Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis for Defense Priorities, cautioned Saturday that, based on Trump’s press conference, “it is not clear the U.S. has a plan for how to manage a political transition in the country,” and that the U.S. could be entrenched in Venezuela for significantly longer than anticipated.
“This affair sounds very similar to the plans for Iraq, with the United States removing a leader they deemed a threat to U.S. interests and then planning to temporarily govern the country,” she wrote in a statement. “We all know how that turned out. There are many ways such a plan could go wrong: infighting in what’s left of Maduro’s regime or collapse into chaos.”
“The bottom line is that U.S. interests were not at risk and Americans are not safer as a result of this morning’s military action,” Kavanagh concluded.
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