Mohammad

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A lot of Canadian commentary on the U.S. capture of Maduro has framed it as “ominous for Canada.” I’ve never liked Trump, and a more overt, less restrained approach to American hemispheric power should concern us. But this reaction badly misreads both Venezuela and the actual constraints on U.S. action—and substitutes reflexive slippery-slope thinking for serious foreign-policy analysis. It is naïve to suggest that ordinary citizens can simply “rise up” against a criminalized, authoritarian regime with total control over the military, security services, and economic rents. That framing ignores how power actually functions in failed or captured states with today’s modern technology. Venezuela’s dictatorship has produced more than eight million refugees, a near-total economic implosion, widespread hunger, and modern forms of forced labor in what was once a prosperous country—while being actively supported by geopolitical adversaries such as Russia and Iran. Non-intervention and indifference are not inherently compassionate positions in foreign policy. In Venezuela’s case, a clear majority of the population—inside and outside the country—wanted Maduro removed. Respecting sovereignty in the abstract while millions suffer in practice is not moral restraint; it is moral abdication. This logic applies more broadly. In our own hemisphere, places like Haiti now have close to half their population living in conditions approaching starvation, governed not by states but by gangs. Pretending that people trapped in such environments can generate rule of law, education systems, and economic capacity on their own is wishful thinking. A long-term, externally administered government—20 to 30 years focused explicitly on security, infrastructure, education, and institutions—would almost certainly leave such countries far better off and be preferred by people living there. Yet we have convinced ourselves that allowing permanent dysfunction is morally superior to intervention, lest it resemble “colonialism.” That inversion of morality is one of the great failures of modern liberal-progressive thinking. The developed world has both a moral obligation and a strategic interest in enabling the conditions for development where local governance has collapsed entirely. Stability, growth, and human dignity abroad reduce migration crises, security threats, and geopolitical openings for adversaries at home. Even where interventions stretch or violate formal international-law processes, public opinion in the aftermath here reveals something uncomfortable for technocrats: people judge legitimacy by outcomes, not procedural purity. In Venezuela, most of the public supports the result—even if the motives were imperfect and RBIO processes abandoned—because the alternative was indefinite mass suffering. The RBIO had two decades to do something and did nothing. Finally, fears that this signals some new risk to Canada, or that an American president could meaningfully “meddle” in Canada with popular support, are detached from reality. Canada is a stable, legitimate democracy with functioning institutions and is beloved by normal Americans. The comparison is not just wrong—it is juvenile. What we are seeing is not the collapse of international order, but a re-ranking of priorities: outcomes over abstractions, legitimacy over formalism, and human consequences over comfortable moral posturing.

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