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US attack on Venezuela raises questions of compatibility with just war theory – LifeSite

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Editor’s note: Catholic opinion is divided on the U.S. operation against the Venezuelan government and the capture of socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro. LifeSiteNews does not take an official stance on the issue. The piece below argues the attack failed to meet the criteria for a just war according to Catholic teaching. For an opposing viewpoint in support of the attack, click here to read Vicki Yamasaki’s piece entitled “Trump crushes narco-socialism: a victory for life and the Church.”

(LifeSiteNews) — Leading Catholic philosophers are questioning the pre-dawn launch of military strikes against Venezuela’s capital Caracas, which led to the capture of Nicolás Maduro and his wife by U.S. special forces on January 3.

In remarks to LifeSiteNews, philosopher Professor Edward Feser and Professor Joseph Capizzi, a scholar at the Catholic University of America, discussed the moral and legal justification for the U.S. military operation.

“The just war logic of cause, intention, and authority are all violated by this action which may explain why, I assume, the Trump administration is occasionally trying to claim it as an action of criminal law enforcement,” Capizzi said.

Capizzi said this new assertion conflicts with “an external military force entering a sovereign nation and whisking its leader away,” as well as the U.S. government’s previous claims of being in a “state of war” to justify strikes against suspected drug traffickers and their ships in the Caribbean Sea.

READ: Pope Leo responds to Maduro’s capture, urges peace, respect for Venezuela’s sovereignty

“The battle over the description of the act just surfaced in Maduro’s claim in Federal Court that he’s a prisoner of war,” Capizzi said. “Regardless, I believe the activity violates the logic of just war analysis.”

Professor Edward Feser outlined several main problems with America’s actions in Venezuela, namely “that the administration has not sought congressional authorization for such a wider commitment, and given the U.S. Constitution, that is contrary to the rule of law.”

Feser said that “Catholic teaching requires respect for the rule of law, and just war doctrine requires that a war be fought only under lawful authority.”

He also called out President Trump’s stated goal for attacking Venezuela, that is, “on securing oil access rights for American corporations.”

Feser noted that this not “a just war aim, and not something that American lives or the lives of Venezuelan civilians should be sacrificed for.”

Reports across multiple sources appear to indicate ulterior motives behind the military operation which have not been fully made transparent to the public.

Oil and money are behind Venezuela

Evidence is now surfacing that shows certain individuals allegedly affiliated with President Donald Trump are “cashing in” on Maduro’s capture.

One of the shady dealings pertains to money circulating through Polymarket, a crypto-based market that gambles on current events. The Wall Street Journal reported one anonymous bettor made more than $400,000 after betting $32,000 on Maduro’s downfall just hours before military attacks.

Breaking Points hosts Krystal Ball and Emily Jashinsky further discussed this, even alluding to “a potential connection to Steve Witkoff.”

“The level of corruption, corrupt dealings and the way that our whole economy and world is turning into a casino,” Ball said.

Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson mentioned another billionaire who stands to gain greatly from the capture of Maduro.

Paul Singer, founder and co-CEO of the hedge fund Elliott Investment Management and a major donor to the Republican Party, has economic interests in Venezuelan oil.

An affiliate of Elliott Investment Management, Amber Energy, purchased Citgo Petroleum for approximately $5.9 billion in November 2025. Citgo is an American-based subsidiary of the Venezuelan state-owned oil company PDVSA.

Johnson pointed out that “Singer’s strategy mirrors past successes, such as his 15-year litigation against Argentina’s debt default, which yielded billions for Elliott.”

Even more disturbing is the presence of arch-neocon Senator Lindsey Graham smirking at Trump’s side during a press gaggle aboard Air Force One on January 4. In fact, Senator Rand Paul has blamed Graham “as the primary instigator” behind President Trump’s operation in Venezuela.

“This is Lindsey Graham. Lindsey Graham has gotten to the president, who expressed — I saw a clip — there’s like 20 clips of [Trump] saying he’s not for regime change and how regime change has always gone wrong,” Paul said. “Somehow they’ve convinced him it’s different if it’s in our hemisphere.”

The Kentucky senator previously warned against military action in Venezuela, saying that “escalating military action in Venezuela without authorization cuts directly against President Trump’s America-First instinct to keep us out of unnecessary foreign entanglements.”

READ: Maduro’s capture raises questions of US election fraud linked to Venezuelan voting machines

The Catholic tradition of just war theory

Francisco De Vitoria was a Roman Catholic philosopher, jurist and theologian in Spain during the Renaissance. He founded the School of Salamanca, which advanced natural law principles throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. He has been called “the father of international law” and makes two key arguments in defense of just war.

