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Boy, are the think tank and media foreign policy poohbahs stumped after Donald Trump’s big kidnapping of the Maduros on Friday night. All of them agree that it was a brilliant military operation, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio insists on calling a law enforcement “mission in support of the Department of Justice.” 

Which I guess isn’t that far-fetched a description, given the fact that we have platoons of armed, uniformed men in full combat gear running around our own country conducting Gestapo-like law enforcement missions on unsuspecting people, immigrant and citizen alike, as they go about their business of living peaceful lives in the United States of America.

What the poohbahs are wringing their hands about is the what-comes-next stage of things, which they are already referring to using the dread terms “regime change” and “nation building,” both of which are anathema to red-hat wearing true-believers of Trump’s America. 

Reading the Washington Post story this morning, “Rubio takes on most challenging role yet: Viceroy of Venezuela,” is like reading a new Pentagon Papers written by academic moles who have been hidden away in the basements of the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute for the last 20 years trying to make sense of How It Could Have Gone So Wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

It is truly going to be a sport watching them trying to avoid saying “here we go again” so they can keep from losing their invitations to MAGA cocktail parties and dinners by pissing off the boss.

Some interesting details are emerging. Planning for the Big Moment of the Maduro Kidnapping took place over months, with the final preparations coming just before Christmas as everyone waited on the weather for the right moment to go. Trump moved himself and his entourage to Mar-a-Lago on December 19, so a lot of the final preparations must have taken place from the front seat of a golf cart, given the fact that Trump, according to informed estimates, has played golf more than 14 times since he reached Palm Beach.

Check out the photograph released by the White House showing Trump, Rubio, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe watching the action on a big flat-screen TV in real time as the assault took place. 

Look closely. What’s that behind the thin curtain used as a privacy screen to create a portable situation room? Why, it’s one of the Mar-a-Lago ballrooms! And who is that standing behind Trump and Rubio in a dark vest and white shirt and tie? Could it be one of the Mar-a-Lago waiters waiting for a Diet Coke order? 

Trump couldn’t inform Congress, but if you were a Mar-a-Lago waiter on Friday night, you knew everything that was happening in Venezuela in real time.

There is one other anathema word that has entered the day-after discussions: footprint. This is mil-speak for how big a military presence will be necessary to keep Venezuela from, in the words of the Post, descending into “catastrophe.” They’re already calling around to D.C. think tanks asking “experts” what size footprint it will take to “run” Venezuela while Trump and his oil-biz buddies “take the oil,” as Trump was fond of putting it, back when he was criticizing the Bush administration for taking Iraq but failing to “take the oil.”

One genius at something called the “Washington Office on Latin America” — there must be a “Washington Office” think tank in D.C. for every region of the world just in case we decide to do some more invading — referred back to what happened after we deposed Manuel Noriega from power in Panama and left an “occupying force” of 27,000. That won’t be enough, because Venezuela is “12 times the size” of Panama with “six times the population,” according to this guy, who is probably paid in the mid-six-figures to Think Big Thoughts about stuff like occupying Latin American countries. At present, we have about 15,000 troops deployed in the region, but we’ll need to “multiply by a factor of five,” and that’s only a “conservative estimate,” according to the Latin America expert.

Remember what happened with Iraq? Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Eric Shinseki went before the Senate Armed Services Committee in February of 2003 and said they would need a force of “several hundred thousand” to occupy Iraq, which has about the same population as Venezuela and half the land mass. That got him fired, for disagreeing with Donald Rumsfeld and the Masters of War who thought about 140,000 troops would suffice — a number of soldiers Shinseki knew was pulled out of somebody’s ass, probably Paul Wolfowitz’s, so they could keep public support for the “cakewalk” on their side.

They’ve removed Nicolas Maduro and left in place his utterly corrupt administration, which according to the Post, Rubio is getting along with because — get this — he speaks Spanish as a first language. 

It apparently hasn’t occurred to anyone in the Trump administration, which appears to have completely decamped to Mar-a-Lago, that they will have to “run” the country in conjunction with the left-over narco-terrorists currently running Venezuela. Because Maduro didn’t do his narco-terrorizing all by himself, did he? Might he have had a few partners in his regime, like maybe his vice president, who had connections to the cocaine drug gangs that Trump and Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem have made such a big deal about for the past year, such as Tren de Aragua, the very bad guys who were so very bad they had to be deported to a torture prison in El Salvador in violation of a court order.

There are so many holes in the leaky vessel of a “policy” that led us to where we find ourselves now that nobody can fill in the blanks of day-after speculation about what the strategy might be. 

Rubio is saber-rattling Cuba, telling reporters that “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned.” This morning, the name of another country in the region popped up, Colombia, as if Latin America is a game of checkers, and all you have to do is leap your chip over the other guy’s chip, and boom, you’ve won. 

Then there is — are you ready for this — Stephen Miller’s wife, who posted on X a map of Greenland painted with the red, white, and blue stripes and stars of the US flag along with one word: “SOON.”

Watching all of this from across various oceans is Vladimir Putin, who’s probably feeling a tad vindicated right now, thinking, as he has told us before, that Ukraine is in his sphere of interest, so why shouldn’t he be able to lob a few missiles and explode a few buildings and kill a few people to take the coal and precious metals and all the rest of Ukraine’s riches, which are as much his as Venezuela’s oil is ours? 

Not to mention China’s Xi Jinping, who is peering hungrily across the Strait of Taiwan at what he considers not just to be in his sphere of influence but actually to belong to him and Greater China.

See how complicated all this is, whether it’s an invasion, or a kidnapping, or a law enforcement mission, or whatever you want to call it? 

But not to worry: Trump has his Big Thinkers on the job. Here is a photo of Trump’s big military guy, Pete Hegseth, watching the Venezuelan operation at Mar-a-Lago with Trump. Look at his military bearing, his command presence! Oh, my goodness! Hegseth sees something! And he can do two things at the same time! He can point with one hand, and button his suit jacket with the other!

Now ask yourself: Does Venezuela have anyone with Hegseth’s talents who can get in our way? Does Cuba? Or Colombia? Or, God help us, Greenland?

How many of them could plan an operation with 150 aircraft and several dozen warships and the Delta Force from the front seat of a golf cart? How many Venezuelans could “ace” their cognitive tests three out of three times? 

Ask yourself that and see if you’re still clutching your pearls about regime change in South America, which after all has belonged to us ever since Trump renamed the body of water separating us as the Gulf of America.

First a hurricane, then an ocean! Yet another victory for his Sharpie!

As a service to our readers, we curate noteworthy stories through partnerships with outside writers and thinkers. A graduate of West Point, Lucian K. Truscott IV has had a career spanning five decades as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. His columns appear in the Lucian Truscott Newsletter. This column has been adapted with the author’s permission.