Morning Note

The U.S. wants to run Venezuela. The job will likely be more difficult than most people realize. Just ask Donald Trump’s former special envoy to the country.

The U.S. “cannot run Venezuela,” Elliott Abrams said on CNN on Sunday. “It would be extremely difficult. You know, it’s a very big country. It’s twice the size of California, 25 million people, roughly. It’s too complex for us to run,” he added.

Abrams is spot on, and even the most committed idealists must acknowledge that Washington has a terrible history of the kind of nation-building effort he’s warning against. The experiment went terribly in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya, and there’s little reason to believe running Venezuela would yield a different result. America remains in the midst of affordability, homelessness, debt, and fraud crises. Those issues, not imposing their will on foreign countries, should be where our leaders’ focus lies. 

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