The one key, unasked question following Donald Trump’s quixotic intervention in Venezuelan domestic affairs has to be – when is he coming for Albo? And how do we make the case and put it to the Pentagon? Nothing would please many of us more than the sight of Albo rotting in a Yankee prison.
Until this week, most people wouldn’t have been able even to name the Venezuelan leader, let alone describe his crimes. The phrase “narco terrorism” wasn’t rolling off too many tongues.
Views will vary on the significance, morality and wisdom of Trump’s brash new approach to foreign policy. Venezuelans across the globe are partying like its 1999. All power to them. Getting rid of an otherwise unflushable is cause for mighty celebration.
And yet it is a tad difficult to see how this latest putsch serves “America first”, notwithstanding Matt Walsh’s claim:
I totally support turning other countries in our hemisphere into subordinate vassals of the United States. That’s the very definition of an America First foreign policy.
Source: Matt Walsh’s Telegram channel, 5 January 2026.
Matt also adds:
“This is a war for oil!!!!!”
First of all, the “war” lasted like 90 minutes. Second, going to war to secure vital resources for your own people is totally legitimate. Why should we allow some third world communist shithole to control trillions of dollars worth of oil?
Matt is perhaps veering towards the reverse of Trump Derangement Syndrome. The Donald can do no wrong! This course of thinking would be unwise. And it is far from clear that the MAGA voting class has making Venezuela great again at the top of its to-do list.
Conrad Black is also in the “you beaut” camp, though with more analytics and a focus on strategic outcomes rather than due process.
Conrad Black: Maduro’s Removal an Astonishing Strategic Success for the US | The Epoch Times
Victor Davis Hanson remains on Team Trump, post the Caracas raid. A Berlin Wall moment, to be celebrated. But VDH has concerns about what comes next, and acknowledges the complexities and the dangers of mission creep. A war on drugs PLUS a war on terror? Perhaps asking for trouble. An outstanding summary, right here. To be engaged by grown-ups.
George Christensen makes the case against. In not one, but two articles, and impressively, in a measured fashion, as always:
In the latter piece, George argues:
Conservatism, properly understood, is not an ideology of permanent war or global crusades. It is a philosophy of restraint, humility, limits, and order.
It begins with a sober view of human nature and a deep suspicion of concentrated power. War represents the greatest possible concentration of power in the hands of the state. It centralises authority, suppresses liberty, corrodes moral restraint, and leaves nations poorer in spirit as well as in treasure.
A conservative case against military interventionism is therefore not a novel concept. It is the original position.
Of course, Trump is no conservative, and never has been. Which isn’t the only point at issue here, of course.
The American left, as would be expected, is blah-blah-blahing away. We can safely dismiss them. Hypocrites at best. It is a bit rich for the Covid generation of politicians to be bleating about the abandonment of due process in the democratic polity.
The spaicecowboy (not a misprint) on Instagram notes that Obama took out Bin Laden without congressional approval. Grenada? Iran-Contra? Iraq? Vietnam? Panama and Noriega? Gaddafi? Other recent precedents abound. Trump himself bombed Iran recently. There is a bit of it going around, in other words. Or, people in glass houses and pots and kettles. At least Trump didn’t have the Venezuelan guy killed.
Which reminds us that now we are in the time of the counter-elite. And the time of presidential executive orders stateside. One lot of elites-rulers has taken over from another. If Pareto, Mosca and Michels are right, modern democracies are necessarily run by elites of one kind or another. It even has a name – the iron law of oligarchy. If we have to be ruled by an elite, why not try and make sure that it is benign and/or favouring our side? It might even increase our freedom and reduce tyranny, even if through what many critics see as authoritarian means. After all, James Burnham sub-titled his 1943 book, The Machiavellians, “Defenders of Freedom”. Theorists of the counter elite suggest that THAT is the way to fight back against the ruling class. Simply get your own and get it into power.
A useful discussion can be found here, and unsurprisingly, Peter Thiel is part of the discussion.
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Many on the broad right don’t much care for Thiel and suggest that replacing one elite with another doesn’t do much for the populist cause. Or the freedom cause, as the development of one of Thiel’s companies, Palantir, attests. This particular member of the alt-elite might we align with cowboy warfaring, given his company’s interests).
On the counter elites, see also Michael Shellenberger:
Apologies to Australian readers under sixteen. You aren’t allowed to watch these.
John Gray is always worth reading, including on the rise of the counter elite.
Shellenberger thinks that our societies are now “disordered”. The so-called “rules based international order” developed after World War Two is no more, really. Should we try to get it back, and have America lead by example? There are very few good actors abroad to make it in any sense meaningful. China? Russia? Hamas? The WEF? The EU? NATO? Iran? The WHO?
