One reason Americans hate regime change operations is that they become sprawling ugly messes, extended nation building projects and long snipe hunts for dictators.
The takedown of Venezuela’s dictator was by contrast a Michael Bay movie played out in real life. And that’s not a bad thing.
President Trump decapitated Venezuela’s Nacromarxist regime using inside intelligence. It’s the kind of operation that Israel had shown off after Oct 7, precisely targeting and taking out key figures in Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.
It wouldn’t have been too shocking for Israel, but it’s startling coming from a Pentagon that tends to blunder around, commit huge numbers of forces, then go in and try to control the situation only for the whole thing to blow up. Past efforts to take out dictators led to the shambolic Iraq War search for Saddam Hussein which began the process of making America’s use of force seem absurd, the dubious Noriega siege and the even more dubious assist for the Gaddafi ambush (Gaddafi deserved to die, but we had made a deal with him and the people we swapped out for him were far worse Muslim Brotherhood members).
President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, by far the most valuable member of the administration, decided not to be stupid, not to let their operation be determined by the same old Pentagon crowd, which would have taken us down the same road, and instead went for a quick and decisive operation.
Whatever happens or doesn’t happen in Venezuela after this, the picture of Maduro under arrest, decisively restores American power. It will give China, Russia and more importantly their proxies something to think about. Some of the effectiveness of Trump’s threats had dissipated in recent months, especially after there were too many empty threats made toward Hamas, but between Venezuela and Iran, we’ve shown that we can act quickly, decisively and still be light on our feet, that we won’t be drawn into extensive operations on the ground, but that we should be feared because we can leverage our capabilities to strike without warning and achieve our operational goals.
A whole lot of our enemies are gonna be sleeping poorly tonight.
