Can Trump stand down over Venezuela or is die cast?

By Andreas Kluth / Bloomberg Opinion

Say that Donald Trump has by now realized that attacking, or even invading, Venezuela might turn into a disaster. He wants to back down and redeploy the mighty American armada in the Caribbean to do something more useful elsewhere in the world. Could he?

Of course he could, technically. As president and commander-in-chief, he ordered those 15,000-odd troops and all that hardware, including the most sophisticated aircraft carrier in the world, to the region without even asking Congress. So he could issue another order to pull them out again, and send that aircraft carrier back to the Mediterranean, whence it came; or, better yet, to the Indo-Pacific, where it could signal to China that the U.S. intends to remain a major power even outside the western hemisphere.

In reality, though, simply standing down after putting on such a show is hard. That’s the lesson from history and international-relations scholarship, which has for decades delved into such concepts as path dependency, commitment traps and audience costs to explain why leaders so often follow up on bad escalatory decisions with even more escalation. As thespians might say, commanders who whimsically hang a pistol on the wall in the first act tend to feel in the second that they have no alternative but to fire it.

Path dependency can take many forms in international affairs. Sometimes it comes down to seemingly banal bureaucratic or logistical dynamics. In 1914, once Russia began mobilizing to be ready for a war with Austria-Hungary, Germany’s military plans “required” it to mobilize too, and to knock out France, which meant going through Belgium. Obviously, those were not good plans.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-can-trump-stand-down-over-venezuela-or-is-die-cast/

Another war started by a chickenhawk.