It’s not hard to see why. Military history teaches us that airpower alone is insufficient to achieve the kinds of aims the Trumpians have set for themselves. Unless the administration accomplishes what has historically proved impossible, it must either scale back its objectives or attempt a ground invasion of Iran. As a former US Army infantryman, who fought in what used to be called the War on Terror, I know one thing: the latter option shouldn’t even be on the table.

A ground war against the Islamic Republic, on Iran’s own terrain, will send American troops into hell on earth — or about as close as we mortals can get to it.

First, the sheer size of the ground force will be staggering. Any serious American invasion of Iran would likely rival or exceed the scale of Vietnam or the 1991 Gulf War, making it the largest US military undertaking since the Second World War. Iran’s land mass and population size alone would prove a daunting hurdle. The country is nearly four times the size of Iraq, and its population is more than three times larger.

Iran’s terrain is, in a word, punishing. Its topography is dominated by mountains, which by some figures constitute half of its territory. Unlike most nations, Iran’s urban centers are located inland, nestled amid mountains, and buffeted by uninhabitable deserts to the east and the south. This combination of Iran’s built and natural environments would mean that US forces would have to advance through numerous bottlenecks to even reach Iran’s military and population centers. And while Iran is in the middle of the pack in terms of population density, its capital, Tehran, teems with more than 15 million souls; a fight to capture the city against a determined enemy would amount to the largest urban battle in American military history.

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The idea of capturing and pacifying Tehran alone illustrates the near-impossibility of such an invasion. Using the troop density employed in the 2004 battle for Fallujah, Iraq, as a point of reference, suggests that it would require more than 600,000 soldiers — roughly the size of the US deployment during the Vietnam War. Hence, perhaps, Leavitt’s talk of reinstituting the draft. 

Looking to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a similar invasion of Iran, given its population size, would require as many 1.6 million troops. Those estimates appear more daunting still when compared with the actual force structure of the US military, which boasts about 2.1 million members in active service, reserves, and the National Guard. Of these, only about 20% are combat troops. Simply put, committing 1.6 million personnel would mean using roughly three-quarters of the entire US military, including combat forces America simply doesn’t have.

Such a war couldn’t be undertaken without a massive mobilization, and a fundamental reordering of American global commitments, requiring the diversion of forces from Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. An invasion of Iran would therefore impel the United States to confront something it has long sought to avoid: hard choices about the limits of its global military footprint. Summing up the scale of the prospect, the columnist Max Boot, not exactly known for his pacifism, described an invasion of Iran as “the mother of all quagmires.”

Then comes the next obvious problem: fighting the war. While Iran’s military would likely lack air superiority and remains less technologically advanced than that of the United States, the Islamic Republic shouldn’t be taken lightly. Before the outbreak of the current war, the country’s regular armed forces were estimated at roughly 420,000 personnel. Iran’s more ideologically committed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps numbered around 190,000, backed by a militia force, known as the Basij, of more than 600,000.

How much of this force could ultimately resist an invasion is speculative: some may defect, and others removed from the battlefield before they can fight. But what is clear is that Iran would likely adhere to its long-standing doctrine of defense in depth. Drawing on lessons from the Iran-Iraq War, Iranian planners have adopted what they call a “mosaic strategy”: decentralized command structures combined with a willingness to trade territory to wear down an invading force through attrition.

Supporting this strategy would be Iran’s still-significant arsenal of rockets and drones. These have already surprised US military officials in recent engagements, and could prove even more dangerous on Iranian soil, where shorter flight times would give the Americans far less warning. Iranian militias in the region, too, are battle-hardened, versed in irregular warfare, and, in many cases, acquainted with American tactics.

US forces would likely find themselves fighting a determined asymmetric opponent armed with effective weapons and operating on difficult terrain. For a military that has not attempted a major invasion in more than two decades, and that remains only partially tested against modern drone warfare, such a fight would be far from easy. In short, Iranian commanders would aim to draw the United States into a long and bloody war of attrition, and they would have the terrain and urban density do it.

Some will argue that the past is not prologue — that the Iranian regime is unpopular and therefore unlikely to inspire serious resistance. It’s telling, however, that American bombing has yet to create fissures in the regime. Nor has the American air campaign inspired the Iranian people to revolt. On the contrary, all available evidence points to regime consolidation, and the closing of the gap between public sentiment and elite opinion.

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Then, too, critics underestimate the power of nationalism, particularly in the Iranian case. The “rally around the flag” effect — the well-documented tendency of citizens to unite behind their government in wartime — was most clearly demonstrated in Iran after Saddam Hussein invaded the country in 1980, a move that ultimately consolidated the very regime the Iraqi dictator had hoped to topple.

Even under the most ideal circumstances of state collapse — like those seen in the early days of George W. Bush’s Iraq War — a post-invasion insurgency in Iran would be all but certain. Between the most fervent supporters of the IRGC, and with the potential backing of Shiite militias across the region, it would not take many committed fighters to prolong the conflict. As Washington learned in both Iraq and Afghanistan, even a relatively small but determined insurgent force can sustain a war for years. That force could draw from an estimated “fit-to-service population” in Iran of 41 million, plus the larger Shiite sphere, including warriors from Iraq, Bahrain, Lebanon, and Pakistan, among others. Much like Iraq and Afghanistan, the defeat of the Iranian army would be a fleeting victory assuredly followed by a bloody and open-ended slog with an insurgency. 

Finally, an American escalation into a conventional ground invasion would deepen the already daunting regional crisis. Deploying ground troops in Iran would provide an ample opportunity for America’s great-power rivals, Russia and China, to drain Uncle Sam of blood and treasure. So far, the pair have yet to expand their assistance to Tehran beyond diplomatic and intelligence support. But the presence of American forces on Iranian soil would provide Moscow and Beijing with a tempting pressure point against a superpower that is already overextended, indebted, and domestically fractured. Iran, then, could become a bloody site of great-power competition. 

Given the totality of Iran’s geography, demographics, military capability, and geopolitical connections, the prospect of an American invasion of the country should be unthinkable. Yet Trump’s ill-considered decision to launch the war, coupled with his vague-but-ambitious goals, has made this impossible scenario a military possibility. Given the horrific costs such an invasion would entail, however, Trump should choose a different path: declare “victory” and de-escalate. Washington must stop throwing good American money after bad — and preserve the lives of the brave men and women who daily underwrite our national security with their blood.

Yet success or failure will be a harder judgment to make for historians of Trump’s own latest Middle East adventure, which is already starting to look like a reverse Suez: its exposure of the limitations of pure military power; the domestic and international hostility; the fragility of alliance systems lazily assumed to be solid; and the wider overtones of an empire wildly overreaching in an attempt to stave off terminal decline. The difficulty in ascertaining, when this ends, whether or not Trump has achieved his war aims rests simply in the fact that the aims so far put forward have differed wildly, and are often mutually contradictory. The Suez Operation possessed a clearly defined military goal which succeeded, and a wider political one, which failed. As it stands, the Trump administration appears in possession of neither.

The broader arguments against the current conflict were most memorably made by Trump himself, campaigning as an anti-war candidate who would keep the United States out of costly and unmanageable Middle Eastern entanglements. His Vice-President, JD Vance, once articulately made the case against this very war. Having successfully demolished his own policy platform, it is difficult to determine what would now count as victory for Trump. The desired outcomes given, at the time of writing, have ranged from the maximalist deliverance of “freedom” to the Iranian people through full regime change in Tehran, through to inspiring an ideal “Venezuela solution” in which more amenable military figures launch an internal coup, then perhaps installing a Shah, ruling Iran remotely from the more stable comfort of Maryland. Or else simply destroying Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity (which Trump claimed to have “obliterated” in June last year). This scrambling for post facto rationales appears to derive from the fact that Iran did not immediately fold, as Trump apparently assumed it would, with the assassination of its leadership: unlike today’s America, it is not a personalist regime.

