First - the reasons given.

Drugs: If the Trump regime cared about drug trafficking, they would not have pardoned the Honduran ex-president convicted of it.

The attacks on Venezuelan ‘drug boats’ were spectacle and priming. For months, the media helped prime the public for what happened yesterday.

But how does kidnapping Maduro and his wife stop cocaine being trafficked to the US? It doesn’t. But Trump supporters cannot think in abstracts. They’ve been fed an image of Maduro as Tony Montana.

Democracy:
Trump doesn’t care about democracy in his own country (he made extreme efforts to destabilise the electoral process in his own country) and certainly not in Venezuela. Additionally, his own supporters are not fans of historic US efforts at nation building. But this move gives his base something to argue about an chew on. Meanwhile the non-Trump republicans really like a good military in the middle of the night show.

What they’ve done in Venezuela leaves is a dangerous power vacuum.

Oil:
Trump doesn’t care about oil, but he does care about oil companies who contribute to his growing financial wealth. He absolutely doesn’t care if Venezuela’s oil producing infrastructure is crumbling. He cares only about the graft he can extract when he opens the field to corporations who can make a business of ‘revitalizing’ it.

While some of those around him may dream of returning to an imperial US, Trump doesn’t have dreams like that. He dreams of staying in power and gilded ballrooms.

Spheres of influence:
There are, without a doubt, those within the Trump administration who do think in the abstract. They don’t give a shit about Venezuela either, but this act signals to China and Russia that a new world order, made up of aggressive spheres of regional influence is perfectly okay with them.

But Trump can’t even mentally conceive of something that broad or abstract. For him, this strike is a way to stop the media attention on Epstein and inflation.

If Trump loses power in the midterms, his graft game is up. While SCOTUS might grant him unlimited criminal power, the one arm of government that can over-ride SCOTUS and curtail his criminality is congress.

What Trump knows is that Americans love a spectacle. They can be for it - the right loves a good show of force - or against it, but it doesn’t actually matter, because it shifts attention away from the concrete realities of inflation, healthcare insurance and his association with Epstein.

Trump cannot think longterm, but those around him do. Giving tacit permission for China to invade Taiwan or Russia to take over Ukraine also paves the way for the US acquisition of the parts of the world they want. And an extreme rise in militarism which requires the suspension of all sorts of everyday rights that are taken for granted in stable democracies.

The US far right needs to be able to point at monstrous aggressive instability to force through their goals of a white, christian US.

It is hard to keep your eye on two games being played at the same time. But this is what has been happening all along. This is why the hard right white Christian nationalists in the US tolerate (and even embrace) Trump.

Not because he has the ability to agree with them ideologically, but because his flagrant global irresponsibility destabilises settled orders enough to make their goals possible.