There is, perhaps oddly, a chance the Trump administration is acting with a degree of geopolitical and strategic prudence regarding the endeavors directed toward Venezuela, but you would not know it from the administration itself.

There are several dimensions to this, more than what the White House, inexplicably, is letting on; but the main issue at the moment, which is crowding out all other aspects of the wider operation, concerns the strikes by U.S. forces on drug boats (alleged drug boats?) launching from Venezuela to ultimately make their way into the streets of America and the blood streams of Americans seeking that sort of escape.

Now, as a general abstract concept, eliminating suppliers of illegal drugs, even violently, is not especially unpalatable, and the higher up the chain, the better. Drug smugglers do not make the most sympathetic of characters.

But of course, this is happening not just in the abstract, but on the ground — or water as it were — as a very concrete, up-close-and-personal application of national policy, delivered in the explicit manner characteristic of missiles with explosive warheads. That takes the level of necessary examination up a notch or twelve.

To say the strikes are legally ambiguous is not so much an understatement as a clear recital of the problem at hand. The administration has certainly not gone out of its way to clarify the legal argument for them. Narcotics trafficking is a crime, domestic and international, defined in various statutes. That implies due process is to be applied, more than can be provided by a missile.

On the other hand, it is readily establishable nonlinear threats to national security, especially given the technology available these days, go beyond the traditional massed armies at the wall or navies breaching the horizon. And a solid argument can be made smuggling dangerous chemicals into a nation — and that is what these drugs are in the final analysis — at least flirts with the definition of an act of war. Moreso when it is part of a coordinated effort being orchestrated by an unfriendly nation state.

This inclines to the argument decisive military or paramilitary action is at times needed, and such action can only issue from a strong executive — the commander-in-chief. Still, we ought to guard against the impulse to let that authority be supreme. The founders never intended for constitutional designs to anticipate every possible circumstance, and clearly gave the executive the flexibility needed to act in the national interest, as a check against legislative branch inertia; but they also granted Congress the tools and authority to counteract the risk of executive supremacy. Those tools and authority should be properly engaged. Certainly, Congress is correct in flexing its investigative muscle to discover the truth about whether our military enterprise in the Caribbean extended to issuing a “no quarters” order to assassinate the survivors of a strike on a drug boat with a follow-up missile, an action which would be outside the parameters of both U.S. and international law, however disagreeable the victims might be.

If the administration’s legal justification of the mission has been inaudible, their explanation of the larger strategic picture has been entirely silent. Geographically and strategically Venezuela is a Caribbean nation more so than a South American one, and the Caribbean is America’s backyard, what Dutch-American political scientist and professor of International Relations at Yale in the first half of the last century called “the American Mediterranean.” Venezuela is on the clutches of a socialist dictator who has improved his country, choked off Western access to considerable oil reserves, threatened the spread of revolution to other countries in the region, and formed unholy alliances with Russia, Cuba, Iran, virtually every anti-American regime on the planet — including China, which is making its own quiet, but concerted efforts to gain traction in America’s Mediterranean.

So, yes, the U.S. has a very legitimate interest in the region, one that probably calls for the use of American military muscle. So make that argument. Not for a mere public relations point. The ultimate success of the nation’s efforts in the Caribbean world rests in considerable part on garnering the support of the nation behind the operation. The White House could potentially galvanize, at least to some degree, our almost hopelessly divided nation around the mission, provided it is executed in accordance with the law, if it would only take a minute or two to explain the situation.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.