Both dictatorships share a lot in common, including relying on China to buy their oil

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The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the Islamic Republic of Iran may seem an unlikely pairing in the effort to make sense of the world at the moment, but the dramatic events unfolding in these two decrepit kleptocracies aren’t just coinciding in an inconvenient competition for front-page headlines.

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It’s all part of the same story. If you get it wrong you’ll end up badly misreading U.S. President Donald Trump’s theatrically brilliant exfiltration of the Venezuelan caudillo Nicolás Maduro over the weekend. You might even conclude that the United States is truly “locked and loaded and ready to go,” as Trump himself put it last Friday, to defend Iran’s protesters against the Khomeinist regime’s guns.

If you’re not careful you’ll end up believing that Trump is primarily intent upon regime change and the restoration of democracy in Venezuela. He isn’t. He’s sidelined and humiliated Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, referring to her only as a “nice lady” who doesn’t enjoy the respect of Venezuelans. Never mind that a recent ClearPath Strategies poll found that 72 per cent of Venezuelans quite admire Machado, who won the Nobel peace prize that Trump was angling for last year — which might go some way in explaining Trump’s churlishness towards her.

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In his address to the nation on Saturday, Trump didn’t even mention the name of Venezuela’s legitimate president, Edmundo González Urrutia, who won the 2024 elections in a landslide. González was forced to hide in the Dutch embassy and ended up being spirited out of the country after Maduro refused to surrender the presidency to him. In a break with the European Parliament and Canada and the several Latin American democracies that recognize González as Venezuela’s president, the United States will recognize Maduro’s own vice-president,