Originally published at RVIVR.com

Here, amid news that the U.S. Navy has seized a Venezuelan oil supertanker which was transporting sanctioned oil as part of an international black market trade in crude, was an interesting exchange between a reporter and Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, whose party won a massive victory in the 2024 Venezuelan elections only to have them stolen…

Reporter: Yesterday, the U.S. seized a ship off the coast of Venezuela. Would you welcome a U.S. military intervention in Venezuela?

María Corina Machado: Look, some people talk about an invasion in Venezuela, the threat of an invasion, and I answer: Venezuela has already been invaded. We have Russian agents. We have Iranian agents. We have terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas operating freely with the regime’s approval.

We have the Colombian guerrilla and drug cartels controlling 60% of our territory, involved not only in drug trafficking but also in human trafficking and networks of prostitution. This has turned Venezuela into the criminal hub of the Americas.

What sustains the regime is a very powerful, well-funded system of repression. Where does that funding come from? From drug trafficking, the black market in oil, arms trafficking, and human trafficking.

We need to cut those flows. Once that happens and the repression is weakened, it’s over, because violence and terror are all the regime has left. We ask the international community to cut those sources, because the regimes supporting Maduro and the criminal networks have turned Venezuela into a safe haven for their operations across Latin America.

Machado has this exactly right. Americans who have paid attention to Venezuela understand these things; the problem is that not too many of us understand the full scope of just how bad the Venezuelan problem is.

And so you have a lot of people on the Right who groan that “we elected Trump to get us out of the endless wars and now the neocons are trying to get us back into another one.”

I understand the sentiment and I generally agree with it. But Trump’s doctrine is not isolationism, and frankly, there is nothing “neocon” in taking a muscular stance toward Venezuela.

In fact, removing the Maduro regime is a defensive action on our part.

Really, it is. There are things to consider that you may not have processed.

First, the Maduro regime is not the legitimate government of Venezuela. They’ve been stealing elections that they’ve lost in that country since Nicolas Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez was around, and every election since at least 2010 in Venezuela has been illegitimately held or counted. And when Machado’s party won by essentially a 2-to-1 margin, only to have lost a 51-49 race on the “official” count, it was only the latest in a string of abuses of the democratic process.

To allow this to happen over and over again down there is cancerous. It’s one thing that this would be the case in some sub-Saharan African hellhole, or in a post-Soviet trashcanistan country. It’s something else that it happens in the Americas, where we’re supposed to be the beacon of ordered liberty and the rule of law. And here’s a regime which, in election after election, brazenly steals power from its people? That’s going to spread.

There are lots of people, President Trump among them, who will tell you that it spread here in the 2020 election. And I don’t mean in some opaque general sense – a fairly strong case can be made for Venezuelan interference in that American election and others with corrupted voting machines and other dirty tricks, and there are credible people making it.

If it can be proven that the Maduro regime did anything to meddle in the 2020 presidential election, or other major American elections, that’s a casus belli out of American national interest alone. If we’re going to go larger and assert that the preservation of democratic principles requires deposing illegitimate regimes which corrupt the process domestically and then export that corruption, there is no case stronger than in Venezuela.

Second, it should be understood that the Maduro regime is not all that Venezuelan. As Machado noted, Venezuela is crawling with Russian, Iranian and Chinese operatives, as well as Colombian communist narco-terrorists. But the people really propping up that regime aren’t any of those. They’re Cubans. Some 15,000 military and intelligence operatives from Cuba are embedded at high levels throughout the Venezuelan armed forces and elsewhere in the government – including in the elections office. Those Cubans don’t give a damn about the people of Venezuela; in fact, should the Venezuelans retake their country these guys would be out of a job or worse. So they enforce a level of discipline within that regime that actual Venezuelans, many of whom would probably otherwise turn their coat and participate in a coup in order to stave off a civil war, never would.

Add the Russians and Chinese and Iranians and the others to the mix, and what you’ve got is very much a foreign occupation of what should be a sovereign people.

And what has this produced? Well, it’s produced one of the world’s worst refugee crises. More than eight million Venezuelans have taken flight as a result of the tyranny imposed from Caracas, and while that outflow hit the U.S. extremely hard (more on that in a second), it’s also been devastating to countries throughout Latin America. Many of them have been destabilized – after already having had to deal with the destabilizing effects of the Chavez/Maduro regime’s efforts at exporting the communist “revolution” they’re pushing.