Yet if America’s war aims are nebulous from a lack of preparation, Israel’s appear haphazard by design. Summing up Netanyahu’s goals, the Israeli strategic analyst Danny Citrinowicz observes that “If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future [or] the stability of Iran.” Whatever Netanyahu’s aspirations, a heavily armed but leaderless Iran, engulfed in chaos, represents a strategic threat rather than a victory for the wider West. In this, it appears that America has launched a war alongside, and at the behest of, a notionally junior partner with wildly divergent goals, and which Washington has already admitted it is unable to rein in. For British politicians, all the warning lights should now be blinking red: even the Iraq War, a historic disaster, was vastly better conceived, planned and resourced than this.

And if America’s war aims are vague and contradictory, their proposed means of achieving these desired outcomes are too — including Iranian submission through aerial bombing alone — a result which has never yet been obtained in the century-long history of air power — through launching a peripheral revolt in which Kurdish and perhaps Baluchi separatists act as America and Israel’s boots on the ground. The best that can currently be said for Trump’s gamble is that the desired end-state is so nebulous in its imagining, and the approach so scattergun, that almost any off-ramp can be spun as a victory by his imperial court and its attendant sycophants. With no single, coherent outcome proposed, Trump can claim, as he already has, that the war has already succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of planners. This is even as he is warning his base that victory may yet take some weeks, and cautioning Congress that “it is not possible at this time to know the full scope and duration of military operations that may be necessary”.

The war was, it seems, resourced for a few days of intensive bombing, with little anticipation of Iran striking back against Gulf states, and American early-warning facilities, with its arsenal of low-cost drones. Policy is now being made on the hoof, with senior administration officials “at each other’s throats” on the need for ground troops. CENTCOM, overseeing the war, has requested an increase in military intelligence analysts “to support operations against Iran for at least 100 days but likely through September”. The spectacle of a days-long special military operation, entered into with an over-confident faith in hard power achieving a swift political solution, then dragging on interminably, is all too familiar. For Vladimir Putin, certainly, America’s unforced error of embroiling itself in a quagmire US presidents have spent a half-century studiously avoiding is a godsend, depleting Western munitions stocks, replenishing the Kremlin’s coffers through rising oil and gas prices, and weakening Europe’s negotiating power.

Judged on strict military terms, though, the operation has chalked up notable successes. Iranian ballistic missile launches have slowed, and no doubt the aerial onslaught is depleting Iran’s arsenal of both munitions and launchers. The looming switch from stand-off munitions to less sophisticated bombs implies that air superiority has already been achieved, as Israel declared last weekend, or will soon be achieved, as the White House more cautiously claims. Whether or not Israel, the US and the Gulf states will run out of interceptor munitions before Iran runs out of missiles is a matter of speculation for even the best-informed analysts. Even as Pentagon sources brief concern over their dwindling arsenal, the Trump administration, for what it is worth, claims that it possesses “unlimited” stocks of munitions for a war that could last “forever” — while simultaneously blaming Ukraine for running down its weapons stockpile.

The most recent American attempt to exert its will in the region through air power alone, against Yemen’s Houthis, who are vastly weaker than Iran, entirely failed. The Houthis have not yet joined the war, as Hezbollah now has in response to Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon: the prospects for escalation grow wider by the day. As for boots on the ground, the much-briefed claims that Iran’s Kurds are willing to join in the war against Tehran remains debatable. The Kurdish Regional Government of Northern Iraq, which hosts exiled Iranian Kurdish militias, has been warned by Iran that their entry into the war will invite an Iranian response, and has stressed its neutrality as a result. It has not even been a month since Washington abandoned its last Kurdish partners: they must now judge whether this time round America will prove a more dependable ally.

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For all the military risks involved, it is very possible, though far from certain, that US and Israeli bombing can bring about the collapse of the Iranian state, though what happens next is anyone’s guess. The US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Caine, reportedly cautioned before the strikes began “about the potential downsides of launching a major military operation targeting Iran”, citing “the scale, complexity and potential for US casualties of such a mission”, and asserting he was “​​unable to predict what the result of a regime change operation would be”. Both the Iranians and the Americans have already claimed to have received, and rejected, the other’s request for a ceasefire, with Israel reportedly seeking assurances Washington is not already seeking private talks. In any case, the Iranians have good cause to be wary of negotiating with Trump, given that their previous rounds of negotiations ended in American and Israeli bombing. Indeed, the current war began with Israel’s aerial assassination of the country’s political leadership in the middle of negotiations which, the Trump administration later boasted, were merely a ruse. Some of America’s intended new rulers of Iran, Trump has claimed, have already been killed by Israel. Having launched a war of choice, at a time convenient to him, Trump may now find ending it a far less simple affair.

As it stands, it is in Iran’s interest to drag out the war for as long as possible, expanding it across the wider region, increasing the economic disruption to American allies, and capitalizing on the widespread hostility to the war. As both Trump’s anti-interventionist base and the Democrat opposition rightly proclaim, this war has been entered into without any coherent plan, seemingly through Israel’s chain-ganging of the United States into military action it would not otherwise have chosen, an observation claimed as antisemitic by Israel’s advocates in the United States yet which has nevertheless also — bafflingly — been offered as proof of the war’s necessity by America’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Intelligence Committee chair Tom Cotton, and most recently by Trump himself.

As for Netanyahu, he exultantly claims that bringing America into the war is something he has “yearned to do for 40 years”. The Democrats, repeatedly briefing the attack line that Trump was “the first president stupid enough” to be cajoled by Netanyahu into war with Iran, have now been gifted a path to success in midterm elections which may yet overlap with the conflict itself. When as cynical a politician as Gavin Newsom feels safe questioning future military support to the “apartheid state” Israel, demanding from the podium “Why did we help Israel kill little girls?”, we see the cracks in America’s only true special relationship widening into a gulf. This war was, most probably, Netanyahu’s last chance to enlist the fading superpower against his decades-long foe. Whether it improves Israel’s long-term strategic position is doubtful in the extreme  — but none of this is Britain’s problem.

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It goes against instinct to praise the Prime Minister for his lawyerly prevarication. Yet given all the risks and uncertainties inherent to this war the arguments against joining America and Israel’s wild gamble are as strong as can be imagined. Just weeks ago, the same Trump administration which now chides us for our caution was threatening to annex European territory, and mocking our participation in its previous disastrous wars. Even if we exclude, as the Prime Minister does not, the moral factors, Starmer is entirely correct to say that this is a war with “no viable plan”. It appears that the Prime Minister, through his twin flaws of excessive deference to both European opinion and international law, may yet be dragged, unwillingly, towards the national interest. We already have our own war to worry about, in which the desire or ability of the United States to negotiate a satisfactory conclusion looks as doubtful from London as Washington’s reliability as a negotiating partner must look from Moscow. American realists may be correct in stating that the Ukraine war, in which Britain is already dangerously over-exposed, is not a core Washington interest — but neither is Netanyahu’s latest war of choice a British or European interest. Simply put, there is no advantage for Britain in joining this distant conflict, and the national interest, as in the Gaza War of which this is a vast escalation, remains in staying out of the affair as far as possible.

It is absurd, then, to watch Reform politicians, so recently bemoaning Britain’s political enmeshment with distant Middle Eastern conflicts and diaspora grievances, caper onstage with Israeli and Iranian monarchist flags, demanding our involvement in this mess. Farage’s hiring as foreign policy adviser of the neoconservative lobbyist Alan Mendoza, who has never yet seen a disastrous war he did not wish to join, was a rare deviation from his sharp political instincts, and a warning of the major strategic risks inherent in a Reform government, however much their domestic agenda may appeal. The Greens will rightly benefit from this misstep, as will, on Reform’s Right, Restore, edging towards a Powellite indifference to distant wars. If he holds his course, so will Starmer too.

The dilemma now for the Prime Minister is whether or not to join the emergent European policy of defensive neutrality, protecting national and continental interests while refusing involvement in the wider campaign. Yet the almost wholesale capture of the British security establishment by an Atlanticist ethos indistinguishable from vassalage, along with the looming American usage of British bases for offensive purposes, will complicate this. Starmer initially refused to permit offensive raids to launch from British territory, a policy which, in Spain’s case, has seen Trump threaten to use its bases anyway. Such threats would appear less stark, no doubt, if Britain had not already placed the sovereignty of Diego Garcia under question, but we cannot all boast the strategic wisdom of David Lammy’s former brain. If allowing British bases to be used cannot be prevented, Starmer can either explain why, or — politically more likely — spin a plausible rationale for active involvement, attempting to make a virtue out of compulsion.

