He says he’s not afraid of American boots on the ground.He later clarified that we’ll probably need them to protect the oil. So that’s good.
It wasn’t long ago that we did a big regime change. It didn’t work out too well. They didn’t exactly greet us with flowers, did they?
Ret. Gen. Mark Hertling wrote about that prospect last month for The Bulwark:
THE U.S. MILITARY LEARNED A LOT of important lessons from the Iraq War—ones that our civilian leaders would be well advised to ask about, and our military leaders ought to reinforce with their civilian counterparts.
The first is that military victory does not equal political success. Toppling a regime can be fast; stabilizing a country never is. The most successful cases of American “regime change” took years: The American military occupied part of Germany for four years after the end of World War II. In Japan, the occupation lasted seven years—and American forces remain stationed in both countries to this day.
The second lesson is that dismantling or hollowing out state institutions creates chaos by design. Police and military forces do not simply vanish without consequence. Neither do bureaucracies and economic systems. Left behind are armed men, unpaid officials, and populations desperate for order.
Another lesson is that external actors always rush into the vacuum. Iran, militias, criminal networks, and proxy forces did not wait politely in 2003. Likewise, Venezuela has friends in Cuba, China, Russia, and Iran, and the region is chock full of organized, sophisticated criminal groups, as the administration well knows.
We should have also learned from our time in Iraq that legitimacy cannot be imported. Governments derive legitimacy from their own people, not from foreign flags, friendly ex-pats, or external timetables.
Finally, time horizons stretch. What is brief in planning becomes prolonged in practice. Months turn into years, years turn into decades.
The United States eventually adapted in Iraq, learning painful lessons about counterinsurgency, governance, oil economies, and coalition warfare. But that learning came at enormous cost—in lives, credibility, and strategic position. The tragedy is not that Iraq was hard. The tragedy is that we acted as though it would not be.
If regime change is being seriously considered, we have learned that the military will have to plan for a significant, sustained force presence and a draining long-term internal security mission. The military and our country’s civilian leaders will have to accept that casualties will occur and continue long after any combat operations end.
And then there’s this which Trump didn’t seem to even consider:
ONE OF THE MOST CONSISTENT FAILURES in regime-change planning is the absence of honest red-teaming, i.e., calculations of the enemy’s options to respond. Regimes facing existential threats do not capitulate quietly. They repress harder. They mobilize nationalism. They seek external patrons. They sabotage infrastructure. They create humanitarian crises that complicate intervention and fracture international support. Dense urban populations, of which Venezuela has plenty, increase civilian risk. Long coastlines enable smuggling and external interference, and Venezuela’s is 1,700 miles long, the same distance between Boston and Key West. Criminal networks embed themselves in political and economic life, and thrive when the government is dysfunctional. Armed paramilitary groups enforce loyalty through fear. Foreign intelligence services exploit chaos. None of these issues is hypothetical. These are predictable dynamics. Ignoring them does not make them disappear. It ensures surprise.
American leaders owe the public clarity about the risks they are willing to accept with any actions against Venezuela. Not precise numbers, but honest ranges. Not promises of gratitude by the Venezuelans, but acknowledgment of resistance. Not assurances of quick exits, but recognition of long commitments. History offers little support for claims that populations universally greet external regime change with enthusiasm—particularly in Latin America, where memories of U.S. intervention run deep.
Anyone advocating regime change in Venezuela is implicitly advocating for a long, bloody, expensive commitment—whether they acknowledge it or not. If the United States justifies regime change because it dislikes a government or covets resources, it erodes every argument it makes against aggression by others, such as Russia attacking Ukraine or the potential of China attacking Taiwan. Norms do not survive selective application.
The most important question is not whether regime change is desirable in the abstract. It is whether the United States is prepared—politically, militarily, morally, and financially—to own another country’s future for years. Clausewitz warned that war is a continuation of politics by other means. Regime change is the transformation of another country’s politics by all the means at our disposal. If ends are unclear, ways improvised, and means insufficient, the outcome is not strategy. It is a gamble.
It’s a bad gamble. These people are stupid and crazy.
Trump said that the “people behind me” meaning Rubio, Hegseth, Ratcliffe and Caine, would be running the country.Ok.
Nobel Prize winner Maria Corinna Machado will not be running the country:
“I think it’d be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn’t have the support or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman but she doesn’t have the respect.”
She had been one of the staunchest supporters of Trump’s aggression against Maduro. Bad call. He obviously has some right-wing billionaire buddies who obviously have a puppet in mind.
Some highlights:
This war is his. He admits it.
Meanwhile:
Is this the end? Not bloody likely:
“And I’ve asked her number times, ‘Would you like us to take out the cartels?’ … something is gonna have to be done with Mexico”