It’s the last Monday in May, and the United States is honoring their nearly 3 million military casualties of war. Since 1776, the nation has officially declared war 5 times; joined 113 foreign wars; of which 5 international conflicts are presently active. The proliferation of Shadow Wars, including — proxy wars, cyberattacks, economic sanctions, and secret military operations — is a relatively recent post era phenomenon.

The US Supreme Court authorized the Trump administration 2.0 to strip the legal protections of 350,000 Venezuelans on Monday. The High Court’s order, with one dissent, represents an alignment with the president’s authority to revoke Venezuelan immigrants Temporary Protected Status (TPS).

Conversely, The Supreme Court last week granted a request by Venezuelan nationals seeking to block their removal from the United States under the Alien Enemies Act. In a 7-2 decision, the court rebuked the Trump administration for not giving the detainees enough time or adequate resources to challenge their deportations, even as his DHS secretary was misquoting habeas corpus before the US Senate.

Asked Tuesday on Capitol Hill to define habeas corpus Kristi Noem replied, "Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country.” Senator Hassan of New Hampshire responds, “Correction. Habeas corpus is the foundational right that separates free societies like America from police states like North Korea. The core protection of habeas corpus is that the government must present a public justification to detain or imprison—anyone.” The two emergency appeals coming back to back at the Supreme Court presuppose a rather simple question: Why, exactly, is President Trump ordering all Venezuelans en masse deported?

During both his first and second terms, Trump floated the possibility of a United States–led invasion of Venezuela. Yes, the Trump administration 1.0 was embarrassed by conventional sanctions that failed to drive the dictator Nicolás Maduro from office. Sure, Biden was probably embarrassed for lifting those sanctions, or ever believing Maduro would participate in a free and fair election. However, Trump 2.0 was positively ballistic over the collapse of his own deal with Maduro to repatriate Venezuelans. Thus, Tren de Aragua, a transnational criminal organization from Venezuela, was declared a foreign terrorist organization, and while only 7000+ members strong somehow assuage the public’s understanding as to why 350,000 Venezuelans are being swept up and deported.

The United States first presented itself in proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam with Soviet Russia. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine followed, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s disproportionate response to the 1,706 casualties of the October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel was to starve, exile, and exterminate roughly 53,700 Palestinians. The Gaza War has triggered an uptick in antisemitic incidents, protests on college campuses, and on Wednesday the murders of Sarah Milgrim (26) and Yaron Lischinsky (30) outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC.

From the Battle of Osan to the present day, politics too often is a shadow cast on society by a cash nexus. Following the money, rather than the morale, is often key to understanding how a shadowy network within government exerts influence over policy and decision-making, often operating independently of the people’s elected representatives.

The US government’s authority to conduct Shadow Wars includes: 1) The Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). In the wake of 9-11, a statutory force authorization empowered the US president to use all "necessary and appropriate force" against those who "planned, authorized, committed or aided" the September 11 attacks, or who harbored said persons or groups. It has been expanded upon by each of the four succeeding administrations to include other geographical locales. The Trump administration used military aircrafts to perform deportation operations in February, an unprecedented strategy. 2) The US Covert Action statute, primarily outlined in 50 U.S. Code § 3093, authorizes the US president to commission covert political, economic, or military actions abroad which are disclosed neither to Congress nor the American people.

Finally, there is a relatively new statutory force authorization of which the general population remains unawares. 1) 10 U.S.C. § 333 permits the Department of Defense to train and equip foreign forces anywhere in the world, and 2) 10 U.S.C. § 127e authorizes the Department of Defense to provide support to foreign forces, paramilitaries, and private individuals who in turn support U.S. counterterrorism operations.

These statutes combine to empower the executive, not Congress, to conduct shadow wars independently of a declaration from the United States Congress. The executive, alone, can now determine when and where the United States encounters state adversaries. Moreover, by determining that “episodic” confrontations and “irregular” warfare do not amount to “hostilities,” the executive avoids even notifying Congress.

There are no universally agreed-upon principles of war. Principles emerge from a military’s experiences with victory and defeat into preferred tactics. Their doctrines, in turn, suggest but do not dictate universal strategies. Leaders are products of their time, and for Trump 2.0 — a man who perhaps more than any other covets the Nobel Peace Prize — his ascension to world peacemaker will have to fly if surreptitiously under the radar of Shadow Wars.

To understand how this tracks we look back. Operation Barrel Roll was a covert interdiction and close air support campaign conducted in the Kingdom of Laos by the U.S. Air Force and Navy between 1964 and 1973, concurrent with the Vietnam War.

The United States became interested in Laos, a largely neutral country, during the Cold War era when a rising fear of communism was spreading throughout Southeast Asia. On the record, the US feared that if Laos fell to communist forces it would trigger a domino effect, leading to further communist expansion in the region. Off the record, the actual fear of communism was fueled by the fact that a planned or command economy, if it expanded across the globe, could supplant the capitalist system, economy, and society throughout the world.

The U.S. concealed its military involvement in Laos, a country officially declared neutral by the 1962 Geneva Accords, to avoid violating international agreements; to prevent an escalation of the Vietnam War; and to keep the balance of power in the West. The CIA-led operations in Laos, known as the "Secret War,” failed on all fronts. Shadow wars proliferated under George W. Bush throughout the Middle East, and became by definition sloppy under Trump 1.0 when four members of the U.S. Army Green Berets were killed in an ambush outside the village of Tongo Tongo. Army General Donald Bolduc, who commanded US special forces through 2017, explains the unreported military activities and presence of US forces in Africa:

We had guys in Kenya, Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Tunisia all over doing the same kinds of things as the guys in Somalia, exposing themselves to operations far beyond those authorized under the AUMF. We’ve had guys wounded and killed in all the types of opaque missions that we do.

To the República Bolivariana de Venezuela we say that today’s shadow wars cannot be won by those who fail to realize they’re fighting them.
The pretenders to communism, socialism and command economies accept they’re unlikely to win a conventional war with the West, but are reassured by time itself that manipulation, misinformation, and asymmetries of power and knowledge which fosters wealth inequality will ultimately erode the dynamism of capitalism. What developed nations see as their greatest strength — democracy, capitalist economies — are the very freedoms ancient kingdom’s like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and nearly 80 additional autocratic nations feel certain they can exploit.

Nikita Khrushchev, who stunned the communist world by denouncing his predecessor Joseph Stalin, held that capitalism had a shelf life. Inequality, markets failures, cronyism, and financial crisis would inevitably erode free market capitalism. “We will take America without firing a shot. We do not have to invade the U.S. We will destroy you from within.” Even so, Reagan’s Star Wars Program was resurrected this week. The Strategic Defense Initiative was conceived as a space-based mission control center to shield the United States from nuclear war, but Trump’s $175 billion incarnation called Golden Dome may have a blindspot.

While technology has advanced since Reagan, physics it seems has remained the same. Ballistic motion, that 20 minutes of every ICBM’s three phases of flight, puts Sir Isaac Newton in the drivers seat. Therein, lies a metaphor for the global economy. Who controls the factors of production, and sets the prices for products into motion — albeit through a parabolic flight of economic sanctions, cyberattacks, and shadow wars — are subject to forces beyond their control. “The cosmos is within all of us,” the astronomer Carl Sagan concluded. “We’re made of star-stuff, and the collective we are the only way the universe will ever see or discover herself.”