But the mass migration to the US from Venezuela – of the 20 million illegal aliens who came to America during the four years Joe Biden occupied the White House, Venezuelans were a plurality – was especially pernicious. Hidden within that migration were criminals, many from a prison gang called Tren de Aragua. TDA, which has been designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the State Department, has become more or less an arm of the state in Venezuela; they’ve got an interesting back story but what matters is that the regime seeded TDA operatives into the Biden mass migration and they set themselves up as kingpins of the drug and sex trade in cities all over America – ultra-violent, ruthless and corrupting in every way possible. It got so bad that, for example, in Aurora, Colorado TDA took over an apartment complex and used it as a forward operating base for a criminal insurgency involving the cocaine trade, prostitution, gun-running and lots of other things. Local law enforcement was overwhelmed.

Aurora was only one of dozens, if not hundreds, of such episodes.

In fact, there is a Venezuelan drug cartel – Cartel de Los Soles – which is run by the country’s military. The “Los Soles” refers to the fact that instead of stars on the epaulets of their military uniforms, the Venezuelan officers have suns. And they’ve become the international hub of the cocaine trade, growing lots of their own product but serving as a transport hub and financial center for the Colombian, Bolivian and Peruvian trade as well. Estimates of the Cartel de Los Soles’ assets run above $2.7 TRILLION. Their alliance with the Mexican cartels make this the largest and most powerful criminal organization in the history of the world.

The idea that you can take this down with lawyers in courtrooms is beyond laughable. It’s akin to the idea that you’re going to beat these people in an election in Venezuela. It’s a fantasy.

Drug-running, as Machado notes, fuels the Venezuelan regime. The seized oil tanker notwithstanding, Venezuelan oil production is a shadow of its former self. That regime has all but destroyed the oil industry in Venezuela, which had at one time made it the most prosperous country in all of Latin America and one of the most prosperous in the world.

It was oil, they killed that. Now it’s cocaine, and what they’ve found is a criminal enterprise is a hell of a lot easier to run out of a communist regime than a legitimate trade ever would be. So every day that goes by presents a larger and larger threat, as the cocaine money accumulates in the hands of communist oppressors seeking to export tyranny across the globe.

This is why our military is blowing up drug boats as they leave port in Venezuela and Colombia. Boarding and seizing them, and then imprisoning low-level operators whose intelligence product we already have, is worthless. We’ve already mapped out the entire operation, at least within Venezuela, of what Cartel de Los Soles has. In fact, one of the prime movers in that organization has already flipped and gone public with what he knows.

Venezuela‘s former military intelligence chief Hugo Carvajal Barrios, widely known by his nickname “El Pollo”, has accused the government of Nicolás Maduro of collaborating with foreign armed groups to target the United States, according to a letter directed to president Trump and obtained by The Dallas Express.

Carvajal, once a top official in the governments of Hugo Chávez and Maduro, is currently imprisoned in the United States after pleading guilty in a federal narco-terrorism case. In the letter addressed to President Donald Trump, he describes Venezuela as a “narco-terrorist organization” and claims the Maduro government has used cocaine trafficking as a weapon against the United States.

“I write to atone by telling the full truth so that the United States can protect itself from the dangers I witnessed for so many years,” Carvajal states in the letter, arguing that Trump’s policies toward Venezuela are “absolutely necessary for the national security of the United States.”

Carvajal goes on to explain that the strategy to move drugs into the U.S. was developed under Chávez and guided by Cuban intelligence in the mid-2000s. He claims it was executed “with help from FARC, ELN, Cuban operatives, and Hezbollah,” and that Venezuelan authorities provided those groups “weapons, passports, and impunity” to operate from Venezuelan territory.

We aren’t very far away from open military operations against the regime. The Trump administration is negotiating, sort of, with Maduro in hopes of facilitating his exit so that Machado’s party, personified in winning presidential candidate Edmundo Gonzalez, can take power and begin to dismantle the criminal operation and foreign occupation of their country.

Hopefully that can happen without bloodshed. But the reality is that it has to happen no matter the means.

This isn’t some foreign adventure the neocons are cooking up. We’re under attack by these people. They’re fighting an Opium War against us and using the proceeds to push a communist revolution around the world. It’s gone on for far too long already, and, if you believe the people pointing toward the 2020 election, it’s already working inside our borders not just as a criminal insurgency but as a cancer on our own election integrity.

Those are all justifications for war with Venezuela. They’re certainly justification for regime change. And unlike in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a legitimately elected, popular reform government waiting to – and blocked from – assume power.

Taking down Maduro and paving the way for Gonzalez and Machado to take office in Caracas would be the single most important foreign policy win for the United States so far this century. Let’s hope Trump can get it done.