Let me share a few thoughts about the U.S. action overnight in Venezuela. I say “action” because it’s not clear to me that the U.S. itself (as in the people calling the shots in Washington) know what this was, or have decided. I woke up in the middle of the night and saw the news of some major U.S. attack. That only registered a few WTFs in my mind. Then I woke up again at maybe 4 a.m. and saw at the least the claim that U.S. forces had captured and exfiltrated Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Then my WTFs escalated to 11.

Let me take an initial crack at assessing what the United States has done in Venezuela with the proviso that time can easily prove such analyses mistaken. Donald Trump’s claimed takeover of Venezuela has been compared to what the American invasion aimed to do in Iraq in 2003, but I’d go back instead to the American intervention in the Spanish-American War in 1898 and its conquest and takeover of Cuba and the Philippines, about which I wrote in Folly of Empire. 

• As you’ve no doubt seen by now, Trump held a press conference during which he stated that the U.S. will “run” Venezuela through a “a group.” He also talked a lot about oil.
  
• Trump was asked about additional military involvement in the country to facilitate this plan to “run” it. “No, if Maduro’s vice president — if the vice president does what we want, we won’t have to do that,” he said. Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, has today been publicly reaffirming that Maduro remains president and demanding the U.S. release him.
  
• Congress was not notified in advance of the strike, members have said and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has confirmed. “This was not the kind of mission that you can do congressional notification on,” Rubio said during Saturday’s press conference.