Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, Sunday morning on ABC’s “This Week,” discussed why he does not support President Trump escalating military action in Venezuela and Syria:

JON KARL: Doesn’t look like that’s exactly happening yet. But let me move on to another issue that you have been very outspoken on and that is the use of U.S. military force abroad. You’ve been consistent Democrat, Republican presidents. What is your reaction to this latest news that we hear? Another oil tanker seized by the U.S. Coast Guard. U.S. military supporting that mission off the coast of Venezuela. SEN. RAND PAUL: I consider it a provocation and a prelude to war and I hope we don’t go to war with Venezuela. Look, at any point in time there are 20, 30 governments around the world that we don’t like that are either socialist or communist or have human rights violations. We could really literally go through a couple dozen. But it isn’t the job of the American soldier to be the policeman of the world. So, I’m not for confiscating these liners. I’m not for blowing up these boats of unarmed people that are suspected of being drug dealers. I’m not for any of this. And neither was Donald Trump. Donald Trump was against the Iraq War, against the regime change there. He, you know, at the time, understood that the weapons of mass destruction was a ruse and it turned out to not be true. And so now his administration is calling fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction. They should be a little bit more understanding that that term has been totally — has come to represent basically falsehood in intelligence. So, I think it’s a bad idea for them to bring that up. But all these designations are steps towards war, calling people terrorists, calling the drug runners terrorists, saying, oh, if they have a designation, well how did they get the designation? Oh, we gave it to them. And then why is the former president, Hernandez of Honduras, who is in jail for 45 years, why is he released? So, some narco-terrorists are really OK and other narco-terrorists we’re going to blow up. And then some of them, if they’re not designated as a terrorist, we might arrest them. It’s a bizarre and contradictory policy and I sure hope we don’t go to war with Venezuela. KARL: And we did — there were at least military strikes this week in — against Syria. What did you make of this? The administration has billed this as a response to the American service members who were killed in Syria, allegedly by ISIS, but this looked like a pretty strenuous attack on targets in Syria this week. PAUL: You know, it’s hard not to want to hit back when they kill some of our own. But I would like to go back really to the first Trump administration, when he said he didn’t want the troops there. There’s like 900 troops, maybe 1,000, maybe 1,500. They’re not enough to fight a war. They’re not enough to be an effective strategic force. What they are is a target and a trip wire. And, unfortunately, in the Middle East, they’d like nothing better than to kill an American. They do it for the celebrity nature of killing Americans. But I think we have no business in Syria. So, we’ve done this retaliatory strike. Now Donald Trump ought to do what Donald Trump proposed in the first administration, what Ronald Reagan did after the 1983 bomb, he left. There’s no reason for us to be in Syria. We need to leave Syria and not be a trip wire to getting back involved in another war.

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