by Steve Timmer

Jan 3, 2026, 10:00 PM

A day which will live in infamy

Minnesota’s ‘boy governor,’ Harold Stassen, is turning in his grave

January 3, 2026 will, or ought to be, a day which will live in infamy. I don’t draw the parallel between the Pearl Harbor attack and the United States attack on Venezuela lightly, but it is there. Both were unprovoked attacks on another country; they were acts of aggressive war. Both were war crimes. Regardless of how the Trump administration tries to parse it, we are not – or weren’t – at war with Venezuela. That we are doing it to gain access to Venezuela’s oil compounds the felony.

The Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials, the United Nations Charter, and the Geneva Conventions all make it clear that self-defense (including mutual defense pursuant to pacts like NATO) against an imminent attack, or collective action under the auspices of the United Nations, are the only grounds to lawfully invade another country. Acts of aggressive war are the most serious war crimes. After WWII, there were German and Japanese leaders who were hung for it.

Readers here, or anybody who ever participated in a game of political trivia at Drinking Liberally in Minneapolis hosted by me, know of my admiration for Harold Stassen. Elected three time as the Republican governor of Minnesota (there were just two-year terms back then), he resigned as governor and accepted a commission in the Navy, where he was an intelligence attaché to Admiral Halsey. He was tasked with the location of and rescuing of Allied POWs in Japanese hands.

Harold Stassen was appointed by FDR – confirmed by Truman – to the eight-member U.S. delegation that negotiated and signed the United Nation Charter; Stassen was quite literally an architect of the post-war international order that has held sway for eighty years, well, until now. I’m a yellow dog Democrat, and I think Harold Stassen was one of the best people that Minnesota ever produced.

Stassen wasn’t the only 40s era Minnesotan who was a committed internationalist. There was also Senator Joseph Ball and Representative Walter Judd who helped encourage support for the U.N.

But now, another Minnesotan, the pride of Forest Lake and former weekend anchor of Fox and Friends, the feckless and ahistorical boob – and avatar for Bob’s Big Boy – Pete Hegseth, has helped throw that all away. If you don’t believe me, you should listen to historian Heather Cox Richardson.

The hour is late, my friends, and the situation is desperate, but remember the small-town boy (West St. Paul) Harold Stassen who could see how thing might be and helped make them happen.

Don’t give up. Harold would be disappointed.

§ § §

There are earlier precedents for this, of course, Iraq, Panama, and Grenada come to mind. But Trump’s almost obsessive focus on oil and his plans to ‘run the country’ makes this one stand out, at least to me.

The U.N. General Assembly ‘deplored’ the action of the United States in Panama. The U.S. justified that incursion to arrest and remove Noriega as an act encouraged by the democratically-elected government of Panama; Noriega was a military dictator. Panama had also declared a state of war against the United States and had killed and injured American service personnel in Panama.

This article is worth reading:

https://www.justsecurity.org/127981/international-law-venezuela-maduro/

“The operation against Venezuela, which culminated in the capture of President Maduro and his wife, amounts to a severe breach of foundational principles of international law. It constitutes a clear violation of the prohibition on the use of force enshrined in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. The claim that drug trafficking, or State involvement in such trafficking, constitutes an “armed attack” sufficient to justify a forcible response in self-defense has no support in customary international law or State practice.”