Amber Duke

What this does is it recreates a relationship with Venezuela that were previously they were more in bed with China and Russia.

And I saw Rahim Kassam put this really well in a comment to Axios where he said, if Venezuela is going to be a puppet, wouldn't we rather than be a puppet for the United States than for Russia and China?

I think that's exactly right.

And on this point about the military, it's so important because when we saw the Afghanistan withdrawal, we saw Lloyd Austin breaking the chain of command and disappearing, wearing a Darth Vader mask during COVID, the firings due to the Vax mandates, the DEI, the transgender troops,

All of this led to severely diminished confidence in our ability to exercise military might.

And under Trump, we have seen two operations that have been just unabashed successes and also incredibly impressive.

I mean, first, the B-2 stealth bombers flying 37-hour missions to drop bunker busters on Iran's nuclear facilities.

then this venezuela operation which was just incredible i mean you have the military going in taking control of the venezuelan airspace um and in just a couple of hours getting delta force on the ground uh raiding maduro's residence and getting to the president before he's even able to get

his steel shelter, which they had prepared for.

They had blowtorches with them just in case.

And I think this should be an indication to the American people that the U.S.

military is still great.

The problem that we had previously was poor leadership and poorly defined goals.

But so long as the leadership is very clear about what the strategic benefit is to using the military and also is focused on quick

and efficient results, this is the type of thing that we can still accomplish as the United States of America.

That's exactly right.

And that's the sort of underrated part of this move is how it triangulates China and its relationship with Venezuela.

They have been taking Venezuelan oil, getting around U.S.

sanctions for years.

So when Trump started seizing those oil tankers, it wasn't just to punish Venezuela, but also to send a message to China that we are certainly not going to accept you breaking the