Yet there is another path, the one shown by Emmanuel Macron, now expanding across the continent the French-led defense axis initially trialed with Greece. At the same time, Macron is drawing a sharp dividing line between the interests of Europe and her many nation states, and of the erratic empire which alternately threatens and cajoles us. Seventy years ago, a misadventure in the Middle East saw Britain and France adopt opposing positions on American domination, which led us to this impasse. Through an accident of British politics, it falls to as unlikely a figure as Starmer to make just such another historic choice.

All manner of extravagant non-military missions — advancing political feminism in Afghanistan, among many others — are quickly added to already luxurious supply requirements and end up feeding well-connected contractors and their expensive lobbyists. Soon enough, the actual cost per bullet fired makes it too expensive to kill enough uncooperative locals to accomplish the mission.

Trump’s Iran war is most definitely of the boot-less variety — and the shoes of the covert operative in Tehran and elsewhere are all on Israeli feet. This neatly eliminates the built-in failure mechanisms of past US interventions. Aside from “nation-building” fantasies bound to fail, troops on the ground mean casualties, which raise the political price of calling off an expedition with its goals visibly unachieved. Thus losing interventions persist: for almost 20 years in Afghanistan, which was supposed to last the 90 days needed to find and kill Bin Laden’s band, and over eight in Iraq, even though Saddam’s regime was brought down in less than a month.

But to go from non-failure to success, two things must be done. The most urgent, even if it is not actually the most difficult, is to demolish Iran’s capacity to launch the ballistic missiles and the explosive drones that have so far landed from the Gulf to Israel to Cyprus, killing some civilians and wounding more.

Because only a small fraction of the missiles produced by the Revolutionary Guards — whose quality controls are not up to Toyota standards — actually do enter boost phase, do reach their apogee, and then do descend correctly with enough precision to hit somewhere in the right country and not fall into the sea, they too have a cost-effectiveness problem just as US shooters did in Afghanistan. In fact, the total cost to Iran per Israeli or Arab killed or wounded is extravagantly high, and that of course means that the cost of preventing those very few casualties with missile defenses is just as extravagant.

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Even so, the US and Israel cannot just sit back and do nothing merely because Iran’s missiles and drones are not cost-effective. Every day and every night, therefore, US and Israeli fighter-bombers must fly out to the missile storage and launcher sites scattered across western Iran to detect and destroy missiles on their just-erected launchers, even as others drop steel-jacketed 2,000-pound penetrator bombs where they detect underground storage sites. Now that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and Qatar are all asking for anti-missile interceptors, and there is a danger of exhausting the supply, heavy bombers are also attacking Iran’s missile-storage sites whenever they are detected.

Another unavoidable military, or rather naval task, is to ensure the safe passage of oil and LNG tankers from Persian Gulf ports into the Indian Ocean and beyond through the Straits of Hormuz, which are only 21 miles wide in their narrowest parts. As it is, the tankers carrying Gulf LNG to the world are the objects of recurrent Iranian threats to “close the straits”. Iran cannot do this with a lock and key, nor does it have to: it would be enough to visibly damage a couple of tankers headed for the Straits to discourage the rest from even trying. Iran is not one of the world’s great naval powers, but in October 2023 it had both the 14 frigates and three submarines of the regular Artesh navy, and the corvettes and fast-attack missile boats of the Revolutionary Guards, with which to hit a tanker or two.

It follows that every one of those vessels had to be destroyed pre-emptively, not a difficult task even for the unassisted Israeli airforce, let alone for the US Air Force and Navy, which now has two aircraft-carrier task forces within striking range of all parts of Iran.

The much greater challenge in trying to replicate the Venezuela model of intervention, one that stops live threats and sets a dictatorship on a better path, with no US troops and no occupation, is to recruit and empower a less-than-horrific regime figure: one who has enough authority to steer the government in the right direction.

That is how Delcy Rodríguez, who was Maduro’s notably hardline and seemingly ultra-faithful vice president, but who eagerly accepted the job, was chosen as the interim ruler of Venezuela. With the help of her brother, Jorge Jesús Rodríguez Gómez, who usefully presides over an obedient national assembly, she has performed tolerably well, expelling Iran’s agents from Caracas (Maduro’s narco partners were the first to flee), liberating political prisoners, and stopping the flow of free oil to Cuba.

Delcy Rodríguez was not recruited to serve as the interim viceroy because she was any more liberal or pro-American than Maduro — or more opposed than him to drug-dealing — but because she was able and willing to overcome resistance to the drastic changes the US is demanding and which are visibly underway.

Iran’s best candidate to lead the country on a path to democracy — once the war has thoroughly demoralized and dispersed the Revolutionary Guards, and sent the low-paid Basij militia in search of better employment — has every possible virtue but one. For one thing, Masoud Pezeshkian personally represents multi-ethnic Iran very well. He is an ethnic Azeri brought up in Iran’s most significant Kurdish-speaking town, while also being immersed in secular Persian culture more vigorous than ever after the Ayatollahs tried to kill it. Even better, Pezeshkian is that great rarity in the Muslim world: a president who was actually elected.

After the sitting President Ebrahim Raisi, a former prosecutor who had imposed thousands of death penalties, was killed in a helicopter crash in May 2024, Saeed Jalili, an equally extremist replacement, offered his candidacy. But at that point, Iran was the scene of increasing anti-hijab protests, while the economy had started to sink under the weight of foreign sanctions.

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Ayatollah Khamenei therefore decided to allow Pezeshkian’s candidacy. A technocrat rather than a fanatic, it was hoped that Pezeshkian would encourage Iranians to vote instead of abstaining, offering evidence that the Islamic Republic enjoyed a measure of popular acceptance. With a veteran nuclear negotiator alongside him, Pezeshkian obtained many more votes than Jalili and became president on 6 July, 2024, amid great hopes that there would soon be a new nuclear agreement, that Iran’s economy would be rescued by rising oil exports, and that it might even enjoy some foreign investment.

Those hopes were crushed when Khamenei withdrew his support from any real nuclear negotiations, and refused to divert the country’s foreign-exchange earnings from the Revolutionary Guard towards rebuilding Iran’s horribly neglected water and energy infrastructures; unlimited gas is of no use without pipelines.

Pezeshkian tried his best, most notably by loudly warning that Tehran’s entire population, which exceeds 10 million, might have to be evacuated because of a sheer lack of water — unless a vast emergency program was started immediately. But even that did not stop the continued diversion of most of Iran’s hard-currency earnings to hugely overbuilt nuclear projects, and to produce more and more ballistic missiles and support expensive foreign militias. In other words, Pezeshkian was powerless.

But since then, the Revolutionary Guards have been decapitated by US and Israeli ultra-precision bombing; many of their officers have died alongside the Arab militias they armed, trained and led to utter defeat; and more have been killed by the systematic bombing of their distinctive headquarters in Tehran and other cities. All their grand plans have very visibly failed, there is no more money for the Basij — and there is no credible replacement for the fanatically extreme but very experienced and wily Khamenei. Yes, the regime quickly chose his son Mojtaba Khamenei, but Iran’s theocracy must be headed by a supremely expert religious scholar (faqih), which cannot just be named as such by the Revolutionary Guards: he must be recognized by the top Shi’a academies in both the Iranian city of Qom and Najaf in Iraq. Mojtaba utterly lacks those credentials, and the scholars cannot possibly accept him as his father’s replacement.

All that leaves Pezeshkian, who is alive and well, as the last man standing. Assuming that he has enough Azeri and other followers to protect him, he could be Iran’s bigger and better answer to Delcy Rodríguez.

To this end, a new big-tent grouping, known as the “Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan”, has united the PAK with other parties in the broader Kurdish-Iranian opposition. As Tehran smolders, that’s led to overtures from both Tel Aviv and Washington. Donald Trump has signaled his willingness to back armed factions on the ground in Iran, in comments with implications for the Kurdish umbrella organization which is now Iran’s most numerous and combat-ready opposition force. But there’s still some way to go before these forces can challenge Tehran on the ground — while the Kurds know from bitter experience that their autonomy can easily be sacrificed at the altar of Western strategy.

