Source: The American Conservative
by Joseph Addington
“[T]he risks inherent to any kind of ‘regime collapse’ approach are numerous and severe, and far outweigh any potential benefits. Most pertinently, when any government collapses, the resulting power vacuum is necessarily unpredictable and chaotic, and leaves room for all kinds of actors, state and nonstate, bad and good, to exert their will. Such a situation is not generally conducive to an orderly transition of power of any kind, let alone a transition to democracy. Here the expected comparison is usually Libya, after the bombing campaign that destroyed the Gaddafi regime, but Venezuelan society is not comparable to that of Libya; it is not characterized by a fractured, tribal society and fundamentalist revolutionaries. Instead the major danger is that Venezuela becomes a mid-20th century Colombia: a weak state inundated by brutal organized crime, incapable of defending itself or of disrupting the conflicts between cartels and narcorevolutionary groups fighting over disputed territory.” (11/10/25)