re: Explosions in Caracas, looks like it’s popping off

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By Russia?

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Hello Senator Slotkin,

I've been waiting for your take on Venezuela. When it comes to regime change, few institutions have a longer and more educational record of failure than the CIA, so your opposition is as reassuring as Jim Cramer's stock picks.

Congratulations on reciting the roll call of countries your own institutions helped ruin. Treating that history as a rhetorical shield doesn't grant you credibility, it just advertises a refusal to learn from it. Now let me explain why Venezuela does not belong in your grab bag of "long-term engagements."

Most of the countries you list were a result of a worldview that any non-democracy is a threat to the stability of the post-Cold War world order.

?? Iraq: My book documents how your side eagerly supported the operations, until Iraq turned into a quagmire, and then instead of taking responsibility, the global liberal order threw America under the bus and blamed a lack of "multilateralism."
?? Somalia: The United Nations 1993 resolution lists the goal of the Somalian intervention as "recreating a Somali State based on democratic governance and rehabilitating the country's economy and infrastructure."
?? Syria: Obama himself celebrated Syria's "peaceful transition to democracy" in the Arab Spring and we all know how that turned out.

Beyond that, the common thread is: you imposed pro-Western views on a non-Western world. You haven't learned from that, because you are still doing that in virtually every country in the world - except over the decades, your meaning of "Western" has morphed to something like "Communism."

The "long-term engagement" framing is a dodge. You've never been afraid of long-term engagements. See: all your chest-beating about Ukraine.

The real question is far darker: if you believe in democracy, why aren't you celebrating the removal of a dictator from the single easiest country on earth to transition back to it?

Venezuela is not Somalia. It has borders, institutions, a literate population, a unified national identity, and a recent democratic memory. Trump just demonstrated how little force was required to remove a narco-state that survived only on inertia.

You are one of these people who idolize democracy, chant "threat to democracy" like it is a holy hymn, who buy into Open Society ideals. And yet, when an actual dictator is removed, your response is anger.

Why?

Because at some point, Venezuelan people became expendable in service of a larger abstraction you call "stability" of the liberal democratic order.

Maduro's Venezuela was useful. It was predictable. It gave BRICS a foothold in the hemisphere, kept drug flows legible and quantifiable, and weakened an increasingly inconvenient United States. It made the region easier to model, easier to manage, easier to explain in policy memos. In short, Maduro made the whole world more legible to you.

A free Venezuela introduces uncertainty. It restores agency to people who were supposed to remain variables.

So now we get lectures about "international law," tantrums from NGOs, and sudden concern for norms that were never extended to the people living under a narco-dictatorship.

We understand the objection. It just isn't the one you say out loud.

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