Iran’s estimated seven to 15 million Kurds share deep links with the country’s Persian majority, including closely related languages, a shared cultural and mythic background, and dynastic ties stretching back millennia. Yet the Kurds have also suffered long-term repression under successive Iranian regimes — as suggested by the lack of clear census data.

Iran’s Kurds first declared autonomy back in 1946, but that Soviet-sponsored project was crushed by the regime of the young Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Western-backed Shah of Iran. Three decades later, Kurdish forces and protesters contributed to the nation-wide uprising which ousted the Shah in the 1979 revolution. But they were rapidly excluded as power centralized around the new Islamic order. A Kurdish bid for greater autonomy was bloodily crushed as over 1,000 Kurdish political activists were executed by the new regime, setting the scene for five more decades of repression.

Kurds have been systematically tortured, imprisoned and executed by the Iranian authorities, with Tehran hanging hundreds of Kurds in recent years. That’s amid a broader climate of cultural repression and economic exclusion. To eke out a living on the margins of Iranian society, thousands of Kurds have lost their lives working as illegal cross-border porters in the country’s rugged border regions.

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Repression has also seen the development of a complex Kurdish opposition landscape. Iran’s short-lived 1946 Kurdish Republic was spearheaded by a traditional nationalist force called the Kurdistan Democratic Party-Iran (KDP-I). Though it retains political cachet on the ground, its armed strength has dwindled in recent decades. Founded in 1991, by the scion of a well-known Iranian Kurdish militant dynasty, the smaller PAK was trained by the US and gained combat experience in the war against ISIS, but is largely reliant on its sponsors in Iraqi Kurdistan rather than an organic domestic base of support.

Meanwhile, other Kurdish regions in Turkey, Syria and Iraq have seen the rise of an alternative political project spearheaded by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which claims to reject Kurdish nationalism in pursuit of the novel goal of a region-wide democratic federation, marked by a prominent role for women. The PKK’s Iranian affiliate, PJAK, has been responsible for the bulk of attacks on Iranian forces in recent years, claiming to have killed hundreds during hit-and-run cross-border attacks, such as a 2018 raid that killed 10 Revolutionary Guards. Iran’s most effective opposition force, the PJAK can field an estimated 3,000 fighters, while drawing on the PKK’s broader network of well-trained, well-resourced militants.

All these forces have generally been pushed back into camps and tunnel complexes in neighboring Iraqi Kurdistan, limiting their ability to act on the ground. In 2022, Kurdish women were at the forefront of nation-wide protests after Jina Mahsa Amini, an Iranian Kurdish woman, was beaten to death by the morality police for an alleged hijab infringement. Yet though the demonstrations brought the PKK’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” slogan to the world’s attention, Iranian-Kurdish parties themselves kept a cautious distance, apparently assessing it was unlikely the popular rage could be translated into an organized opposition movement.

But following two years of Israeli attacks on Iranian assets across the Middle East, the balance of power has permanently shifted. This February, five of Iran’s leading opposition groupings put aside ideological and historic differences to form the new Coalition of Political Forces — just one week before the bombs began to fall on Tehran. In its first statement after the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei, the Kurdish Coalition laid the blame for the conflict at Tehran’s door, describing a “domino effect” leading Iran towards its “most decisive days”.

Perhaps. For now, the Kurdish Coalition is yet to announce any intended or actual military operation on the ground. Rather, the Kurdish Coalition struck a cautious note, calling for defections from the armed forces, the protection of public and administrative institutions, and restraint as a potential new order takes shape. Significantly, the group’s statement sought to present the US-Israeli operation as targeting the Iranian regime rather than the Iranian people, claiming: “This war is not between Iranian society and [its constituent] peoples and the United States, Israel and the international community”.

But though hundreds of political leaders and combatants have been killed in the US-Israeli strikes, so too have hundreds of civilians, including a reported 153 people in a strike on a girl’s school. Iranian military installations in the country’s western Kurdish regions have been first in the firing line, adding a fresh layer of terror and uncertainty to the experience of ordinary Iranian Kurds — even as Iranian Kurdish political detainees are reported to be escaping prison amid the chaos.

While making it clear that “we support the intense attacks of the US and Israel against the tyrant regime of Iran,” the PAK spokesperson stresses that “we haven’t been in touch with either Israel or the US”, a point repeated by the representatives of other, larger Iranian Kurdish opposition groups within the coalition. All the same, there were phone calls earlier this week between Donald Trump and the senior leadership of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region, while breaking reports confirm Trump has indeed been in contact with the Iranian Kurdish leadership. “US interests differ from our own,” the PAK spokesperson tells me. “Sometimes they might align, and sometimes they might be perpendicular to one another.”

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Reza Pahlavi, the son of the exiled Shah who styles himself Iran’s new leader-in-waiting, has shown himself hostile to his Kurdish rivals in the Iranian opposition, even as he makes use of the Kurdish “Women, Life, Freedom” slogan to lobby for US support. Pahlavi dismissed the Kurdish opposition as “separatists” and collaborators with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein just this week, in comments slammed by the new Coalition as “hysterical and hateful”.

In any case, rather than Pahlavi Jr swooping in to take the reins after a lifetime in luxurious exile, the more likely outcome appears to be a takeover by elements in the Iranian security apparatus more amenable to US interests. Any such rump state would itself rely on authoritarian measures and a reformulated nationalist ideology to secure a chaotic post-conflict Iran, meaning there would be little reason for the Kurds to expect better treatment than under the deposed Islamic regime.

Nor can the Kurds trust one another. Other Iranian Kurdish Leftist opposition groups remain outside the fold of the new Coalition. More significantly, the Iraqi Kurdish region, which has long housed the Iranian Kurdish opposition, itself maintains close ties with Turkey, and could be unwilling to antagonize Ankara by facilitating further Kurdish gains in Iran. Turkey itself may well enter the fray if Iran’s security apparatus crumbles further, deepening links with the country’s millions of Turkish-speaking Turkmen, and preventing any Kurdish gains on the ground as an absolute priority.

Whether the current regime stands, falls, or is reduced to a shadow of its former self, Kurdish civilians and political actors could be first in line for retributive violence. That’s what happened after 2025’s 12 Day War, when Kurds and other minorities were rounded up in their thousands in apparent retribution for prior Israeli and US airstrikes. Trump and Netanyahu may well seek to make use of the Kurdish fight for self-determination on the battlefield, but this doesn’t mean they’ll guarantee Kurdish interests at the negotiation table. This long-term reality was made apparent once again in January when the US pulled the rug out from under their Syrian-Kurdish partners, exposing yet another set of Kurds to deadly, retributive violence by a centralized Islamist state.

For now, the Iranian Kurdish opposition forces remain pinned down in their bases by the Iraqi border, peppered by Iranian missiles as Tehran continues to take pot-shots at targets across the region. Locals describe mass electricity blackouts and panic as Iranian missiles soar overhead, while the PAK share images of Iranian munitions that have struck their mountain base. If they are able to overcome their internal differences and a hostile geopolitical environment to cross the border back into their homeland, these forces could see their numbers swell — as they give unified, armed, political voice to the long-overlooked grievances of millions of Iranian Kurds. But that won’t happen overnight. “This regime is still strong,” says the PAK spokesperson. “It can hold its breath for a long time.”

To put this in stark terms: somehow Vice President JD Vance, a fierce Trumpian critic of the neoconservatives, ended up in government at the highest levels, only to help implement the foreign-policy preferences of, say, John Bolton or Elliott Abrams. The Vance who once sharply critiqued a foreign policy of “moralizing” is overseeing strikes explicitly aimed at freeing the people of Iran.

In 2016, as it became clear that Donald Trump represented the future of the GOP, three paths presented themselves to respectable conservative intellectuals, such as those at the Wall Street Journal’s comment pages, where I was working at the time. The first was the path of slow, cynical accommodation: having opposed Trump to the last, as a heretic from foreign-policy hawkism and free trade, the accommodators slowly began to wonder: well, what can we get out of this guy?

