In the earliest hours of January 3, a group of U.S. Delta Force operators broke into the heavily fortified presidential compound of Nicolás Maduro, the dictator who has ruled Venezuela since 2013.
Maduro tried to shut the door to a steel safe room, but it was too late. By 4:29 a.m. Caracas time, he and his wife were aboard the USS Iwo Jima bound for New York, where they are set to be arraigned as early as Monday.
“I watched it literally like I was watching a television show,” an exultant President Donald Trump told Fox News over the phone. Later, in a press conference, he compared the operation to “World War II” and to the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities this past June.
As predictable as the numbing effect of a pisco sour, out poured the condemnations. The newly inaugurated mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, condemned “the pursuit of regime change.” Commentator David Rothkopf called it the “Putinization of U.S. foreign policy.” Social media was alive with accusations that Trump had sold out to the neocons. Former national security adviser John Bolton gave an interview that amounted to “attaboy.”
All this seems wide of the mark. For the right analogy, we need to reach back much further than George W. Bush circa 2001—back another 100 years. Excitable liberals have wasted a decade looking for analogies between Trump and interwar European dictators, when all along it has been perfectly clear that his playbook was Made in America circa 1900.
