Yet despite the obvious need for American troops to secure entry points for humanitarian aid if Venezuela does collapse, the usual suspects threw a fit when Trump mentioned the possibility of American military intervention.
Far better to let Venezuelans starve and allow the refugee flow to destabilize neighbors than "taint" the aid with American soldiers, eh?
One can regret that America didn't support a coup back in 2002 that would have stopped the Chavez/Maduro destruction of a once-prosperous nation. But there is no Wayback Machine, and you can easily write the history that the usual suspects would have spread if America had done that:
Venezuela might have been spared this destruction at the hands of the idiotic Chavez-Maduro regimes if the 2002 coup attempt had actually succeeded.
We should wish that America had actually supported the coup which would have rewritten the past 16 years.
But recall that if we had helped the coup leaders succeed back then, that intervention would have led to ruffled feathers in the region and among the global Left every time an American secretary of state visited the region.
Yes indeed, we'd have endured sad tales of how brutal America prevented Venezuela from reaching the heights of prosperity and equality that Hugo's brand of socialism could have built on the solid foundation of the world's largest petroleum reserves! It would have been one more damning indictment of America's long role in Latin America.
But instead, here we are.
And my best-case scenario simply counts on Maduro not attempting a last-ditch war with the Netherlands in an attempt to rally his people around the flag that Maduro waves.