Then there was the path of unbending Never Trump defiance. A subset of conservatives, especially those of a hawkish bent on foreign policy, resolved that they would sooner become politically homeless and embrace liberal media organs than bow to the vulgarian from Queens, who railed against “globalism”, called the Iraq War a “disaster”, and dunked on George W. Bush-era neoconservatives.

Among those at the Journal who took this approach was an energetic op-ed editor, Bari Weiss, and her mentor, the columnist Bret Stephens, both of whom decamped for the Left-of-center opinion pages of The New York Times soon after Trump’s first ballot-box triumph. I, too, belonged to this group initially. I endorsed Hillary Clinton in the paper and traded many an email with Bari and Bret venting our disgust at the institution’s leaders for choosing what we saw as accommodation.

But not all of the hard-line Never Trumpers would stay that way forever. There was also, finally, the path of the converts. These were right-wing intellectuals who, overcoming their disgust at Trump’s antics, tried to understand why the Republican base had elevated a populist former reality-TV star who challenged our conventions and orthodoxies. What had free trade and decades of a hyperactive foreign policy wrought for “flyover country”?

I was one of the Trumpian converts. Having endorsed and voted for Hillary Clinton, I would go on to conclude that the old, pre-Trump consensus had been a disaster. It had left American power overstretched abroad and hollowed out its domestic foundations: visible in the abandoned factories of the heartland, its streets now littered with the needle-mark-strewn, opioid-addicted bodies of the sons and daughters of once-proud manufacturing workers.

I spent much of the first Trump administration as the op-ed editor of the New York Post, a more populist tabloid and a favorite of the President, who would often clip columns I’d commissioned and mail them to their respective authors, signing them with a thick Sharpie pen and adding words of encouragement: “Attaboy!”

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In my extracurricular hours, I served as the principal drafter and organizer of “Against the Dead Consensus,” a 2019 manifesto for the so-called New Right that blamed the Old Right — my comrades of just a few years earlier, figures like Bret and Bari — for failing to “retard, much less reverse, the eclipse of permanent truths, family stability, communal solidarity, and much else”. Conventional conservatism, my cosignatories and I charged, had “surrendered to the pornographization of daily life, to the culture of death, to the cult of competitiveness. It too often bowed to a poisonous and censorious multiculturalism.”

Conventional conservatism was scarcely different from liberalism. And it had allowed “an ideological liberalism seeks to dictate our foreign policy” — meaning we’d too often gone abroad seeking autocratic monsters to slay and freedom-seeking peoples to emancipate. Many of the signatories were converts: to the Catholic faith, but also the Trumpian one. Another convert who might as well have signed but didn’t (because we didn’t think to ask him) was JD Vance.

A Yale Law-educated venture capitalist, Vance was also the author of a best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which soon became a go-to guide for coastal journalists figuring out what made Trumpian America tick. Although he poignantly described the miseries of Trumpian America, Vance was by no means prepared to throw in his lot with Trump in those years. On the contrary, his book’s diagnosis of what had gone wrong with his Appalachian kinfolk was very much aligned with that of the respectable conservatives: what ailed his people, Vance concluded, was a failure of bootstrapping self-help — not the GOP’s neoliberal trade policies and neoconservative defense policies. Trump himself, meanwhile, was a latter-day “Hitler,” as Vance told a friend in an infamous leaked text message.

Yet a few years later, just as I would strive to lend intellectual coherence to the Trumpian project (don’t laugh), Vance would emerge as a democratic tribune of Trumpian America. Eventually, he’d be elected a US senator from his home state of Ohio after a campaign that saw him crank up the Trumpian rhetorical quotient to 11.

Once in office, Vance sought to govern as a thoughtful populist, launching major legislative initiatives in collaboration with the economic progressives: a railroad-reform bill, an attempt at breaking the credit-card duopoly, a bid to lower insulin prices, and the like. While most of these initiatives would fail — falling victim to opposition not from the Democratic Party, but the Senate GOP’s free-market old guard — Vance would be tapped as Trump’s 2024 running mate. All along, he continued to sound anti-interventionist notes, not least on Iran. In 2024, for example, he declared: “Our interest, I think, very much is in not going to war with Iran. It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.”

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But here we are. Trump has now launched an all-out, and deeply unpopular, war against the Islamic Republic, with Iranian “freedom” as its primary objective. Vance, though not exactly leading the charge on messaging, has been photographed running a sort of Team B situation room in Washington (the President’s own situation room is in Mar-a-Lago). Again, for those of us who have been inside these circles and debates, the ironies are mind-boggling.

How to explain them? I’d venture four reasons.

First, there are the structural realities of the GOP. Despite the realignment of the two parties — working- and lower-middle-class voters’ shift from Left to Right beginning in 2016 — the institutional party remains dominated by the old-line foreign policy: the think tanks, the senior staffers, the octogenarian senators for whom it’s always 1983.

Yes, the party has its “restrainers” — those who favor a less expansive foreign policy — and the “prioritizers” — those who want to pivot from Europe and the Middle East to confront China — including many in the Pentagon and the intelligence apparatus. But these are typically younger, and their influence in the Trump administration is dwarfed by that of the traditional hawks in the President’s orbit. People such as the acting national-security adviser and secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles.

Second, there’s the role of anti-woke-ism as new skin for old wine. The hawks — not least Weiss, through her outlet The Free Press — championed popular grievances with the inanities of the “peak-woke” moment and successfully married this to the same old agenda. Many of the would-be populists were all too happy to go along, hailing a once-more culturally muscular and unembarrassed America as it pursued the very policies that they’d deplored just a few years earlier. As one online wit remarked somewhere: “Good thing [Secretary of War] Pete [Hegseth] purged the trannies from the military so beefy white guys can do a regime change in Iran.” Based and red-pilled!

Third, there was the reframing of regime-change wars to mean only operations that put boots on the ground. In this telling, the true hallmark of the old failed neoconservatism was not its globe-spanning scope or its shoot-first-ask-question-later reflexes, but its idealism: its naïve faith in helping oppressed peoples and the deployment of troops for nation-building. Under the new dispensation, America would simply break things and leave it to others to pick up the pieces.

As Vance told me in a 2024 interview, the new Trumpian foreign policy would be “a mixture of extreme skepticism towards intervention overseas, combined with an extremely aggressive posture when you do intervene overseas…. Don’t punch often, but when you punch, punch really goddamn hard.” But this logic — that you aren’t a neocon as long as you don’t actually dispatch ground troops — soon became a beguiling invitation to punch quite often indeed. The “extreme skepticism” soon melted away; the second Trump administration has now launched interventions in no fewer than seven countries.

Finally, and most simply, there’s Trump himself: a product of a generation of Americans for whom the Iranian regime is — not unjustly — remembered for the 1979 hostage crisis and the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing. The Islamic Republic has historical agency, after all, which it used for nearly five decades to prosecute a strategically foolish ideological war against Israel and the West. And while Tehran doesn’t loom as a menace (or bogeyman) for younger Americans to nearly the same degree (or at all), that’s neither here nor there. Trump is the commander-in-chief, and he perhaps sees himself as the avenger of those older Iranian sins.

It remains to be seen whether voters in 2026 — and, more important for Vance, 2028 — will conclude that revenge was worth the candle.

The administration’s reasoning is not merely that momentum is on its side, but that Maduro’s Venezuela — particularly its oil — had long served as one of very few lifelines available to a Cuban economy teetering on the edge of collapse. Now that Venezuela under Delcy Rodríguez has cut off that supply, an energy crisis is adding to an already bleak economic picture on the island. 

By 1 January, two days before Maduro’s removal from Venezuela, Cuba had lost over 10% of its population over the previous five years. Over the same period, the country’s GDP declined by 11%. Around the country, Cubans are today frequently in the dark, owing not only to energy shortages but a disintegrating power grid. Cuba continues to sort through the rubble of Hurricane Melissa, which last October damaged almost 100,000 homes and much of eastern Cuba’s farmland, while the country also faces an epidemic of dengue fever. 

To topple the government of Cuba — one which has held its population to early-20th century living standards, repressed all political dissent, and been a thorn in the side of US policy for six decades — has long been an impossible dream for American presidents. Only two years after Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s revolution, in 1959, President Kennedy failed multiple times to dislodge the new regime, whether by covert invasion force or assassination. 

