President Donald Trump has thrust the country into a significant new phase in his showdown with Venezuela with a CIA strike on a port facility.

But as he approaches grave new decisions on even greater escalations, his team has not yet spelled out a clear consistent public rationale for its actions.

Nor has it prepared the country for what might come next.

Top officials haven’t explained how long the massive naval buildup in the Caribbean will last or what US service members will be asked to do in an operation that is already raising legal and constitutional alarms.

Neither Trump nor his top foreign policy aides have sketched a preferred endgame for the confrontation, which has climbed a ladder of escalation: from diplomatic pressure to strikes against alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean to a blockade against oil tankers to, now, a land attack.

If the goal really is to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro, as recent comments from top officials and the logic of the deployment imply, there’s been no White House effort to show Americans the administration is planning for the aftermath. This is an especially relevant point given the quagmires that developed after US military action to topple the rulers of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, told CNN’s Brianna Keilar Tuesday that the CIA attack was a significant sharpening of US pressure and raised a knot of thorny questions.

“Where it goes from here, I think, is the thing to be concerned about, because Trump clearly wants to drive Maduro from power,” Smith said, arguing that boat strikes and other means of duress didn’t seem like they would have the intended effect. If they don’t, Smith continued, “What is Trump prepared to do next? How far is he willing to take this effort at regime change in Venezuela?”

Perhaps Trump’s fogginess is deliberate. If the buildup and steady escalations are part of a psychological operations campaign to wrong-foot Maduro or to persuade his regime cronies they’d be safer without him, confusion and disorientation could act as weapons. Even from the outside, it’s obvious the CIA strike on the port facility — in which, sources said, no one was killed — is a performative warning that far greater US capabilities can be brought to bear.

Yet the more serious the situation gets — especially now the US has crossed the threshold into land attacks — the more acute is the obligation to inform Americans of the administration’s plans. The founders never envisaged presidents being able to wage war on a whim. And large and intractable conflicts have sometimes started with discrete actions that mushroom into consequences that can cascade out of control. Take Vietnam as an example.

Few Venezuelans or citizens of the Western hemisphere would mourn a regime often likened to a criminal organization that has wrecked an oil-rich economy, impoverished millions and triggered a refugee exodus. A peaceful restoration of democracy and the rebuilding of Venezuelan prosperity would be a major legacy victory for Trump and would benefit the region.

But critics of the administration aren’t trying to defend a cruel and illegitimate ruler. They’re questioning the administration’s motives, good faith and competence.

In the absence of a White House campaign to explain its thinking — which would be typical before most potential US military action — outsiders must sift for clues.

The Trump administration has declared a diffuse military-criminal enterprise called the Cartel of the Suns, which is embedded in Maduro’s power structure, as a foreign terrorist organization. It says this gives it the power to use military force to target Venezuela, which it says is involved in narcoterrorism threatening US security.

This is a hugely controversial position even among some Republicans. To critics, it looks like a White House giving itself the power to break the law and to wage war with impunity.

Given that the attack on the port facility was a covert CIA operation — at least until the president made it public in a radio interview last week — it’s perhaps not surprising that details are hazy. “There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” Trump told reporters Monday. He declined to give more details of a strike that CNN later reported was carried out by the CIA using a drone.

The president’s decision to talk about a clandestine operation at all is puzzling, since he’s now deprived himself of the cover of plausible deniability that is a major advantage of covert action. Perhaps Trump wanted this public comment to build more outside pressure on Maduro. But now that everyone knows, Trump may have narrowed his own options, because it’s hard to believe that blowing up port facilities is going to dislodge Maduro from his tyrant’s perch.

Retired Admiral James Stavridis, a former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, told CNN’s Keilar that he expected Trump to authorize more covert strikes in Venezuela against drug targets but that the CIA attack reinforced perceptions that the Venezuela operation was primarily about regime change. “If that’s the case … President Trump has a pretty distinct choice of elevating these strikes in intensity, scope, scale, and going after Venezuelan military, going after their air defense system and ultimately going after, shall we say, the leadership,” he said.

Stavridis, a senior CNN military analyst, added: “Those are hard decisions for any president. I think they’re looming early in the new year.”

The use of the CIA in a comparatively rudimentary operation — given its capabilities and broader mission — is intriguing. One possible explanation is that covert action by intelligence agencies would not require the endorsement of Congress or a declaration of war that would cover regular military action. In covert operations, a president issues a finding and authorizes the agencies to act and the intelligence committees in Congress must be notified.

The escalating pressure campaign makes it unlikely that this will be the last such attack on Venezuelan soil. But such a pattern also raises the possibility of an open-ended covert US war that bypasses legal or constitutional constraints. This president’s willingness to stretch his power to — and beyond — its limits in other areas is only likely to fuel such concerns.

On Christmas Day, Trump announced US military strikes against Islamist groups he said were threatening Christians in Nigeria. The administration is yet to provide any public accounting of the targets. On Monday, Trump threatened new military strikes against Iran if it reconstituted its missile or nuclear programs. The impression of a president acting on impulse is only growing.

It’s therefore even more important for Americans to understand what is being done in their name in Venezuela — especially since thousands of service personnel are on active duty and some may be in harm’s way.

Trump and other top officials have argued that they are justified in their actions because Venezuela is a key cog in the narcotics trade that leads to the deaths of thousands of Americans every year. Yet the country is not seen as a major trafficking route for fentanyl, which drives the worst drug crisis in the US.

And Trump undercut his own argument when he pardoned a former president of Honduras who was serving a 45-year federal sentence in the US for drug trafficking — partly, it appears, to influence an election.

The administration may not be making an effective public case for its strategy. But it does have a compelling internal political logic.

The administration’s approach unites various policy strands, ideologies and personalities in the president’s inner circle:

► A US-friendly government in Venezuela could, in theory, speed the administration’s ability to return undocumented migrants who’ve fled the country for the US — a key goal of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

► Secretary of State Marco Rubio has long been a Western Hemisphere hawk keen to destabilize left-wing autocracies in the region. If Maduro is toppled, some analysts think that the next domino to fall could be Cuba’s communist regime.

► And the bristling armada of US naval ships in the Caribbean provides a stage for the swaggering belligerence of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

And whether the US goal is regime change; to exploit Venezuela’s vast reserves of oil; or to build a cadre of MAGA-style satellite governments in Latin America, the administration’s actions are at least consistent with its recently rolled out national security strategy.

“After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region,” the strategy reads.

The document refers to the warning in 1823 by President James Monroe that the US would not tolerate further colonization in the region by European power. Trump’s update states that the administration will deprive “non-Hemispheric competitors” the ability to position forces in the region or to own or control vital assets. The “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine will “enlist established friends in the Hemisphere to control migration, stop drug flows, and strengthen stability and security on land and sea.”

It calls for “targeted deployments to secure the border and defeat cartels, including where necessary the use of lethal force to replace the failed law enforcement-only strategy of the last several decades.”

This does not address the legal alarms raised by Trump’s campaign against Venezuela or the sovereignty issues of actions on its soil. It is unlikely to placate Democrats and Republican rebels who doubt the constitutional basis of his actions or MAGA conservatives who think Trump has deserted his “America First” roots. But it does suggest a clear rationale for the president’s actions beyond his off-the-cuff waffling and the hints and threats of his Cabinet.

Maybe it’s time to make the case to the public more broadly.