My objection was not that Maduro did not deserve his fate – he did. It was that methods matter. The Venezuela operation was unilateral, without congressional authorisation or allied support. Its justification was openly transactional – oil, drugs, the Monroe Doctrine. There was no plan for what follows. The historian Niall Ferguson, writing in The Free Press, praised Trump as a “nineteenth-century figure” returning to the politics of 1900. But that is not a compliment. The politics of 1900 produced 1914, and then 1945. A rerun with nuclear weapons will be worse.
