Why it doesn't pay to make predictions
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 great news day. (Given how surprising the news has been so far in 2026, who would be such a fool as to blithely rule that out?)
I’ll leave it at that.
Civil war seems less likely. My guess would be military dictatorship. Maduro was certainly betrayed on the inside.
It's going to be really embarrassing when some of your readers try and reframe this as somehow different from Bush-era politics.
If even one of these optimistic variants comes true, a lot of people will be dining on crow. On both sides of the barricades.
"TRUMP did this? No way, he likes dictators."
"TRUMP did this? After promising to keep us out of forever-wars?"