Once, we had wars of choice. Today, we have wars of distraction.

Call the catastrophically misguided war in Iran and the blink-and-you-missed-it war with Venezuela the Epstein Wars.

These were not wars fought to defend U.S. national security. They were not wars fought to advance our national interests.

They were wars conjured up not by generals or seasoned foreign policy advisors but by a frightened old man and his public relations team to distract from a scandal he fears will be his undoing.

Their massive human, economic, and geopolitical costs being undertaken to serve the narrow self-interests of not a nation but that man, the president of the United States.

The facts of what has unfolded to date in these wars make this clear. Trump and his team could not coherently express a rationale for entering into either “military operation.” They offered many possibilities, and spouted many blatant lies, but shifted between them carelessly as if they did not matter.

Because they did not matter.

The leaders of Venezuela were corrupt, criminal even. But they were not terrorists. They are not terrorists. They pose no direct threat to the people or territory of the United States.

Iran was nowhere near acquiring a nuclear weapon. It had no ability to deliver such a weapon. There was no imminent threat and indeed, to the degree to which Iran had moved closer to gaining the ability to manufacture a weapon, it was in large part due to actions taken by the president during his first term, when he tore up the effective, successful nuclear agreement struck during the Obama administration.

The operation in Venezuela began with the murder on the high seas of occupants of small craft the U.S. alleged were trafficking in drugs. We attacked them with no evidence of these alleged crimes. We administered the death penalty to the occupants of the boats without due process. (In some cases,........

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