Mick Hartley

Well yes – what happens next is the big question. No tears lost over Maduro, but….

Freddy Gray in the Spectator:

Few will mourn the departure of Maduro – a left-wing tyrant whose regime has grown ever more corrupt and oppressive as the years have gone by. Venezuela is a gangsterish system in which citizens struggle for food, snitch on each other to the authorities through social media, and drug cartels operate with impunity. But the question of what comes next is of course now paramount. America has proven quite successful in recent years at regime decapitation. It’s the change part that proves really difficult.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado, who was so careful to praise Trump after receiving the award in October, declared three weeks ago that her country had already been invaded – by Russia and Iran.

‘We have the Russian agents, we have the Iranian agents. We have terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, operating freely in accordance with the regime,’ she said.

‘We have the Colombian guerrilla, the drug cartels that have taken over 60 per cent of our populations and not only involved in drug trafficking, but in human trafficking in networks of prostitution. This has turned Venezuela into the criminal hub of the Americas.’

So far so good, then. But….

Trump has a deep obsession with energy prices and it’s notable that every country he threatens or attacks happens to have enormous oil reserves. On Christmas Day, he ordered strikes on Nigeria, apparently as a ‘Christmas present’ to protect Christians but cynics suspect other motives.

By changing the guard in Venezuela he has removed one of the last major oil-exporting administrations that oppose American interests. The other big two are Iran and Russia. Given the increasing talk inside American corridors of power of a peace deal over Ukraine – and the business possibilities stemming from a rapprochement between Moscow and Washington – the Trump foreign-policy agenda of 2026 could already be clear. War with Venezuela and Iran and fossil-fuel-rich peace with Mother Russia. Total energy dominance – the idea will make beautiful sense in Trump’s mind. But as his predecessors George W Bush and Barack Obama discovered, the problem with forcibly removing governments is controlling what happens next.

The assumption is always that the people of the country will rush out onto the streets to celebrate their new-found freedom – like, say, the French liberation from the Nazis. It’s perhaps more likely with Venezuela than it was with Iraq. But still…

Also, of course, this was by every yardstick a middle finger up to international law.