Eventually, the US settled on an indefinite extension of the 1960 trade embargo, a policy designed to ensure that if a longtime friend and ally of Washington was suddenly going to embrace a political ideology antithetical to American values and interests, it would have no support from American commerce in doing so. The policy, which has persisted to this day, succeeded in washing America’s hands of communist Cuba. It failed entirely, however, to pressure Cuba to pursue a different course. 

The embargo’s failure would become synonymous with the axiom that one cannot starve revolutionaries out of their ideologies merely by disengaging with them. As both Cuba and the hermit kingdom of North Korea have shown, communist leaders can use their control over the flow of information to blame their citizens’ poverty on the very nations they have alienated, thus instilling an “us against the world” mentality that dulls the gnaw of poverty, keeps counterrevolution at bay, and preserves leaders’ power.

But even despots cannot ignore the needs of their people forever. After the Soviet Union’s fall in 1990 deprived Havana of a longtime source of international aid, Cuba’s GDP fell by a third. Its economy limped along for two decades. Desperate Cubans regularly left the island on unseaworthy crafts to seek asylum in America, in a manner reminiscent of the South Vietnamese “Boat People” of the Seventies. By 2010, Castro’s brother and successor Raúl was declaring that “we reform, or we sink”. 

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In the early 2010s, Cuba conducted a surface-level political and economic reform sufficient to convince US President Barack Obama to normalize diplomatic relations with the island in 2014, for the first time since the Kennedy presidency, in exchange for Cuba allowing American investment in the island. But over the years that followed, most of those investments went nowhere, waylaid by a command-and-control economy that government insiders still controlled. There was therefore little American political resistance when President Trump cut off diplomatic relations again in 2017. In 2021, Cuba experienced its widest-reaching anti-government protests since the 1959 revolution. 

Today, Cuba — as a nation, a polity, and an economy — is at its lowest ebb since the collapse of the Soviet Union. With Fidel dead and Raúl retired, the family that held the Cuban communist project together is now gone. President Trump is right to see an opportunity. But to take advantage of that opportunity, he will need to bear in mind that Cuba is nothing like Venezuela. 

For one thing, Cuba is a bureaucratic government with power diffused among a large group of party elites. President Díaz-Canel was hand-picked by Cuba’s Communist Party apparatus, and elected by a congress controlled by it. While Venezuela also has a congress, Maduro was a strongman elected by popular (sometimes rigged) elections. Because Maduro was the main locus of political power, a “decapitation” strategy of removing him from the country stood a chance of drastically changing Venezuelan government policy even as the rest of the government structure remained intact. In the few weeks since Maduro’s arrest, this does indeed seem to be happening. But in Cuba, there is no Maduro figure to remove. Power resides in Cuba’s Communist Party and its congress. 

Another difference is ideology. Cuba is a one-party state. Venezuela, at least officially, is not. Venezuelan Chavists follow a populist socialist program with considerable ideological flexibility, whereas Cuba is notorious for its legalistic interpretation of Marxist-Leninist communism. While both nations have always had their share of graft, Chavist Venezuela’s lodestar is self-enrichment for the politically connected, whereas Cuba’s is Marxism-Leninism, even when it impoverishes everyone. 

And then there’s the question of historical memory. Whereas Venezuela was a functional democratic country within the memory of most Venezuelans, Cuba has been a communist dictatorship for as long as most Cubans have been alive. And even those few born during the reign of Cuba’s pre-revolutionary dictator Fulgencio Batista will find few lessons from that grim era.

Based on these contrasts, the Trump administration should instead base its Cuba policy on six decades of US experience with the country — as well as a century of experience with other communist regimes. These encounters might suggest that neither decapitation nor further economic sanctions are, in themselves, viable pathways to change in Cuba. An effective strategy, if it involves a stick in one hand, must be balanced by a carrot in the other.

The most powerful carrot in our arsenal is the prosperity that comes from friendship with the United States. American strategy must make it painfully clear to Cuban leaders and citizens alike what they are missing by not being full members of the international community and the Western Hemisphere specifically. Today’s American leaders can learn a great deal here from the statesmen of the late Cold War, particularly men like Secretary of State George Shultz, who used Western economic dynamism to persuade the Soviet Union’s leaders essentially to legislate themselves out of existence.

Creating a functional democratic government in Cuba is going to require hand-holding. Cuba has been steeped only in communist political philosophies for the lifetimes of most Cubans. To learn anything else will take a great deal of external commitment. Cuba — like many other communist adversaries — also has a history of feigning reforms to attract concessions: as President Obama learned to his cost in 2014. To stick with the late Cold War theme, then, “Trust but Verify” will need to be the watchword of any US strategy toward Cuba, just as it was for Ronald Reagan and the Soviet Union.

Yet if the administration’s current strategy as widely reported, covertly convincing a critical mass of public officials to turn on the government is unlikely to work. If the Cuban Communist Party knows one thing, it is how to sniff out and imprison counterrevolutionaries. And even were this strategy to succeed, pandemonium would be the likeliest result in a nation that has known nothing but one-party rule for the better part of a century. Far better would be a policy that unequivocally shows an exhausted people the perks of friendship with the United States, and persuades them to leave communism behind. No coups required; a whimper, not a bang. 

Trump’s first priority, then, should be to open the information environment in Cuba. An advantage here is Elon Musk’s Starlink, which could connect the whole island cheaply (or even, knowing Musk’s tendencies toward political philanthropy, for free). Reliable internet needs electricity, and Cubans are struggling with broken-down power grids. Happily, American firms have the dollars to help them rebuild. All Cuba’s government would need to do to receive these fabulous benefits would be to end online censorship. Were Cuba to do so and then go back on its word, meanwhile, those benefits could be taken away just as easily. 

Once information is flowing more freely, the Trump administration should set to work on two initiatives at once — one economic, one political. First, Trump should work with US businesses to put together a massive package of potential investment for Cuba. In doing so, it should pretend to be living in a parallel universe with no trade embargo. It is difficult to overstate just how much American imports could contribute to the Cuban economy were the embargo to be lifted, even in part. One might compare Cuba to the Dominican Republic, a US ally with a similar population but which earns seven times as much export income as Cuba.

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How might trade with the US uplift Cuba? Take the example of cigars. Cuba remains, in the estimation of most aficionados, the undisputed quality king. At the moment, though, Cuba’s total international cigar sales are around $1 billion. The country’s total exports, in all categories, are barely above $2 billion. The US market for premium cigars alone is $4 billion. Were American cigar smokers to choose Cuban cigars even half the time, US demand for Cuban cigars alone would equal the total exports of the entire island of Cuba. And that’s just cigars. Cuba also has some of the world’s best land for the cultivation of sugar and fruit, and some of the world’s largest deposits of nickel — a metal vital for producing electronics from phones to electric vehicles.

Once Trump puts together a suitably impressive list of hypothetical commitments, he can begin selling them to the Cuban government and its people. He could offer those investments individually, alongside matching abatements of the embargo, in exchange for specific political changes in Cuba. These could start with concessions in economic policy — allowing private businesses to compete with state-owned monopolies, for instance, or else setting exchange rates, tax policies, and legal frameworks to encourage foreign investment. As the economic rewards get bigger, meanwhile, Trump might exchange them for ever-greater political reforms ending, finally, with the abolition of Cuba’s one-party state, the freeing of political prisoners, and free movement between Cuba and the US. 

Cuba is a once proud and vibrant country that has been hollowed by 65 years of Marxist-Leninist dictatorship. Rebuilding will take time, and such an ambitious program might seem optimistic given the long decades of failure. Yet here it’s useful, perhaps, to return to Venezuela, which the US currently controls. Maduro’s regime was Cuba’s closest ally, and Havana is watching what happens in Venezuela very carefully. If Trump can prove that by bringing a longtime enemy into alignment with Washington, and is able to better the lives of Venezuela’s people, Cubans are likely to be far more receptive to similar ideas for their own country. 

