Nicolas Maduro was led to believe that Russian air defense systems would keep American helicopters from landing near his fortified compound in Caracas. He was misinformed.
The Venezuelan dictator also thought that any hostiles who managed to enter his residence would be taken down by his Cuban bodyguards. But Caribbean muscle proved no match for Delta Force special operators relying on actionable intelligence provided by a clandestine CIA team. More than 30 Cubans were reportedly KIA.
President Trump deserves enormous credit for authorizing this intervention, fully aware of the risks entailed but also anticipating significant rewards – for the U.S., Venezuela, and Latin America.
Mr. Maduro is now in a federal jail cell in Brooklyn, New York. Do you think being incarcerated in a city that has a socialist mayor is any consolation for him? Is he feeling the collectivist warmth?
But I digress.
The extraction of Mr. Maduro – indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2020 for "narco-terrorism" and other crimes – should not be confused with "regime change." For now, at least, Mr. Maduro's henchmen – the pillars of his regime – remain in power. Let me acquaint you with three of them.
Delcy Rodriguez, formerly Mr. Maduro's vice president, minister of finance, and minister of petroleum, is now interim president.
Her father, Jorge Antonio Rodriguez, was a Venezuelan Marxist guerrilla and political leader who died in 1976 after being arrested in connection with the kidnapping of an American businessman in Caracas.
Ms. Rodriguez studied labor law at the Sorbonne in Paris and was later assigned to a diplomatic post in London. She's also been – and perhaps still is, I've read conflicting reports – the head of SEBIN, Venezuela's secret police, infamous for torturing dissidents and journalists.
Behind her – I use the term advisedly – is Diosdado Cabello, whose formal title is "Minister of the Popular Power for Interior, Justice and Peace." A socialist ideologue, he is under indictment in the United States on charges related to international drug trafficking and narco-terrorism.
Mr. Cabello controls the national police, the national intelligence services, and the "colectivos," paramilitary armed thugs akin to Nazi Brownshirts.
He also is believed to closely cooperate with Tren de Aragua, a transnational gang involved in violent crimes, drug and human trafficking, extortion, and racketeering. More than a thousand Tren de Aragua members are estimated to have illegally entered the U.S. under the Biden administration's open-borders policy. They now operate in at least 19 states.
And then there's Vladimir Padrino Lopez, Venezuela's longtime defense minister, and a stalwart Maduro loyalist. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and Transparency International detail a web of family-linked companies and U.S. real estate worth millions.
I presume that any one of them would be thrilled to slit Mr. Trump's throat with a butter knife. But at this moment, they appear to view appeasement as the better part of valor. They're "giving us everything that we feel is necessary," President Trump said last week.
President Trump's necessities include ending the flow of drugs from Venezuela and beginning the flow of crude oil to refineries on the American Gulf coast.
President Trump has vowed that no more subsidized Venezuelan oil will go to Cuba. If the Castroite Communist regime – its economy already enfeebled – were to collapse as a consequence, wouldn't that be one for the history books?
Most geo-strategically significant is that Venezuela stop serving as an operating base in the Western Hemisphere for Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran – three members of an implacably anti-American axis of aggressors whose imperialism is precisely what the Monroe Doctrine and the Trump Corollary prohibit.
Related: President Trump should not tolerate the Venezuelan government continuing to issue passports to members of Hezbollah, Tehran's terrorist vassal.
According to Venezuela's Penitentiary Services Ministry, 116 of roughly 800 political prisoners have been released. Foro Penal, an independent human-rights monitoring group, has verified less than half that number. President Trump should insist that all the anti-socialists be freed immediately and that those who celebrate their liberation may do so without fear.
Eventually, Venezuela will need a new government, one that respects the basic rights of Venezuelans, including the more than 8 million – roughly a quarter of the population – who have fled socialist oppression and poverty. Many have the brains and skills necessary to reinvigorate the dilapidated economy.
Venezuela possesses the world's largest crude oil reserves, but its energy infrastructure is derelict. To bring production from where it is now, 870,000 barrels a day, to where it was in the late 1990s before the socialists took over, 3.4 million barrels a day, will cost as much as $100 billion. I doubt American oil companies will make that investment until and unless Venezuela is again a rule-of-law nation.
Venezuela is fortunate to have a united opposition led by Maria Corina Machado, the recent Nobel Prize winner, and Edmundo Gonzalez, the overwhelming winner of the 2024 election which Mr. Maduro stole from Venezuela's voters.
That opposition lacks one essential: guns. Mr. Maduro's remnant regime still has a monopoly on violence, though their eagerness to slaughter dissidents may now be tempered by Mr. Trump's attention.
I'd like to think that someone in Washington or northern Virginia is in touch with patriotic Venezuelan military officers willing to take risks to make their country free and prosperous – as it was before the socialist thugs took over.
On these and related matters, in my humble opinion, President Trump could have no better counselor than the one he was smart enough to choose: Marco Rubio. It's apparent that Mr. Trump's Secretary of State/National Security Advisor understands that having more allies in the Americas is one of the ways to make America great again.