Maduro has been indicted; let the lawfare begin! As for Venezuela’s fate we can only speculate. Despite President Trump’s confidence that we’ll “run Venezuela” the regime in Caracas doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

Let’s do some wild speculation about what might happen to get our arms around the possibilities. As I see it the following have various degrees of likelihood:

1. U.S. “runs” Venezuela until free, fair, and democratic elections are held. Venezuela becomes a liberal democratic ally of the United States.

This is the best case scenario. I consider this possibility extremely unlikely. It would require the collapse of the Chavista regime, temporary U. S. or multinational control, a complete rework of Venezuela’s security sector and judiciary, and huge capital inflows.

The honest reality is that there is so much opposition to this scenario it’s hard to see how it could happen. The U. S. doesn’t have the will to make it happen. Venezuelan elites are likely to resist literally violently—they have an enormous amount to lose, not just their livelihoods but their lives. Russia and China are unlikely to sit idle while all of this is going on.

2. Iraq redivivus

In this scenario there would be forcible regime change followed by chaos in which an insurgency arises. In my opinion the probability of this is low. Venezuela is not Iraq and U. S. public opinion would be very much against it.

3. The Chavista regime stays, makes reform promises, but doesn’t deliver.

This would be the classical response of an authoritarian regime. Announce electoral reforms, release a few political prisoners, signal openness to investment, get sanctions relief then stall and backslide. I think the likelihood of this scenario is medium to high. It is quite consistent with the behavior pattern of this regime.

4. The Chavista regime stays but there are no real reforms or no foreign investment.

Basically, things just muddle through. Venezuela gets continued support from China and Russia. IMO the likelihood of this scenario is medium.

5. There is an internal coup.

IMO the likelihood of this is low.

I think it’s instructive to think about the analogies to Iran and Cuba with Zimbabwe as an object lesson.

In the Iran case Venezuela would remain a sanctioned oil state with a culture of evasion and transactional détente. Although superficially that seems likely Venezuela does not have the ideological framework Iran has or the accompanying institutional stability.

Cuba, too, has some superficial similarities but Venezuela has an oil and smuggling economy. It is not a closed island economy like Cuba.

In the Zimbabwe case we see an ongoing economic collapse, hyperinflation, and retrenchment of the ruling party. However, Zimbabwe is not a strategic oil state and it doesn’t have a security partner (Cuba) as Venezuela does.

None of these analogies is particularly close.

Please feel free to add your own prognostications in comments.

I do not think it means what you think it means. In reading the opinion pieces about Venezuela the authors repeatedly claim “justification” for the raid. All of the pieces cited above repeat it.

Something can only be justified if it is just. To be just an act of war must be conducted under just authority, used just means, and had just ends. The first is not true. The second is not true since under the UN Charter to which the U. S. is signatory we must eschew the use of military force other than in self-defense. The third may or may not be true—it is too early to tell. The raid and arrest of Maduro were not just under U. S. or international law. They were rational which is a very different thing.

The implicit argument is that might makes right. Do they really want to make that argument?

I have been struck by how little anyone actually had to say about President Trump’s attack on Venezuela and arrest of its president. Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeated a commitment to the people of Venezuela without much elaboration.

In the Washington Post Megan McArdle, after considerable throat-clearing, devotes the balance of her column to an observation I made here much more succinctly almost immediately: “running” Venezuela will be harder than arresting Maduro and we have no real idea how we’ll do that. The editorial in the Washington Post has a single good paragraph in the entire piece:

The best way forward is for the Trump administration to consistently take the side of the Venezuelan people — and to make clear that the end goal is economic freedom and democracy, whatever messiness comes first.

which is pretty much what Marco Rubio said.

