“The coup.”

It's No. 19. Aggression of this kind against another people always fails.

Caracas, not Miami. 2019. (VOA/ Wikimedia Commons.)

4 JANUARY—I imagine others were as shocked as I to awaken Saturday morning to news that the United States had just invaded Venezuela and “captured” Nicolás Maduro. Immediately we are on notice that the language used to describe the events of this weekend will be highly manipulated: This is and will remain key to the manufacture of consent as the Trump regime proceeds brazenly on its way. The Venezuelan president was not captured: He was kidnapped.

There were brief video snippets Saturday morning, not quite real-time but nearly, showing lots of American aircraft above Caracas and lots of explosions across the nation’s capital. Reports since, by non–American correspondents writing from Caracas, indicate U.S. fighter jets had the capital ablaze within two hours, electricity and communications knocked out. Among much else, they also bombed and destroyed La Guaira, 30 miles north of the capital and the nation’s principal port. This was a very major assault—excuse me, law-enforcement operation—and it is possibly unprecedented in Venezuelan history.

And then I read that this was not your usual C.I.A. operation. “It was the product of a deep partnership between the agency and the military,” The New York Times reported. We like products of deep partnerships, I suppose is the thought. We don’t like invasions, but damn it, get with the program, this was no an invasion. And then this from Julian Barnes and Eric Schmitt, Times correspondents well-versed in how to mind their manners while covering “the intelligence community,” as they are wont to call it:

While the C.I.A. played a critical role in planning and carrying it out, the mission was a law enforcement operation by the U.S. military’s special operation forces, rather than an operation carried out under the agency’s authority.

A law-enforcement operation. Whose law, enforced under whose jurisdiction? Special op soldiers now enforce the law? I never heard of that before. In this case 2,000 miles and across international frontiers from the legal authority claiming jurisdiction? Never heard of that, either. But thank goodness this wasn’t one of those criminal C.I.A. ops you read about if you read the better histories of America’s post–1945 conduct. No, it was a deep partnership enforcing the law—this even if it looks like a breach of more laws than one can count.

Anything anything anything, I tell you, to avoid calling this a “coup”—a word you will never ever read in the pages of The Times or any of the other corporate dailies. In the Venezuelan case, we don’t even get to call it “regime change,” which I have always thought was fun as these sorts of euphemisms go. The Times went daringly far Sunday to suggest the Venezuela op “seems like regime change,” which is The Times’s way of tell readers not to believe their own eyes because this only looks like regime change but really and truly isn’t. You have to love the paper for this kind of thing.

And so a law-enforcement operation this must be.

Alas, the wads of cotton-wool English these media deploy to keep America’s self-image in shiny shape.

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O.K., some thoughts concerning the coup conducted in the early hours of 3 January, while most Americans slept and while President Trump watched in real time, “like I was watching a television show,” as he put it on Fox News. One is sure it was just like that for the Trumpster.

Who wouldn’t feel sideswiped, as I did, on hearing of this latest intervention in Latin America? True, the Pentagon has maintained that immense flotilla of ships in the Caribbean, along with assorted aircraft and 15,000 personnel, since last summer. In November Trump authorized the C.I.A. to conduct covert operations on Venezuelan soil. And there is the National Security Strategy the White House issued more or less simultaneously, wherein it is baldly stated:

After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.

How would you like to be Brazilian or Chilean or Peruvian and read that?

No, it was not hard to miss what was coming before this past weekend. How to account, then, for the shock attaching to Saturday Morning Surprise, as we might as well call it? I see two explanations, and I propose we consider them carefully so as to understand… to understand who we are and what our nation is.

One, conducting a live, videoed coup in Latin America in the year 2025 or 2026 seemed simply too stupid even for the Dummköpfe who run the Trump regime to consider. But here we are. Stupid does not count in this crowd as a reason not to do something.

This escapade is not going to be a disaster. The disaster is already unfolding. However much the United States makes this work is the extent to which the victor will end up the defeated. Aggression of this kind against another people simply cannot work.

“We’re going to stay until such time as we’re going to run it,” Trump said, a little incoherently, in his speech to the nation Saturday morning. We are back in the “nation-building” business, in other words. As Washington’s adventure in Iraq should have taught the policy cliques, if only they were capable of learning anything, this is a commitment the magnitude and duration of which cannot be foreseen. Reminder: Venezuela is a nation of 30 million people. If you go in for these kinds of stats, it is twice as large as Spain, two and a half times the size of Germany, and four times larger than Great Britain.