Going Caracas

What Could Possibly Go Wrong in Venezuela?

The military has an unofficial four stage strategy for conducting a war:

• Phase I – Halt the enemy: Stop an invasion or initial attack and prevent further enemy gains.​

• Phase II – Build up / seize initiative: Flow U.S. combat and logistics forces into theater and begin degrading enemy capabilities.​

• Phase III – Decisive operations: Conduct major offensive operations to defeat the enemy militarily.​

• Phase IV – Post‑war stability / transition: Maintain some forces in theater to stabilize the situation and support post‑conflict recovery.

Donald Trump apparently has two stages:

1. Attack

2. Hope for the best.

The exfiltration of Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela displayed U.S. military tacticians and operators at their spectacular best. The operation was flawless. As has been stated repeatedly, no other military could have brought this off.

Donald Trump’s assault on Venezuela was quite the opposite from the military precision on January 2... We await Phases II, III and IV. Especially IV. I remember endless conversations with military experts after George W. Bush’s foolish invasion of Iraq: what were the plans for Phase IV? There were a few: all bad. We outlawed the Baath Party, which meant we fired every teacher and policeman and civil servants in the country and replaced them with…what? Chaos. “You’re not actually thinking of trying to run that country?” an Israeli security expert asked me. Truth was, we were not thinking of anything.

And now? This is classic Trump. DOGE War. Take out the chainsaw and let the shards fall where they may. The lack of preparation in this case—unless there’s something I’m not seeing—is phenomenal. But that is the way Trump does things. That is how he’s done tariffs. That is how he has undone Ukraine. There is no strategy; there are only impulses. But it’s hard to TACO a coup.

No one knows what happens now. Trump assumes the Venezuelan vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, will go along with his wishes. Rodriguez says the attack had a “zionist tint.” The film of the Venezuelan cabinet meeting was, well, you’d have to call it hilarious if one didn’t suspect the human suffering to come. They were sitting at a horseshoe table, stone-faced, petrified by their own ambitions. Who’s on First? Who tries to overthrow that poor woman VP and make a deal with the gringos? You know there’s some lieutenant colonel in the weeds licking his chops.

No one disputes what a terrible country Venezuela was under Maduro—and Chavez before him—a country only Zohran Mamdani could love. The warmth of oil socialism: the people own the oil…except for the profits, which are owned by the oligarchs. The hemisphere would be far better off if there was a nice, moderate free enterprise government in place. But there is a problem in South America, always has been: in all but a few countries, feudalism still rules. There is an entrenched land-owning class, unwilling to indulge in true free enterprise. This has been an historic tragedy, aided and abetted too often by the United States. We watch countries like Argentina and Brazil emerge, thrive for a time, collapse under populist regimes, slip into inflationary darkness, coup themselves into anarchy. We watch others create new feudalists—cartels—to make hay off North America’s affluence and depraved drug needs.

I hope for the best in Venezuela. But I suspect that if freedom comes, it will arrive circuitously without having much to do with the vacuous machismo of the past 24 hours.