In his Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead does them one better: he has two good paragraphs. First

Six months to a year from now, Absolute Resolve could be forgotten in the rush of greater events, look like one of America’s greatest foreign-policy successes, or become an albatross around the administration’s neck. Success won’t require only a mixture of luck, cooperation by the robust remnants of the Chávez-Maduro political machine, and the full engagement of Mr. Trump’s unrivaled political instincts. It will also require the kind of integrated, efficient planning and interagency cooperation that Mr. Trump’s penchant for personalistic management and chaotic governance makes difficult to mobilize and sustain.

and then

The blowback from Absolute Resolve won’t be confined to Venezuela. China and Russia will, rightly, look at the American strike against Mr. Maduro as a challenge to their power and prestige. The strike on Venezuela, like last summer’s Operation Midnight Hammer against Iran, was an American attack on the revisionist axis where the axis was weak. Planners in Beijing and Moscow will be hunting for areas of American weakness as they look to retaliate. Terror strikes? Escalation in Russia’s military campaign against European targets? Escalation in the undeclared cyberwar now raging between the West and its enemies?

The first is essentially what I’ve said in my posts and the second tells us that we don’t know what will happen.

Some things that are missing from all of these pieces are a) that Maduro’s regime in its incarnation as the Chavez regime was elected in a reasonably fair election by the Venezuelan people who b) have little tolerance for foreign companies making a profit by pumping and selling Venezuela’s oil. Have they learned state control has failed after decades of misery? I see few signs of it.

Noah Smith’s most recent Substack is a lament. Noting that Democrats’ approval rating is the lowest ever he declaims:

But beginning in the mid-2010s, I began to understand that my political “side” had evolved beyond the goals and beliefs of the late 20th century.

Like many liberals of the old school, I watched with concern as the quest to end discrimination against Black Americans evolved into a desire to institutionalize discrimination against White Americans in universities, nonprofits, government agencies, and many corporations — something the liberals of the 1990s swore they would never countenance. I felt uneasy as the desire to expand the welfare state and universalize health care morphed into endless deficit-funded subsidies for overpriced service industries. I watched as the gay rights movement gave way to a trans movement that was deeply out of step with both America’s beliefs and civil rights law.

I watched, too, as “progressive” governance hollowed out the great American metropolises whose revitalization had been one of the quiet triumphs of late 20th century liberalism. A small anecdote illustrates this. Recently, a homeless man attacked and blinded an elderly woman in Seattle. Despite dozens of violent arrests, this man had been allowed to live on the streets of the city, attacking passers-by. A cop on the scene told reporters that “He’s a regular…he usually punches.”

“He usually punches”??? How has progressive governance allowed the people of America’s greatest cities to live like this? After decades of mass incarceration, a loose alliance of progressive DAs, judges, and anti-police protesters shifted blue cities toward far more permissive policies toward property crime, public drug markets, and low-level assaults and harassment. The progressivism that emerged in the 2010s seems to view anarchy as a form of welfare, believing that the best way to help the poor and unfortunate was to allow the worst and most violent among them to terrorize the rest of them without restraint or reprisal.

And at the same time, progressive governance threw billions of dollars at unaccountable and sometimes fraudulent NGOs, allowing state capacity to degrade. Blue states spent lavishly on infrastructure projects that created many jobs but created little actual infrastructure. Environmental mandates in California built less solar and wind power than simply liberalizing land use regulation in Texas. Blue cities failed to build housing, choosing instead to embrace the progressive myth that new construction fuels “gentrification”.

As I have observed, most of today’s progressives aren’t progressive. The greatest likelihoods are that they are trying to use the levers of government to gain wealth and power or trying to obtain an undeserved handout we can’t afford. The evils to which he refers are not overreaches. They are the realization of stated objectives coupled with institutional realities. It can’t be rectified by continuing to vote for the same self-dealers but you have already decided they constitute the lesser evil.

I was disappointed but not particularly surprised by the reaction of the editors of the Wall Street Journal to President Trump’s attack on Venezuela and removal of its president:

Mr. Trump said Mr. Maduro and his wife were headed to New York, where they will face trial for narco-trafficking. But Mr. Maduro’s damage goes well beyond the drug trade. His socialist and authoritarian policies burdened the region with millions of refugees. He flooded the U.S. with migrants in an effort to sow political discord.

