Secretary of State Marco Rubio is beginning to look interesting. I do not think his surgeon is very good: The work has accentuated his mild lazy eye; his cheekbones are beginning to look dangerous to touch; his brow is wandering into the realm of the perpetually surprised. We will draw the veil of charity over the unusual maneuvers involving his hairline. I am a nearly middle-aged Italian American man, and making fun of others’ misfortunes of coiffure invites heaven’s revenge.
Rubio is not only beginning to look interesting; he’s also beginning to sound interesting. Like dozens of anhedonic hacks in our fair imperial capital, I occasionally read State Department press emails out of sheer anxious boredom. Well, by thunder, the man from Miami is saying strange things about Venezuela. The menacing buildup of naval and air assets in the environs of everyone’s favorite communist favela has just a whiff of “regime change” about it. When a Fox News hostess asked about that, Rubio advanced a novel argument that I’m sure is turning retired Bushies green with envy: It’s not regime change if you say the head of state isn’t actually legitimate.
Well, he’s not a—but the thing is they’re not—he’s—we don’t—not only do we not recognize him, 50-something countries around the world do not recognize Nicolás Maduro as the rightful president. He’s not the president of Venezuela. That’s a title he’s given himself. And that’s not just us saying it. That was – by the way, that was the policy of the Biden administration, and that was the policy of the first Trump Administration, and that’s the policy of 50-something countries, including multiple countries in the region, do not recognize him as the president of that country.
What he is, is someone who’s empowered himself of some of the instruments of government and are using that to operate a drug cartel from Venezuelan territory, much of that drugs aimed at reaching the United States. So we’re not going to have a cartel, operating or masquerading as a government, operating in our own hemisphere. He’s indicted. He’s a fugitive of American justice. There’s a reward out for his capture. And by the way, related to that, the President of the United States made clear that he’s not going to allow cartels, that cartel or any other cartel, to operate with impunity in our hemisphere and send drugs towards the United States. And he’s going to use the U.S. military and all the elements of American power to target cartels who are targeting America.
By gum. Hunting season is coming up; I’m going to tell my neighbor that he is not the rightful owner of the rather enviable tree stand he keeps leaving in his driveway, it’s just a title he’s given himself. But lay aside venery for a moment. It seems an awful lot as if Rubio is saying that the United States is about to justify a war of regime change against Venezuela. This would be somewhat less worrying if the bluster weren’t paired with boarding and/or blowing up random Venezuelan boats, which is certainly a customary sort of prelude to a war.
This is a bit of a monkey’s-paw situation for your humble correspondent. We have for years argued that the U.S. should pay more attention to its own hemisphere and implement muscular solutions where applicable. At the same time, a speciously justified and illegal war against a given country, a war that is liable to destabilize its neighbors and kick off another round of migratory unrest in Latin America, seems, well, imprudent—especially if it results in the further accretion of unaccountable war powers to the executive. Venezuela is, without a doubt, an unpleasant, blighted fossil of the Third Worldism of yesteryear; it has been for many years, as reported here by more estimable pens than mine. It is also not a serious threat to American sovereignty or to American welfare—it bears repeating that Venezuelan drug-trafficking is just the boring year-in, year-out trade in Colombian-sourced cocaine, not the fentanyl that kills five-figure Americans annually. Thanks to the Trump administration, a return to normal American border enforcement has stanched the flow of Venezuelan illegal immigrants to nearly nothing. This all is to say that, in September 2025, the Bolivarian Republic is, thank God, a fairly distant problem.
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Nicolas Maduro is a nasty character, but he has not proven immune to good old-fashioned logrolling. Why not try some more in that line? It is not our duty to rescue the Venezuelan people from their multi-decade immiseration—and, if you accept the interventionists’ argument that it is, actually, you may look askance at those same interventionists’ longstanding sanctions program against Caracas, which has not changed the regime’s behavior but has in fact helped to impoverish the Venezuelan people.
The U.S. has had the luxury of tampering in parts of the world where failure’s costs are borne by others. (It is astonishing that the anti-immigration political groundswell in Europe is not accompanied by any real animus toward the superpower that set off the migration crisis—a true testament to the unquestionable nature of American hegemony in the West, even in 2025.) We will not be so insulated from a Venezuelan adventure. This could be endured, perhaps, if the representatives of the American people were given the real facts and made a deliberate decision. But as it is, it seems that Rubio—that is to say, Trump, because certainly the leading neoconservative Latin American in the administration could not possibly be the prime mover for neoconservative Latin American policies, the very suggestion is preposterous—is intent on a smoke-and-mirrors justification for unilateral executive action.
This looks like a bad war; the administration’s facelift efforts are only making it worse. Rubio should take note.
