There’s a terrible pattern in American life. Every decade or so, a president steps forward, pounds a podium, and tells us we must wage war for something noble, clean and digestible to American sensibilities.
We’re told it’s for “freedom,” or “stability,” or now, apparently, “to stop drugs.”
Oh no — never for oil, or power, or corporate interests we’re not supposed to talk about.
And like clockwork, a good chunk of America nods along. And always has.
Now in 2025, Donald Trump is floating the idea of launching a land war with Venezuela.
Not sanctions.
Not diplomacy.
Not embargoes.
A war — “to stop drugs.”
And just like that, Venezuela has popped up as our newest international villain ready to be bombed for their and our own good. Just. Like. That.
Really?
We’ve heard this song before.
The last time we fell for a sales pitch this flimsy, it came wrapped in yellowcake uranium and aluminum tubes. Colin Powell held up props at the U.N., America swallowed it whole, and our kids were shipped to the desert while Halliburton billed the government by the hour.
The truth came later:
No weapons of mass destruction.
No imminent threat.
Just oil. Lots of oil.
And dead is dead, no matter what excuse you stamp on the paperwork. Killing is killing — and the Iraq War cost plus or minus half a million Iraqi lives, thousands of dead and wounded American troops, and trillions swept into our $37 trillion national debt.
This is the lesson America refuses to learn:
War is the single worst investment a nation can make.
Look at the balance sheet:
Tanks aren’t hospitals.
Fighter jets aren’t schools.
“Shock and awe” doesn’t build affordable housing.
Trillions spent on war come back only as Veterans Affairs wards and prosthetics.
We bomb lives abroad and bury them in deficits at home.
Over 20 years, we poured nearly $8 trillion into Iraq and Afghanistan.
What did we get?
We didn’t get lower gas prices.
We didn’t get stability.
We didn’t get geopolitical advantage.
But we did get flag-draped coffins, broken veterans, and a trillion-dollar interest bill.
And we inherited entanglements that continue to reverberate 22 years later.
That’s not foreign policy. That’s presidential malpractice.
Meanwhile, China, the country we’re told to fear, has built its influence without starting international wars. They didn’t invade anyone. They didn’t need to. They built ports, railways, solar plants, roads, factories, and 5G networks.
War machines don’t build empires anymore.
Infrastructure does.
Yet here we are again, dusting off our well-worn American interventionist script.
This time we’re told Venezuela must be confronted “for drugs,” when every sober adult knows their real export isn’t cocaine or fentanyl. It’s oil, and Venezuela has some of the largest heavy-crude reserves on Earth.
And we’re supposed to believe a ground invasion in 2025 is about fentanyl?
Please.
We’re being asked to buy another war from the same guy who once said Bush’s war was “a real beauty — a big, fat mistake.” I guess Trump forgot his own campaign words.
Here’s what another war really buys you and me:
More dead kids from working-class towns.
Higher deficits, higher interest payments, and fewer dollars for Social Security and Medicare.
A VA system collapsing under prior wars.
Another decade of geopolitical distraction while China builds and we bleed.
War is the only business where the costs are guaranteed, and the profits never arrive.
America has real problems: health care, homelessness, aging infrastructure, senior care, climate resilience, affordable college — affordable anything. And that’s just the short list.
None of these are solved with tanks.
And Venezuela has nothing to do with any of them.
We have to stop falling for the repeated lie that war makes us safer or richer. It makes us poorer, angrier, more divided, and less morally credible.
The next time a politician tells us war is necessary, we should ask only one question:
“Show me the spreadsheet.”
Show me how it pays back.
Show me how it keeps my kids safe.
Show me how it strengthens America instead of hollowing it out.
Because the truth is simple:
War is the worst investment a nation can make.
Yet America keeps buying the same old tanking stock.
If we let ourselves get tricked into another war, this time in Venezuela — the problem won’t be the politician selling it.
It’ll be our country still willing to buy the worst investment ever.
Gary Horton is chairman of the College of the Canyons Foundation board. His “Full Speed to Port!” has appeared in The Signal since 2006. The opinions expressed in his column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Signal or its editorial board.
