What does “America First ” mean? It’s a question that President Donald Trump may have to finally answer in his escalating campaign against Venezuela. The stakes for Americans couldn’t be higher.

Across Trump’s runs for the presidency, he appealed directly to Americans who were tired of high-minded talk of defending the “international order,” nation building, regime change and spreading American values abroad. He tapped into popular discontent about the long, difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He vowed to put America first. But that simple phrase could mean very different things to his supporters.

The Washington Post reports that the deputy White House chief of staff even hopes to use conflict with Caracas as an excuse to invoke the Alien Enemies Act and deport hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants.

The Venezuelan government under Nicolas Maduro is deplorable in many ways. But the American people deserve to hear directly from the president why it is in our interest to meddle so aggressively — and what the goal is. Is there some actual just cause driving the sabre rattling, or is Miller simply so eager for mass deportation that he convinced the rest of the White House to put service members’ lives on the line as part of some grand legal gambit?

If you voted for Trump, you should want to hear that explanation even more. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, misguided though it may have been, came after President George W. Bush made a lengthy, concerted effort to rally public support for the war. It was based on false claims about weapons of mass destruction — claims this editorial board saw as insufficient — but he succeeded.

Trump has barely even tried.

Today, polls show that just about 30% of Americans approve of a campaign against Venezuela, and that number has been dropping. That may be because recently, Americans have too often had to try to find out what their country is doing through contradictory social media posts from members of the administration. Earlier this month, following the imposition of the blockade, Trump gave a primetime address on major broadcast networks in which he was widely expected to address the situation in the Caribbean. He didn’t mention it once. On Truth Social, however, his preferred social media network, he wrote that Venezuela had stolen our “land” and “oil” — a shift from previous claims about drugs. He seemed to be referring to previous rounds of nationalization in the Venezuelan oil industry, which took place in 1976 and 2007, and wants our military to conduct the equivalent of a smash-and-grab robbery to get it back. Luckily for Trump, those expropriated private companies are in the process of being compensated. No war required.

At the moment, it’s hard to say how serious the administration is about beginning a military conflict. The unfortunate fact is that the more ships and more threats we use, the greater the likelihood that a conflict starts. Once American sailors or soldiers die, the thing may take on a life of its own.

America’s war in Vietnam, we should remember, only really took off with the Gulf of Tonkin incident, when American ships became frightened of hostile torpedoes that didn’t actually exist, giving President Lyndon B. Johnson the perfect pretext to escalate the conflict. And the blockade of Cuba during the Missile Crisis almost resulted in a hot war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Congress should affirmatively debate what is happening in the Caribbean more broadly and make clear its preferences, putting itself on the record. And Texans should ask their candidates for Congress — especially Rep. Wesley Hunt, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary for Senate — what they would support in office.

Perhaps the crisis around Venezuela will pass, as other foreign policy crises have passed in the first and second Trump administration. But we may be muddling through an inflection point. Houston has long been shaped by the geopolitics of oil as well as our deep ties with Latin America. We understand that the foreign entanglements Washington warned against are inevitable in the 21st century, but war should be a last resort.

— The Houston Chronicle