While Americans have spent the last 24 hours justifiably focused on Trump's exposure in the Epstein files, the president has been increasingly engaged in another dangerous flirtation: with yet another war.

The supercarrier USS Gerald R. Ford and its strike group are nearing Venezuela, capping off the most significant U.S. military escalation in Latin America since the 1994 U.S. invasion of Haiti. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has mobilized an estimated 200,000 troops in hopes of staving off regime change. Trump, meanwhile, keeps treating the Caribbean as his personal shooting gallery, with the death toll from missile strikes on civilian boats he accuses (without offering evidence) of drug smuggling now reaching eighty.

Our cosplaying “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth took another step this afternoon, officially designating the build-up Operation Southern Spear. His announcement — on X, of course — hit all the imperial chestnuts the U.S. has historically used to justify its actions in Latin America: describing targets as “narco-terrorists” and the entire Western Hemisphere as “America’s neighborhood.”

“Narcoterrorism” — a word you will see everywhere if the war begins — was a piece of agitprop first used at scale by the Reagan administration in the 1980s. It was a way of rhetorically linking the socialist governments of Cuba and Nicaragua to the moral panic over cocaine and crack to boost support for his interventions in Central America’s civil wars. This was especially ironic given that the region’s governments and factions most directly involved in the drug trade were right-wing U.S. allies, including the Nicaraguan Contras and Panamanian dictator/CIA asset Manuel Noriega.¹ When the Cold War ended and Noriega ceased to be useful, his former boss at the CIA, George H.W. Bush reversed course and declared that the Panamanian dictator had been a narcoterrorist after all, as the pretext for the 1989 invasion that overthrew him.²

War with Venezuela will make even less sense, at least under the terms the Trump apparatus is trying to justify it. Trump has justified his lawless assassinations of smugglers and fishermen by raising the specter of fentanyl — the early 21st-century replacement for 1980s’ crack in the American imagination. At an Oct. 15 press conference, he claimed: “The boats get hit, and you see that fentanyl all over the ocean … It’s like floating in bags. It’s all over the place.” He claimed that every strike against a boat thus saved “25,000 American lives” — itself an unhinged claim, given that the last total reported one-year number of overdose deaths by the CDC was less than 74,000, and that was for all drugs combined.