The dictator was also part of the axis of U.S. adversaries that includes Russia, China, Cuba and Iran. All were helping to keep Mr. Maduro in power. His capture is a demonstration of Mr. Trump’s declaration to keep America’s enemies from spreading chaos in the Western Hemisphere. It’s the “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.

All of this makes the military action justified, despite cries from the left that it is illegal under international law.

I have no idea how they arrive at that conclusion. They certainly can’t mean “legally justified”. Had President Biden acted immediately to remove Maduro there would have been a figleaf of legality but under the circumstances there is none. That Maduro is vile is not a legal justification.

I was similarly disappointed by the editors’ of the Washington Post’s phlegmatic reaction:

In my opinion what should happen next is that President Trump should be impeached for abuse of power and turned over to the International Criminal Court. It would be an excellent opportunity for the Congress to assume its responsibilities. I am under no illusions. That will not happen.

What I think will happen is clumsy attempts at ruling Venezuela eventually followed by an even clumsier turnover of power to a Venezuelan who won’t last long but will be replaced by another Bolivarian dictator. Concurrently with that American oil companies will do their level best to loot Venezuela of its oil. All of the foregoing will further diminish the U. S.’s repute in the Western Hemisphere and probably the world.

So, what will happen next?

In the past I have sketched an outline of the structure of the present Democratic Party. In this post I plan to show why my outline is demonstrably correct and its implications.

The three factions I have identified are the technocrats, the elected officials, bureaucrats, and consultants who see politics as a career and/or a path to riches and power; the clients, those who want to receive benefits from government; and the reformers, those who want to accomplish specific goals that can only be accomplished using the lever of government.

That’s more than just an opinion. It’s a testable hypothesis. The following would confirm my hypothesis. For the technocrat faction if

1. There is a high rotation among government, consulting, lobbying, think tanks, the media, and back to government
2. Designed policies tend to increase administrative complexity, requiring credentialed intermediaries and
3. There is an emphasis on “process virtue”, e.g. “expert-led”, “evidence-based”, “stakeholder engagement”, over measurable outcomes

If senior Democratic officials disproportionately end their careers wealthier than when they entered without comparable private-sector innovation or risk-taking, it supports the technocrat hypothesis.

On the other hand if a significant number of leaders voluntarily leave power without monetizing access, return to private sector roles unrelated to influence, or advocate reforms that shrink their own institutional relevance or discretion, it would contradict the hypothesis.

For the client faction if

1. Programs are designed to be permanent rather than transitional
2. Rhetoric frames benefits as rights rather than temporary assistance
3. There is a strong resistance against means testing, program consolidation, or exit ramps tied to economic improvement

it would confirm the existence of the faction while if there were a large-scale willingness to eliminate or sharply reduce programs once they had succeeded, tie benefits explicitly to time limits, skills acquisition, or labor market absorption it would contradict the hypothesis.

For the reformer faction it would confirm my hypothesis if

1. There is a focus on reforms that require centralized enforcement, produce symbolic wins even when outcomes are ambiguous, and persist even after there is evidence of limited effectiveness
2. There is a willingness to redefine success metrics midstream and
3. Language shifts rather than abandoning initiatives

while frequent abandonment of high-profile reforms once evidence turns negative or a preference for decentralized, voluntary, or market-based mechanisms when they outperform bureaucratic ones contraindicate it.

Based on the above my conclusion is that this structure has already been confirmed as real as rigorously as can be expected of anything in human affairs.

The implication of this analysis is that these factions are mutually reinforcing. The technocrats design programs, clients depend on them, and reformers justify their expansion. It predicts that preserving power takes precedence over resolving problems.

This explanation is not partisan or ideological. It is institutional analysis. It considers career trajectories, program lifecycle behavior, and the willingness to declare problems as solved. The bottom line is that Democratic Party behavior is better explained by incentives and coalition maintenance than by stated moral or policy goals.