President Trump is an extraordinarily effective salesman, and this is fundamentally a strategy of salesmanship. The greatest obstacle to its success might be the President’s own capriciousness. Rebuilding Venezuela is a years-long project, and at times it seems that Trump has already lost interest in it. Cuba will take far longer, and will require a new level of patience for his administration. But if Trump can retain focus on the long haul of rebuilding Venezuela and Cuba, however, he will have done more to advance American leadership in its near-abroad than any president in decades. And conversely, he will not be able to achieve his goal of reasserting the Monroe Doctrine and reestablishing US dominance over the Western Hemisphere with a blood enemy in Cuba.

As the world now knows, it wasn’t. But what that means for this city and Fermín’s country remains unclear. For though Fermín felt euphoria over Maduro’s arrest, after years of Chavista misrule, Venezuela’s ruling socialist party is still in power, and a dangerous pro-government militia is still active in Fermín’s neighborhood. Indeed, with its web of guerrillas, gangsters, soldiers and political police, the frontier city of San Antonio del Táchira speaks vividly to explosive problems in Venezuela and the dangers of them spilling into more violence — amid Trump’s new “Donroe Doctrine” of open aggression in Latin America.

Since 2014, almost eight million people have fled hunger and poverty in Venezuela. Close to three million have settled in Colombia, and frontier towns like the sprawling Cúcuta are particularly popular destinations. With the Venezuelan economy in a mess — inflation currently sits at 225% — many of Fermín’s countrymen follow him over the border into Cúcuta to work. In the evenings, they cross back over the Táchira River, being sure to return before the Simón Bolívar International Bridge closes at 9pm. Close by, as dusk falls, I talk to Venezuelans as they are blasting salsa and reggaeton, drinking Coca-Cola and beer in plastic cups, and eating hot dogs from a stand.

There are more opportunities in Cúcuta than in Venezuela. The sweaty city of a million people, framed by green hills, has a booming clothes industry, coffee and sugar trades and universities. Even so, this lively community where they sell food and drinks, and zoom about as motorcycle taxis, has its problems. On the Venezuelan side, there are pro-government militias: the so-called colectivos. Since the American attack, they are reported to be putting up checkpoints and detaining people suspected of siding with Washington. The army and political police, known by the acronym SEBIN, also keep tabs on opponents.

Repression is increasing in other ways, too. The government is detaining journalists in Caracas and it has blocked foreign journalists from entering since the strike. Several teams tried to cross in as tourists at Cúcuta; Venezuelan troops held them and deleted photos and video before deporting them back across the river. In front of the bridge, dozens of TV crews made do with taking live shots from Colombian soil, a boon to the gaggle of drinks sellers nearby.

Locals must also contend with guerrillas from the National Liberation Army, or ELN, which has an estimated 5,000 fighters. Active on both sides of the border, the ELN is a fierce backer of Chavismo; following Trump’s attack, it released a statement calling on Venezuelans to defend against “the gringo aggression”. In more prosaic terms, though, the guerrillas extort many businesses in the area, calling payments “vaccines”. One Venezuelan tells me he used to have a food business but gave up because of the extortion, and now drives a taxi.

Whatever its Marxist rhetoric, the ELN also makes money from the drugs trade. Close to the bridge, along a stony river where goats munch on bags of trash, are dirt tracks known as trochas. They’re used by smugglers to take contraband over the border, whether sides of beef — or bricks of cocaine. Once the runners reach Venezuela, crossing the river on rickety wooden planks, they’re liable to face a tax: whether from guerrillas or soldiers. “They all work together,” says Celio, a charismatic former gasoline smuggler. Gangs get their cut too: Celio warns me not to go further along the trochas because it’s the home to infamous gangs like the Tren de Aragua. Five men with guns recently held up a photographer friend there, stealing his equipment.

Collaboration between gangsters and the state is key to the case against Maduro. US prosecutors indicted him in 2020 and again this year on crimes including narco-terrorism conspiracy. Though Venezuela is not a significant producer of cocaine, nor of other drugs like fentanyl, narco traffickers do shift tons of white powder from Colombia through places like Catatumbo, north of here, and on to the United States and Europe, all with the alleged complicity of the Venezuelan army. In 2018, I interviewed convicted Mexican trafficker Fernando Blengio, who told me that the military worked openly with narcos.

While Trump may have taken out Maduro, then, these broader criminal networks still appear firmly in place. And if the regime begins genuinely to totter — violence has lately erupted on the streets of Caracas — corrupt soldiers and gangsters could yet be used to repress the population. Another possibility, of course, is that they instead turn on each other, transforming Venezuela into a low-intensity civil war.

Amid this tangled mesh of state power and criminal violence, the people of La Parada, the local term for the Bolívar bridge checkpoint, seem unsurprisingly cynical of the government in Caracas. Several speculate that the army had not put up a fight but let Maduro be captured. “How come things are normal here if there was really an invasion of our country?” asked Sarai*, selling drinks by the river crossing in Cúcuta. Even so, some are optimistic that acting president Delcy Rodríguez is capable of overseeing a transition back to democracy. “We have to move slowly to change the institutions,” suggests Roberto*, a stocky former Venezuelan soldier. “We need someone inside the government to do that.” The guerrillas, gangs and militias of Cúcuta show how difficult such change could be.

Nor is Venezuela the only country facing challenges following America’s attack on Caracas. On the west bank of the river, I join a Colombian army convoy as it patrols the roads north of Cúcuta. It’s nighttime, and a bright moon bounces light off the heavily armored vehicles. The colonel in charge describes how he also woke to news of the US attack on Venezuela; unlike Fermín, he was soon on a call with Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who ordered 30,000 police and soldiers to reinforce the 1,300-mile frontier with Venezuela.

Petro, himself a former guerrilla, fervently condemned the abduction of Maduro, posting that “the United States is the first country in the world to bomb a South American capital in human history”. Trump responded by accusing Petro of being involved in cocaine production and saying he didn’t have long left himself. Ominous words — though there’s currently no known indictment of Petro, and he’s anyway due to step down this year once his term ends. If the Donroe Doctrine means additional attacks in Latin America, then, other countries may have more to fear. That includes Cuba and Nicaragua, both with more entrenched authoritarian Leftist leaders. Trump, as always, has shown he can be impossible to predict.

As for Colombia, an army officer in the convoy tells me he thinks the Americans are more likely to strike a cocaine lab than attack the government itself. Yet even if Petro and his successors avoid direct intervention, the challenges of Cúcuta still hint at trouble ahead. For one thing, there are those ELN guerillas. Colombian army sources warn that a large concentration have lately crossed the border from Venezuela. In December, the ELN also carried out a wave of bomb and gun attacks on Colombian targets, causing terror with makeshift explosives and killing an ambulance driver as they shot up a police station.

It goes without saying, meanwhile, that a meltdown in Venezuela is likely to spark even more violence across the border. Guerrillas and gangs operate across the two countries and flee heat from one to the other, and that’s before you add Colombia’s own brutal history of drug runners and Marxist fighters. One US argument for taking out Maduro was that his regime causes instability. But a collapse in Venezuela could cause even more.

For the moment, anyway, the rhythms of life in Cúcuta continue. As night falls, Fermín says he’d have to return home to Venezuela — and the fears and hardships he has faced for years. But, he adds, Venezuelans have learned to wait, hardly surprising when the Chavistas have been in power since 1999, when Fermín was just 12 years old. “Before,” he adds, “we made the mistake of thinking things would change when they wouldn’t. Now, we have learned to be patient.” The risk, of course, is that change could be violent, with US forces weakening the regime from the top and guerrillas and militias taking advantage of the power vacuum from below. So while things might get better, there is also the fear they could get even worse.

*Names have been changed.

The symbolism of the Venezuelan exfiltration op, on the anniversary of Noriega’s surrender, speaks volumes about the Trump administration’s thinking on Venezuela. The conclusion of Operation Just Cause in 1990 delivered a rare success in US-imposed regime change: Panama has since emerged as a vibrant democracy. The same may not be true of Venezuela.

As of this writing, the exact circumstances of Maduro’s capture remain unclear. Members of the Venezuelan opposition claim that the arrest was negotiated with the regime, implying that some of the dictator’s underlings turned against him. Asked at a news conference whether opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado would take power, Trump replied: “They have a vice president, y’know?” and suggested that Machado lacks the popular “respect” needed to govern. But he later implied in an address that Washington would oversee a regime transition and run Venezuela’s oil industry.

