Nicolas Maduro gets more dangerous by the day.

Where once stood an international laughingstock — a cartoonish tinpot dictator lacking even a semblance of legitimacy a dozen years on from a closely-contested election in which a hesitant Venezuelan electorate gave Hugo Chávez’s outwardly hapless protégé the benefit of the doubt — now stands the Western Hemisphere’s foremost drug lord, a towering narcoterrorist who, when he isn’t busy with the particulars of his vast cocaine logistics empire, presides over a supranational street gang and a lucrative human trafficking network.

That’s all according to Donald Trump who, as you might’ve heard, has imposed a naval blockade on dark fleet vessels loading Venezuelan oil cargoes. Trump’s announcement, delivered via TruthSocial with all the usual bombast and superfluous all-caps, came a week after the US seized an oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast. The vessel, sanctioned by Treasury since 2022, was part of a global shadow fleet known to have facilitated shipments of Maduro’s crude.

In announcing the blockade, Trump accused Maduro of stealing oil from — checks TruthSocial — America. Trump described Pete Hegseth’s naval buildup around Venezuela as “the largest Armada ever assembled,” and warned it’ll “only get bigger” unless and until Maduro returns to the US “all of the oil, land and other assets that they previously stole from us.”

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard such an open admission of one government’s intent to commandeer, by military force, the national resources of another nation. Dick Cheney’s blushing from the great beyond.

There are a lot of ways to characterize Chávez’s nationalization of the Venezuelan oil industry, a push which did in fact involve forcing American Big Oil to relinquish operational charge over jointly-run projects. Chávez’s program was expropriation pretty much by definition.

But at the end of the day, Venezuela’s oil reserves belong to the Venezuelan people, not to the shareholders of US oil majors through legacy claims on nationalized assets and not to US taxpayers, vicariously, through those claims. I shouldn’t have to say that, but apparently I do, because Trump’s citing Chávez’s nationalization program in asserting the US military’s alleged right to enforce Treasury sanctions on Venezuelan oil by way of a naval blockade.

In the same message, Trump said he’s designating Maduro’s government as a foreign terrorist organization. That’s a controversial move which conjures his decision to similarly designate the IRGC in October of 2017. He punctuated his announcement by demanding that Maduro “return our oil, land and any other assets IMMEDIATELY.”

As usual, I’m compelled to state the obvious lest anyone should get the wrong idea about my analysis of this rapidly escalating standoff: Maduro is a murderer, is a kidnapper, does traffic in relatively small (compared to real Latin American cartels) quantities of cocaine in order to raise hard currency, should probably be deposed (just not by America) and is directly responsible for the worst economic crisis in the world outside of warzones. Additionally, his mentor did, on some interpretations, “steal” assets from US oil majors.

Those are the caveats, and they’re important. Context matters. And yet, Trump’s engaged in a transparently heinous attempt to play up Maduro’s sundry crimes and misdeeds such that the US electorate comes to see the regime in Caracas as an amalgamation of the Medellín Cartel in its prime, a terror organization, a deliberate exporter of gang culture and an organized human trafficking outfit, all run by a criminal mastermind more dangerous than five El Chapos.

With the disclaimer (again) that Maduro is in too many respects to count a criminal, in no world is he a mastermind. On the contrary, he’s a moron. And not just any moron, a legendary one. In fact, Nicolas Maduro has a (very) solid claim on being the most moronic world leader in modern history. Ironically, his only competition in that regard is the man currently trying to overthrow him.

I’d like to think the US electorate is smarter than this, where that means too smart to sanction a war with Venezuela for the sake of reclaiming what was lost to Exxon and ConocoPhillips during the Chávez years, on the way to installing — I suppose — María Corina Machado as a de facto US puppet in Caracas. (I’m not suggesting that’s what Machado wants to be, but that’s how she’ll be viewed, particularly by the ~25% of Venezuelans still loyal to Maduro, in the event she inherits the government following a successful regime change effort orchestrated by Trump.)

Similarly, I can’t imagine Congress, even in the pitiable state it’s in, going along with an actual war declaration against Venezuela that’d allow Trump to deploy the tens of thousands of ground troops it’d take to establish anything that even approximates control over the country.

I don’t want to jump the gun (“Why the hell not?!” shouted Hegseth), but the specifics of an invasion are challenging, to put it mildly. To call Venezuela’s borders “porous” would be to materially understate the case, and outside of urban centers, the place is crawling with armed militia and the remnants of dismantled left-wing guerrilla groups.

Bottom line: It’s a logistical nightmare. Sending the Marines into that place is a suicide mission, figuratively in the political area and literally in the battlefield context. Could the US conquer Venezuela with a full-scale invasion? Well, sure. But at what cost? This fantasy of Trump’s is manifestly insane, even by Trumpian standards.