Neither Dan nor I put this on our list of 2026 predictions at all:
Suitably chastened by my failure to tell you this was imminent, I’ll refrain from telling you what will happen next, not least because I know next to nothing about Venezuela, to be honest. I mean, I know enough to fake it (and many would be convinced) but I’d know I was a fraud.
I hope this works out well for Venezuela. The people there have suffered terribly. That I do know. I hope the country can be stabilized quickly. I hope the most pessimistic predictions I’ve seen—involving a collapse into civil war à la Iraq— prove wildly incorrect. I hope Venezuela’s future is bright, democratic, prosperous, and peaceful. I have no idea if any of that will come to pass, but I hope so.
And I hope when I next check the news, I discover that we’ve put a missile down Khamenei’s smokestack, and that Putin and his entourage have perished mysteriously in an accident involving an exploding tractor or something. Wouldn’t that make for a gr…
