Not only Amercians have fallen prey to pursuing a seemingly simple answer to a complicated and complex problem and badly failed. Venezuela is the current poster child for this.

In 1605, Guy Fawkes and others were arrested in the Gunpowder Plot to kill the Protestant King James I and blow up the House of Lords. That of course did not happen. And November the 5th has since been celebrated as “bonfire night.”

H.L. Mencken famously described this symptom. He wrote that, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” Too bad that truism has been frequently ignored or forgotten by us.

Attempting to resolve a mutiny and in the case of Fawkes a regime change is neither simple nor easy. As the Trump administration tightens the noose around Venezuela and its President Nikolas Maduro, is it falling into the simplicity trap of trying to resolve a multifaceted crisis with a single policy? The first question is why is President Trump picking on Maduro? What could Maduro have done that was even more grievous than Vladimir Putin’s illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine?

From the White House........

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