How to correct course, whether by traditional rules or through counter-tyranny, is a real question. Having both been a student of conservatism for at least a quarter of a century, but also having witnessed the takeover of our world and our nations by unelected puppeteers, I can see both sides of the debate over Trump’s cowboyism. Having profound scholar-conservatives like Tony Abbott repeatedly cautioning against unalloyed Trumpism and alt-politics should cause us at least to pause our cheersquadding against the bad guys and their bad ideologies. Despite all the excitement involved in kicking ass.
It is reassuring that as sure a pair of hands as Rod Dreher is also in two minds about El Trumpo.
And yet …
Elites make up their own rules. We all witnessed this, and suffered muchly from it, during the plandemic. That doesn’t make them or it right, of course. That is George Christensen’s point. The rules should come from we-the-people, massaged gently over time through a regime of prudence and restraint if the idea of the social contract and the ongoing case (now wafer thin) for paying taxes is to have any ongoing meaning.
But what if the rules – all of them – have been thrown out? What to do?
One view – and who is to say it is wrong? – is that in the era of active terrorism, open borders, rampant international criminality, globalist governance, post-accountability, post-international law, and post-everything else decent in policy making, we should welcome someone who “puts a bit of stick about”, in the manner of the fictional FU (Francis Urquhart). Or, put another way, if our side plays by the (now extinct) rules (of the game), we will never make our way back to decency in government and decent government. Or put a third way, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Or put a fourth way, all bets are now off in the age of evil, post-modernist governance. This view makes even more sense when we remember that bad actors and demonic ideologies dominate just about every major institution in society, and when these actors are making decisions every day which affect our lives.
The alternate view is that even if the other side plays dirty, why should we? We, and in this case the Americans, should respect their own constitutional traditions, and the principles of international law and order. Not to mention consistency.
Trump may be an oligarch, but he is OUR oligarch, the argument might go.
The great fear, though, is that, whatever good or ill Trump 47 achieves during his fifteen minutes of fame, it will be mostly reversed, within months if not weeks, by a successor Democrat administration. Ruling by executive order is like that. Consequential leaders bed down change and make sure it can’t be reversed. See under Tony Blair, not in a good way. See also under the long and seemingly irreversible march through the institutions, noted above. Far better to create an ecosystem for genuine push-back that will last, than simply crack the whip and charge on in.
Having not solved the great dilemma …
Back to the case for an American removal and arrest of Albo. In short – bugger the emerging “Columbia next” narrative noted by Paul Joseph Watson (Telegram channel, 6 January 2026). Greenland? Who cares? They don’t have an Albo. Cuba? They tried that with the Bay of Pigs. Oops. Mexico? There are some signs of hope there, without US help.
Greenland, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico… who will the US target next? | The Spectator
We have our own priorities … and we are America’s greatest ally. Or we were once. Adapting John Howard’s post-9/11 rhetoric, now isn’t the time for the USA to be an eighty per cent ally of Australia. Our need for an intervention is urgent and significant.
Albo may or may not be a drug criminal. But he is a socialist dictator with scant regard for the human rights of his citizens. He is moving our country in dangerous and possibly fatal directions. He surrounds himself with madmen and, mostly, mad women. He is actively attempting to bankrupt the nation. He is providing ever new avenues for digital tyranny. He is Hamas’s man down under. He is most of the way down the road to destroying our energy strength, our farmlands and our industrial base. What is left of it.
Simply, many want him gone. And what with a rigged electoral system – where a schmuck like Albo can get in on a landslide with a third of the primary vote – what other way is there of removing him? Conrad Black refers to Maduro’s “repression and incompetence”. A combo all too familiar to Canberra watchers. Here is Black:
More important than any pan-American consequence of the removal of Maduro is that Trump has already promised to send U.S. oil companies to Venezuela to triple oil production to where it was when the former Venezuelan government seized most of the oil business from the Americans about 25 years ago. This alone would add about $4,000 per capita to the Venezuelan people (not counting the 7.7 million people, 20 percent of the population, who have fled the country due to Maduro’s repression and incompetence).
Repression and incompetence. Let it sink in.
And you don’t need to suffer from ADS (Albo Derangement Syndrome) to wish for the above. I just hope that planning of Operation Kangaroo is well advanced in DC.
Paul Collits
7 January 2026
Does this guy know what is going on? Of course I don't. That is why I write about these things. Trying to find out, mate. Source the best of what is thought and written, in the spirit of Matthew Arnold. And bring some (I hope) wisdom to bear.
I had similar thoughts - unfortunately I think Operation Kangaroo (that's OK!) might be a bit far down Trump's list at the moment.