The Undeniable Truths of Regime Change

It’s been a long time in the United States since we found anything undeniable.

We are a nation of deniability, and have been so ever since a lying president made ‘alternative facts’ fashionable. But there is a truth we can hang our hats on, and that’s the fallibility of regime change.

I got not a wink of sleep last night, staring at the ceiling, and rolling around in my mind the audacity of what’s happened in Venezuela.

And, sorry as I am to admit it, our current occupant of the Oval Office is not the only victim of that wrongheadedness.

Truman had his Korean adventure. Kennedy went after Vietnam and Cuba, Bush and Cheney aimed to fix Iraq and Afghanistan, and others have been up to their hips in nations from Central America to take-your-choice across the Middle East. The Reagan administration sent the most adherents to prison, but all others had a hand in the game.

As cowboy philosopher Will Rogers once said, “There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.”

We continue to pee, yet not a regime has been changed since World War Two.

It’s worth mentioning that, as we approach America’s 250^th Anniversary, we have been at war somewhere in the world for all but seventeen years, much of that against our own native population.

More Americans died in the Civil War than in all other U.S. wars combined, with estimates around 620,000 to 750,000 deaths, in a nation of slightly over 30 million. This number far exceeding the combined fatalities from World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, making it America’s bloodiest conflict by a significant margin. The sheer scale of death, often due to disease as much as combat, was so immense that it’s comparable to all other U.S. wars’ losses put together, highlighting its devastating impact on the nation’s history.

Yet, we celebrate war, and our national gun culture is part and parcel of the very fabric of America, the only country I know of that has twice as many guns as citizens. Unknown to most, Japan had considered a troop landing on America’s west coast, immediately after Pearl Harbor. That plan was abandoned when they learned that America’s private citizens were heavily armed.

If one were to search for a president strongly opposed to war as a solution to regime change, that search would begin and end with Dwight Eisenhower.

Overall commander of allied troops in WWII, Eisenhower kept us out of foreign engagements during his two terms as president. I was in the army during the second of those terms (between Korea and Vietnam) and the threat at the time was Nassar’s takeover of the Suez Canal. Congress wanted war. Ike kept us home. According to him,

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world of ours... must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.”

Back to the subject at hand: Is the recent kidnapping of the president of Venezuela and his wife an act of war?

Under international law and diplomatic norms, the use of force against another sovereign state’s territory — including military strikes — normally constitutes an act of war or aggression (unless authorized by the UN Security Council or in clear self-defense). The U.S. president’s operation apparently involved bombing Venezuelan military and civilian targets and a military raid inside Venezuela without UN authorization.

Forcibly seizing a foreign head of state is a violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty. Leaders around the world, including China, Mexico, and Brazil’s president, have condemned the action as an illegal breach of international law.

(New York Post) Opponents, legal scholars, and political figures (including some U.S. lawmakers) have explicitly labeled the operation an “act of war” or an illegal intervention. (Associated Press) Venezuela’s vice president and courts have declared Maduro the legitimate president and demanded his return.

(CBS News) The Trump administration is portraying the operation as a law-enforcement action tied to longstanding U.S. indictments against Maduro for alleged narcotics trafficking.

What it apparently amounts to is a convenient smokescreen, at a time when the president is under extreme pressure for his alleged participation in Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex activities. Using such a blatant military strike to change the national narrative is beyond the pale of normal presidential powers, but the facts of the strike are beyond controversy.

Perhaps the president considers them ‘alternative facts.’

If it was a legitimate argument against Venezuela’s purported support of the the international drug trade, President Trump hardly supports that case by his recent pardon for former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández.

Hernández, who served as president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022, was convicted in a U.S. federal court in 2024 of conspiring to import hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States and related weapons offenses and was sentenced to 45 years in prison.

Last month, President Donald Trump granted Hernández a full pardon, and he was released from U.S. custody. According to The Washington Post, Hernández’s case drew major attention because he was not only a high-level political leader but was convicted of involvement with one of the largest drug trafficking conspiracies ever prosecuted in the United States.

The current Honduran government strongly condemned the pardon, calling it a betrayal of justice and a blow to anti-corruption efforts.

Honduran prosecutors and civil-society groups warned it undermines years of cooperation with U.S. anti-narcotics enforcement. Victims’ organizations argued the pardon validated impunity for political elites tied to organized crime.

If all this seems too long and varied a critique, I make no apology. In a lifetime that spans all, or part, of ten decades, I have never witnessed such controversial acts by a sitting president of the United States.

It’s unlikely they will ever be seen again.