thank you all for joining us on Bullwark on Sunday.