Facing scrutiny on Capitol Hill over whether the stealth American military action in Venezuela — action that saw the U.S. remove sitting Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro — constituted an act of war, Secretary of State Marco Rubio paid Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), his inquisitor, one of the highest compliments a U.S. lawmaker can receive — lauding the Senator’s consistency.
Rubio acknowledged Paul’s credibility on the issue, saying that the Senator has been “very consistent on all these points” throughout his career. And those points? Mainly those enshrined in the Constitution — that the power to declare or initiate war resides in Congress, and the attendant notion that wars are not particularly hard to define.
Paul sought an answer from Rubio about whether the U.S. action in Venezuela was an “act of war.” To compel a clarifying answer, the Senator flipped the script, reversing the players, asserting that in a reversed scenario it would be impossible to conclude otherwise.
What if, Paul conjectured, another country had extracted the American President and blockaded our country (as the U.S. did in Venezuela)? Would that be an act of war?
Paul prefaced his argument by noting that many who advocate for “expansive notion of presidential power” often dubiously argue that “wars are not really wars, but they’re kinetic actions or drug busts.”
Paul: So I would ask you, if a foreign country bombed our air defense missiles, captured and removed our president and blockaded our country, would that be considered an act of war? pic.twitter.com/3S8cmT6vwv
— Acyn (@Acyn) January 28, 2026
Rubio deflected the Constitutional content of Paul’s question, and talked instead about how clean the operation was and how — unlike in most wars — no one was hurt. Rubio said “it’s hard for us to concede that an operation that lasted about four and a half hours and was a law enforcement operation…”
Ignoring Rubio’s attempt to deflect, Paul restated his imagined scenario: “Then my question would be if it only took four hours to take our president. Very short, nobody dies on the other side, nobody dies on our side, it’s perfect — would it be an act of war?”
Rubio asserted in response that “we just don’t believe that this action comes anywhere close to the constitutional definition of war.”
Unrelenting, Paul reiterated his flipped script: “But would it be an act of war if somebody did it to us?”
Paul answered his own question: “Of course it would be an act of war. I’m probably the most anti-war person in the Senate and I would vote to declare war if someone invaded our country and took our president.”
Paul lectured Rubio: “This is a one-way argument. One way arguments that don’t rebound, that cannot be universally applicable, are bad arguments.”
Where Paul used “drug busts” as one administration-preferred euphemism for war, Rubio’s own choice — a “law enforcement action” — drew attention on social media.
One commenter asked: “Secretary, what gives the US the right to ex*cute a “law enforcement operation” inside of another sovereign country? Whose law? On whose authority?”
[NOTE: Paul presumably references “drug busts” as a semantic substitute for “act of war” because the Trump administration has cited numerous justifications for Maduro’s removal, including his alleged enabling of Venezuela’s drug trafficking operations, though notably Trump critics have called this particular premise dubious, as the Venezuela operation came within weeks of Trump’s pardoning a former President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted and serving a prison sentence for drug trafficking.]