Trump is unleashing forces beyond his control

World leaders know that the most catastrophic conflicts can start from the most modest beginnings.

- David French

“War,” Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “is a mere continuation of policy by other means.” If there is one line that virtually every army officer learns from Clausewitz’s posthumously published 1832 book, On War, it is that description of the purpose of armed conflict.

Those words were among the first that popped into my head when I woke up Saturday morning to the news that the US military had attacked Venezuela, seized its dictator, Nicolas Maduro, and brought him to the US to face criminal charges.

The reason those words occurred to me was simple: The attack on Venezuela harks back to a different time, before the 19th century world order unravelled, before two catastrophic world wars and before the creation of international legal and diplomatic structures designed to stop nations from doing exactly what the US just did.

One of the most important questions any nation must decide is when — and how — to wage war.

It’s a mistake, incidentally, to view Clausewitz as an amoral warmonger. He wasn’t inventing the notion he describes; he was describing the world as it was. His statement is a pithy explanation of how sovereign states have viewed warfare for much of human history.

When a strong state operates under the principle that war is just another extension of policy, it is tempted to operate a bit like a mob boss. Every interaction with a weaker nation is tinged in some way with the threat of force: Nice little country you have there — shame if something happened to it.

This is not fanciful. In a telephone conversation with The Atlantic’s Michael Scherer, President Donald Trump threatened Venezuela’s new leader, Ms Delcy Rodriguez, who served as Maduro’s vice-president. “If she doesn’t do what's right,” Mr Trump said, “she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”