In the future I plan to post a similar analysis of the factions that comprise the Republican Party, a comparison between the two, and why the two together bode badly for our future.

I wanted to call your attention to the remarks of Venezuelan Quico Toro at the Persuasion Substack:

Maduro is gone. It’s tempting to think that, without him, the regime will implode. But Maduro’s was never the kind of personalist system that depends on a single leader. It was always more of a team effort, with a constellation of influential figures like Rodríguez and Cabello teaming up with Cuban intelligence to keep dissent at bay. In other words, the kind of regime that could very well survive decapitation. And if it does, Venezuelans will get the worst of it.

For three decades, the most trustworthy principle for interpreting Venezuelan affairs has been a simple heuristic: whatever outcome makes Venezuelans’ lives most miserable is always to be treated as the odds-on-favorite. If, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio apparently told Senator Mike Lee, the United States really isn’t planning any follow-on actions against the rump regime, then for Venezuelans on the ground nothing may change. Things could get even worse: you can easily imagine a wounded and humiliated Chavista successor ratcheting up state repression to rebuild the regime’s now tattered aura of invincibility.

Maduro’s abduction could easily become an all-purpose excuse to crack down on any and every sign of dissent: any expression of dissatisfaction will surely be used as evidence of connivance with the American enemy. Trump’s stunning one-day win could be remembered for heralding an even darker stage in Venezuela’s path towards totalitarianism.

At the same time, as the post-9/11 era showed, if the United States did attempt to install a democratic government, that too could go wrong in a million ways. This is not to mention the fact that the operation was carried out illegally, with no Congressional authorization, and that the precedent of superpowers deciding which foreign leaders to capture may not always lead to the downfall of people as evil as Maduro.

All through this latest round of American pressure, the specter of half-measures has loomed large over Venezuela’s future. The Bolivarian regime is always at its most vicious when it feels most threatened, and, right now, it must feel enormously threatened. Time and again, when the regime feels threatened, it’s ordinary Venezuelans who pay the price.

or, in other words, what I’ve been saying.

This morning I woke to claims that the U. S. had invaded Venezuela, captured its president, and flown him out of the country.

I don’t know much more about it. The primary source seems to be a Truth Social post from President Trump. Here is its text:

The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country. This operation was done in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement. Details to follow. There will be a News Conference today at 11 A.M., at Mar-a-Lago. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

The statement is notable both for its scale and for the absence of any corroboration.

The only source for it is, apparently, President Trump’s post. Assuming it’s true, I oppose such extrajudicial action. It would be illegal under international law, immoral, and a strategic mistake, substituting spectacle for policy.

I doubt it will solve much, because Venezuela’s collapse is institutional and social, not personal. Unless it is President Trump’s intention to rule Venezuela from Mar-a-Lago, the problem there is not a single individual or even a regime.

In that regard it is similar to Burma, Iran, Russia, and China or any other state whose problems are embedded in durable institutions rather than removable leaders. We cannot solve our foreign policy problems with military force. We need to learn, even uncomfortably, to live with them without pretending every problem has a kinetic solution.

Update

The Associated Press has confirmed the strikes with photographs taken by onsite photographers. Meanwhile, although I was getting a haircut when it took place, President Trump has given a press conference in which he repeated the statements from his Truth Social post above, said the U. S. would “run” Venezuela until a peaceful transition could take place, and that U. S. oil companies would work to restore Venezuela’s oil infrastructure.

I wonder if he’s aware of how bad our track record on those last two things have been.

So, what’s next? How do we “run” Venezuela?

For our first dinner of the New Year I made red beans and rice. I adapted my recipe to use Carolina red peas rather than red beans on the theory that something like those may have been what were originally used in the dish.

My recipe is pretty simple. Cajum Holy Trinity (onions, celery, bell pepper), red beans, ham stock, Worchestershire sauce, dash of bitters, hot sauce, black pepper. I threw in some chopped ham to up the protein level a bit.

It was delicious.