While you were sleeping off your residual New Year’s hangovers the first wee Saturday hours of 2026, President Donald Trump started his military decapitation of Venezuela’s communist dictatorship. And while you were still sleeping, the president ended it, seizing and arresting accused criminal drug trafficker Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia in fewer than 2 1/2 hours. Without a single American life lost.

If the Venezuela raid counts as a regime change war, it’s the shortest not just in American history, but in that of the entire world.

The legal basis for Operation Absolute Resolve — that the Justice Department was executing an arrest warrant for narco terrorism as it would anywhere and against any other offender — was belied as a mere pretext by the White House’s initial assertion that the United States would run Venezuela. There were indeed high-minded reasons that the neoconservatives of past generations would have used to justify the attack: that Maduro was an illegitimate leader who rigged both of his most recent elections, and that the Venezuelan people deserve to liberate themselves from the poverty........

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