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Title: "The Silliest Venezuela Take You Will Read Today"
Source:
National Review
URL Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/corn ... uela-take-you-will-read-today/
Published: Jan 8, 2026
Author: Dan McLaughlin
Post Date: 2026-01-08 10:52:04 by Mudboy Slim
Keywords: None
Views: 22
Here’s the silliest take of the week so far on Venezuela: a Sunday New York Times column by M. Gessen (per bio: “They won a George Polk Award for opinion writing in 2024. They are the author of 11 books”), titled “Maduro’s Ouster Plays Right into Putin’s Hands.” Set aside the knee-jerk instinct of certain liberal and progressive publications to insist that everything Donald Trump does must be good news for Vladimir Putin. Consider Gessen’s theses. First, we get the complaint that taking out Nicolás Maduro “is a blow — quite likely fatal — to the new world order of law, justice and human rights that was heralded in the wake of World War II.” As if a despotic regime that oppresses its people, flouts its own laws, and rigs elections is an icon of “law, justice and human rights.” What happened to “nobody is above the law”? Gessen tells us that the capture of Maduro undermines “multilateral institutions created to foster cooperation and enforce international law.” But those institutions exist and can function only because of American power. “International law” is not law at all, as we Americans think of law as the product of representative institutions making rules with the consent of the governed, to be enforced by people chosen with that consent and answerable to it. International law has always been more of a system of manners, by which separate sovereigns agree to abide by certain customs so long as their opposite numbers do the same. Yet you will again find nothing in Gessen’s piece even bothering to claim that Maduro’s regime has behaved in a law-bound manner worthy of reciprocity. Gessen says that “despite what the hoodlums running our country may actually believe, abduction — whether on a street in Boston, in an apartment building in New York or Chicago, or in Maduro’s compound in Caracas — never serves the cause of justice.” But criminals always think there’s no difference between an abduction and an arrest. We have, after all, an indictment to enforce. And I would argue that the cause of justice was served when we got Osama bin Laden, and this would have been true had he agreed to come peaceably to be prosecuted. In either case, the question of legality is one of American law. There are entirely fair criticisms to be made of treating the acts of other heads of state as crimes to be prosecuted, and that is so whether the target is Maduro, or Slobodan Miloševi, or Augusto Pinochet. But the question whether America is entitled to enforce its laws against a foreign despot is not about whether international law has been violated. Then, we get to the assertion that this is all a useful precedent for Putin because American enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine somehow legitimizes Russian aggression against Ukraine: "What matters here is the similarity between the aggressors: Trump and Putin. . . . Another thing Trump and Putin share is their disdain for European values, the very values of cooperation, justice and human rights that the post-World War II international order was designed to uphold. . . . If so, it will also allow Putin to take as much of Europe as he wants to bite off. . . . The invasion of Caracas, carried out in ways eerily similar to what Moscow had once planned for Kyiv, will embolden him further. A similar message has no doubt been received in Beijing: If Trump can take Venezuela and Putin can take Ukraine, surely President Xi Jinping of China can take Taiwan." Leave aside the implication here that Moscow came and went from Ukraine in one day without killing a single Ukrainian civilian. Leave aside also the idea that values imposed by force on a continent that was torn by internal wars for centuries can properly be described as “European” in nature. I’m sorry, but it has never been “European values” of “cooperation, justice and human rights” that has stalled Putin’s advance and (thus far) deterred China — it is bombs and guns and airplanes and ships, many of them American or American-funded. Putin and Xi do not care about the Europeans’ moral example, or ours. They care about power and will. So long as we have the power and the will to stop their aggression, “European values” do not enter into it. Will all of this prevent European or Latin American countries from allying with the United States? Ask George H. W. Bush. While the parallels between the captures of Maduro and Manuel Noriega are not entirely exact given that Panama had formally declared war on the United States before we invaded, we heard much of the same caterwauling from the same sources in 1989–90. Noriega surrendered to the United States on January 3, 1990, 36 years to the day before we captured Maduro. On November 29 of that same year, the United Nations passed a resolution authorizing an American-led coalition, which ultimately included 42 countries, to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. The coalition included two Latin American countries (Honduras and Argentina), as well as several nations whose regimes had been toppled with American assistance, some of them a few decades earlier (Germany, Japan, Italy), some of them just within the prior 18 months (Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania). They allied with us then, in our action against Hussein, regardless of what they thought about the invasion of Panama, because of our power, our will, their self-interest, and the justice of that cause. 
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