Of all the decisions a president can make, the most perilous is going to war. The Vietnam War doomed Lyndon Johnson, just as the Korean War did Harry Truman. The Iraq invasion was a political debacle for George W. Bush. The lesson is that presidents should avoid war at almost any cost. 

But Donald Trump, no student of history, has not absorbed that lesson. For months, he has been courting war with Venezuela: blowing up boats alleged to be smuggling drugs, massing naval forces and fighter jets in the Caribbean, demanding the resignation of President Nicolás Maduro and declaring the closure of Venezuela’s airspace. 

He may hope these measures will be enough to get rid of Maduro. If they aren’t, Trump appears poised to launch direct attacks on Venezuela. In a Thanksgiving address to U.S. troops, he said those strikes are “going to start very soon.” 

Why he would be willing to take such a hazardous step is not obvious. Trump ran on a promise to stay out of foreign conflicts. He has no idealistic mission to spread democracy. Venezuela hasn’t attacked U.S. targets or built weapons of mass destruction. Most of his supporters don’t care who governs Venezuela, or how. 

Trump has framed his policy as essential to smashing drug cartels and stopping the flow of lethal drugs. But fentanyl is what accounts for most U.S. overdose deaths, and it comes mostly from China and Mexico. What comes from Venezuela is cocaine, the majority of which goes to Europe. 

This dubious pretext lost all........

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