President Obama raised eyebrows last week when he issued an executive order declaring Venezuela to be a threat to national security. It would be pertinent to ask just how that deeply divided, nearly bankrupt country could menace the security of the global superpower. Venezuela has no long‐​range ballistic missiles or bombers, much less nuclear weapons. It does not have a large, well‐​equipped army. The Venezuelan navy is both small and antiquated. Although rumors continue to circulate that the leftist government of President Nicolás Maduro flirts with terrorist organizations in neighboring Colombia and elsewhere, those reports remain little more than rumors.


Most telling, Obama’s executive order did not cite evidence that Venezuela actually posed a threat to the security and well‐​being of the United States. Instead, it focused on the Maduro regime’s ill‐​treatment of the Venezuelan people. The executive order is a textbook example of an overly broad definition of national security. The White House emphasized that the order imposed sanctions on officials who undermined democratic processes or institutions, abused human rights, were involved in prohibiting or penalizing freedom of expression, or were guilty of corruption. White House spokesman Josh Earnest declared that the United States now had the tools to block the financial assets of Venezuelan officials “past and present” who dare “violate the human rights of Venezuelan citizens and engage in acts of public corruption.”


Those are all tragic aspects of that country’s dysfunctional political system. There is little question that Venezuela’s government is horrifyingly corrupt and autocratic. Cato’s Juan Carlos Hidalgo has ably described the many abuses committed by both Maduro and his predecessor and mentor Hugo Chávez.. It may well take Venezuela a generation or more to recover from the socialist idiocies of those two rulers. But as I point out in the pages of the National Interest Online, just because a regime is repugnant does not make it a credible security threat to the United States.


Obama’s executive order is ominous because it signals a return to the overuse of national security justifications that was so common in previous administrations. It should be recalled that U.S. officials asserted, apparently while maintaining straight faces, that such small, weak adversaries as North Vietnam, Serbia, Iraq, and Cuba posed dire national security threats. The ensuing policies produced frustrating, counterproductive results. Indeed, in the cases of Vietnam and Iraq, the outcomes of such a promiscuous invocation of U.S. security needs were disastrous wars that squandered hundreds of billions of tax dollars and snuffed out the lives of thousands of American military personnel. One might hope that policymakers had learned from those bruising experiences and would avoid such folly in the future.


It is imperative to adopt a more rigorous standard about what does and does not constitute a threat to national security. A foreign regime’s domestic behavior, however reprehensible, does not per se pose a menace to America. The actions of Maduro and his henchmen fall into that category. Venezuela’s government is riddled with corruption and behaves in a disturbingly repressive fashion toward political opponents. But that makes Venezuela an obnoxious neighbor, not a security threat to the United States.