John M. Crisp: Trump's and Hegseth's belligerence is directed at the wrong target

John M. Crisp, Tribune News Service on Dec 9, 2025

Published in Op Eds

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President Donald Trump and Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth, at first glance, do not look like a natural match.

Hegseth joined the Minnesota Army National Guard in 2003 and served tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. Trump, on the other hand, followed the path of other white guys with resources and avoided military service altogether during the Vietnam War, largely thanks to a highly questionable diagnosis of bone spurs.

But both Trump and Hegseth are deeply attracted to the trappings of the military—uniforms, parades, flyovers, high-powered weapons and big explosions—and neither is very concerned about the norms, standards, rules and laws that our nation and the world have developed in the effort to impose some limits on the most brutal of all of humanity’s activities: making war.

Thus we have a spectacular exhibition of war-making writ small currently taking place in the Caribbean. The explosions produced by rockets slamming into speedboats are dramatic, the destruction impressive.

And probably illegal, by both national and international law. I’m not particularly qualified to make that case and probably neither are you. But it doesn’t take much research among experts in military and maritime law to discover convincing evidence that the killings in the Caribbean are, at best, extrajudicial and, maybe, war crimes.

But I’ll leave that to the experts. My objections involve Trump’s eager expansion of the use of the military under flimsy pretenses. He’s already demonstrated his enthusiasm for force by his deployment of the military and federalized national guard units to American cities under the pretext that they were threatened by uncontrolled chaos. So why not deploy our most potent military firepower to destroy the threat facing us in the Caribbean?

But is it really a threat? My chances of overdosing on opiates laced with fentanyl are close to zero, and if you’re reading this newspaper, yours are probably the same. Why? Because we don’t use illegal drugs. Further, the citizens among us who do take illegal drugs are adults making personal choices or youngsters making bad choices.

I make no defense of drug runners, but the fact that many Americans are willing consumers undercuts Trump’s characterization of drug traffic as an aggressive threat to “millions” of Americans and that it can be turned away only with force.

Besides, Trump’s math is dubious: Last week Trump again claimed that every boat destroyed means 25,000 American lives saved. But 22 destroyed boats times 25,000 equals 550,000 lives. While a solid figure for drug overdose deaths is difficult to nail down, a credible case can be made for around 75,000 to 80,000 per year.

That’s quite a gap. The case for going to war against drug traffickers should not require such sketchy math.

I wish Trump and Hegseth would redirect their belligerence against a proper adversary, Russia, for example.

While Venezuela is just being Venezuela, Russia is illegally and brutally invading a nation that aspires to the liberal principles that the U.S. helped establish after World War II: democracy, fair elections, rule of law, equality, freedom and so on. While Ukraine slowly loses ground, Russia, a kleptocratic autocracy, is playing Trump’s envoys for time, with no intention of agreeing to an end of the war that stands in the way of Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s goal to dominate Ukraine, the Baltic states and Europe.

Putin will not be stopped by diplomacy; he understands only power.

But while Trump uses the U.S.’s biggest aircraft carrier and a battle group to throw our weight around in the Caribbean, he is withdrawing our military, financial and moral support from Ukraine and Europe.

In the Bible this is called straining at a gnat (Venezuela) and swallowing a camel (Russia).

Here’s the basic problem: Venezuela is easy; Russia is hard. Trump and Hegseth, with maximum bluster and bravado, are quick to project our military power against a weak adversary, but against a strong adversary in service of a good cause, they’re missing in action.

But isn’t this what bullies always do?

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