A Panamanian scenario the White House might be considering is one in which Vice President Delcy Rodríguez will call for free and fair elections, as a result of which some other figure — perhaps Edmundo Gonzalez, who ran in Machado’s place in 2024’s stolen vote — assumes the presidency. Another alternative is that Maduro’s regime remains largely in place, with Rodríguez and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello kowtowing to Trump’s oil and deportation demands.

Then there are the dangerous scenarios. Infighting between regime loyalists and the opposition could provoke a prolonged conflict akin to the guerrilla battles and terrorism that racked neighboring Colombia for decades. Even if Venezuela avoids outright state collapse as in Libya or Haiti, Marxist guerrillas and other pro-regime elements are likely to wage an insurgency against an opposition government.

Maduro’s regime is unlikely to survive if Trump follows through on his threats of further strikes should the remnant junta not meet his demands. Opposition from the Venezuelan military and guerrilla proxies could prove resilient to US air strikes, with Rodríguez stating she intends to retain power (though it is possible that she maintains a more pro-American posture than her ex-boss, Maduro). The White House has also shown a reluctance to put boots on the ground. Trump, however, has floated the prospect of funding American support — perhaps even an occupation — through the appropriation of Venezuelan oil.

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To be fair to Venezuelans, and Miami neoconservatives like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, it’s plausible that Maduro’s ouster could prove a modest success. A good indicator of a country’s prospects of returning to democracy is a past history of electing and peacefully transferring power. Unlike Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, or Syria, Venezuela had a relatively strong tradition of continuous (if flawed) democratic government before Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, took power in 1999.

Despite years of repression and a grievous humanitarian crisis, Venezuelan civil society remains vibrant. Numerous polls have suggested that majorities in the diaspora are willing to repatriate to a post-Maduro government. Cheering crowds have erupted throughout the country in scenes reminiscent of Saddam Hussein’s downfall in Iraq.

There’s likewise cause to believe that many within the regime voted for the opposition in the 2024 election. For all of his faults, Chavez was an effective populist, in that he always valued his regime’s legitimacy via popular will, expressed at the ballot box. While deeply corrupt, the Leftist icon won all four of his elections fairly and by large margins. This fact brought him to the short-sighted conclusion that his regime could only fall thanks to fraud by his elitist opponents. His government thus instituted a seemingly foolproof electoral process, whereby all participants signed and received electoral tallies with unique QR codes from electronic voting machines.

In 2024, it was these tallies, courageously collected and uploaded by the Venezuelan opposition, that corroborated a likely 40-point victory by Maduro’s opponent, Gonzalez. In the wake of more than 10 years of mass killings, torture, mismanagement, opposition own goals, sanctions. and US-backed coup attempts, Chavez’s regime lost all claims to popular legitimacy under his successor, Maduro. If a future opposition government can retain the loyalty of the armed forces, it’s more likely that a guerrilla insurgency could be contained; elected leaders could then begin to rebuild the institutions that Chavismo destroyed.

Yet there’s enough reason to doubt a happy ending in Venezuela. It may not be possible to ensure a stable opposition government without lasting support from the US military. Unlike Noriega, Maduro’s regime never exercised a true monopoly of force. Rather, it achieved relative peace in recent years by cutting deals with various armed groups on a case-by-case basis. Thousands of guerrillas from the Colombian National Liberation Army, known as the ELN, and FARC dissidents control vast swaths of the country, particularly along the Colombian-Venezuelan border. Both groups have pledged to defend the regime’s “Bolivarian Revolution” and have decades of experience combating security forces, sabotaging vital infrastructure, and conducting acts of terror.

The best model for a guerrilla insurgency in Venezuela comes from the height of Colombia’s Armed Conflict at the end of the 20th century. During the 1980s, ’90s and early aughts, guerrillas and drug cartels conducted hundreds of car bombings, massacred civilians, and even captured the Palace of Justice in the heart of Bogotá. Colombia, however, avoided the kind of economic collapse and inflationary chaos seen recently in Venezuela and has a highly sophisticated military, hardened by more than 60 years of experience in counterinsurgency tactics. Venezuela, by contrast, has an undisciplined and profoundly corrupt military, armed with mostly outdated equipment.

It’s possible and even likely, moreover, that elements within the Venezuelan military will refuse to lay down their arms and carve out fiefdoms in conjunction with criminal and insurgent groups. Even in Panama, it took months to completely quash Noriega loyalists after his surrender, despite the presence of some 27,000 American troops.

Venezuela has more than 10 times the area and six times the population as Panama. In practice, the regime built by Chavez, a colonel, was a military dictatorship akin to Noriega’s and other US-backed regimes in the Americas. Thus, the military is the most decisive facet of the country’s future, with or without Maduro. The regime has more than 500 generals, the most of any country in the world and a means for dividing spoils and coup-proofing its leadership. Any successor to Maduro will confront 500 problems in attempting to extricate the military from its criminal rackets.

The regime’s relative security in recent years via mass repression and symbiosis with armed groups also saw the country’s homicide rate fall to 26 per 100,000 last year, down from 90 per 100,000 in 2016. A power vacuum could portend an explosion in violence amid a truly failed state carved up by various factions. Unlike Panama in 1990, Venezuela has been teetering on the verge of failed-state status since the price of its bulk commodity, oil, first collapsed in 2014. Its economy is roughly four times smaller than what it was during the aughts and is the third most corrupt on the planet after Somalia and South Sudan.

Against this backdrop, nation building will be a tall order.

Whatever is in the cards for Venezuela’s future, the Trump administration should remember its campaign promises and avoid dragging Washington into another forever war, this time in America’s own backyard. Even if chaos doesn’t trigger a mass exodus of refugees, a prolonged military presence will necessarily boost legal immigration, thanks to chain migration through military personnel marrying locals. For all its talk of restoring an American arcadia by way of 100 million deportations, the administration itself has halted deportation flights to Venezuela by repeatedly closing the country’s airspace.

Maduro’s ouster also has significant geopolitical implications. Hours before his capture, the dictator met with a special envoy from Chinese President Xi Jinping. Beyond symbolic statements of solidarity, the Chinese Communist Party almost certainly relayed a message that Caracas, an unreliable debtor to Beijing, was on its own. The harsh truth for Maduro is that he wasn’t worth saving by his preoccupied Chinese and Russian allies.

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America’s invasion of Mexico

By Ian Birrell

The “anti-imperialist” leader largely dug his own grave by alienating his most vital regional allies. Chavez spent decades promoting Venezuelan soft power in the region through discounted oil sales. But by threatening to invade and annex two-thirds of Guyana and later Trinidad, Maduro turned once-close allies in the Caribbean into states willing to act as the staging grounds for his own ouster; he also sponsored guerrilla violence against his Leftist neighbor, Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro, for failing to recognize his “re-election.”

At the same time, Trump’s embrace of naked plunder on charges of “counternarcotics” sends a clear signal to the CCP that an equally preposterous pretext is fair game for invading Taiwan. Considering that the president has pardoned dozens of convicted fraudsters and drug traffickers — including former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was indicted by Trump-appointed stalwart P. Kevin Hastel of trafficking 500 tons of cocaine into the homeland—the White House’s war-on-drugs justification stretches credulity.

The message sent to other Leftist governments in the Americas is that they can be deposed at any time and for any reason. Speaking on Fox News on Saturday, Trump suggested that it was the cartels that really run Mexico, rather than President Claudia Sheinbaum: “I’ve asked her a number of times, ‘Would you like us to take out the cartels?’… Something is gonna have to be done with Mexico.”

Then again, if Venezuela deseconds into a true failed state, or if American troops get mired in a South-American Afghanistan, it’s possible that the administration will learn from its mistakes and avoid turning the rest of Latin America into the Middle East. Alternatively, modest success in a post-Maduro state could embolden the White House to bomb neighboring Colombia, Brazil, Central America, and, of course, Mexico, as some MAGA luminaries have always wanted. Never mind the refugees who would then storm the southern border.

For now, Venezuelans can rejoice that their country’s long night of Bolivarian tyranny might be coming to a close. It is to be hoped that the American people’s reluctance to sink into a Latin-American quagmire will ensure that whatever comes next will be on Venezuelans’ own terms.