The Dominican Thomist wrote his support of just war theory in the historical context of Spain’s conquest of the New World, and it is applicable still today.

First, the personal glory of the leader of a state is not a just cause to go to war; for the leader “directs his government toward his individual profit and advantage” rather than to the public welfare, and this is a principle as old as Aristotle.[1]

President Trump has personally boasted about extracting oil resources from foreign countries as early as 2016.

“I’ve been saying it for years. Take the oil,” he told The New York Times. He was speaking about how his military strategy to defeat the ISIS terror group would differ from President Barack Obama.

In a speech at the North Carolina Republican Convention in 2023, Trump specifically mentioned Venezuela: “We would have gotten all that oil … It would have been right next door.”

Recently, he told reporters shortly after Maduro’s capture that “we’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground.”

Another rule of warfare or canon, as de Vitoria mentions, is that a just war must not be done to “ruin the people against whom it is directed.”[2]

Given the modern weaponry that exists today, namely guided missiles and drones, the likelihood of that not happening is diminished and nearly impossible.

The New York Times reported, per a Venezuelan official, that 80 people were killed during the U.S. strikes. There has also been extensive damage done to civilian infrastructure in Caracas. All these factors make the U.S. military action unjustifiable, according to de Vitoria.

So far from the reports, it seems that the movers and shakers behind the Venezuelan attacks, and especially those who benefit, are the rich elite.

While Pope Leo XIII defended private property and rejected socialism in his encyclical Rerum Novarum, he affirmed that the Church “intervenes directly on behalf of the poor (ut bene habeant proletarii) by setting on foot and maintaining associations which she knows to be efficient for the relief of property.”[3]

Further, Leo XIII also expressed the necessity to save the working class from cruel men of greed who use “human beings as mere instruments for money-making.”[4]

It should be further noted that any arguments saying that the military action was a victory to liberate the Venezuelan people from tyranny are meaningless when it is purely being used as a political talking point, not that dissimilar from the US regime change wars of the past half century.

This was also warned by Pope Leo in Graves De Communi Re.[5]

A “Christian Democracy” as outlined by Leo XIII rarely exists in today’s heavily secularized Western governments, which has become influenced by Freemasonry, liberalism and modernism.

Therefore, causes meriting a “just” intervention do not appear to exist here in Venezuela: it is a military adventure using false motives to take resources, it has caused deaths of innocent civilians and destruction to their safety and welfare, and even if there were a “just cause,” there is no plan of action to bring about a government in line with Christian moral principles.

For these reasons alone, the U.S. intervention was unjust and immoral.

Venezuela attacks show ‘we have no regard for human life’: former CIA analyst

A final point which must resonate in the minds of anyone who claims to value the dignity of every human life from conception is the human cost to unjust wars.

In a recent episode of Lt. Col Daniel Davis’s podcast Deep Dive, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson argued that the U.S. military action in Venezuela was “not a daring assault against active defenses, but a carefully staged action enabled by high-level insiders.”

The hosts even discussed the ethical and moral implications of the attack which killed more than 80 people.

“One thing that really stood out to me when I saw the initial images is that there were a lot of helicopters and those are the most vulnerable assets,” said Johnson. “I saw no missiles going from the ground to the air at all and no helicopters were hit.”

“That told me that probably nothing was operational. But how do you get to a situation where none of the nation’s air defenses are even executed? You get somebody on the inside helping you out.”

Col. Davis criticized Retired General Jack Keane’s threat to the current acting president in Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, who said that “it remains to be seen whether she is going to bend to our will or not. If she doesn’t bend to her will, then I think we’re going to have to force the situation. We have enormous leverage given the success of the operation.”

Johnson rebuked the “fervor in the United States among our leaders like Lindsey Graham, Jack Keane but now Donald Trump, Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio and going down the list.”

“They enjoy killing these other people without not one shred of regret for taking human life and that defines us as a society,” Johnson said. “We have no regard for human life.”

Venezuela has maintained protections for family and life in their law books, despite Maduro’s use of “gender-inclusive” language and previously endorsing same-sex “marriage.”

Article 44 of Venezuela’s civil code states that “matrimony can only be contracted between a single man and a single woman,” and abortion remains illegal.

Another question remains: If the liberal Western-backed technocrats and American oligarchs have their way in controlling Venezuela’s resources, economy and society, what will happen to those laws?


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