Grim Reminder: A Grim Historian is a reader-supported newsletter and depends on your 5$ donations to keep the most depressing politics and history in your inbox. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber or sharing with someone who loves misery.

Share

Every American military misadventure begins the same way: with a name that insists nothing bad is happening. Operation Iraqi Freedom. Operation Enduring Whatever. And now, effectively, Operation We Swear This Isn’t About Oil. But Oh Wait, It Is.

If you are just tuning into Trump’s reality tv show, Grandpa spent months shouting rather hysterically about fentanyl, narcoterrorists, and brown tattooed drug lords coming for your women and children. Of course, fentanyl scares Fox voters and polls well.

But you know what is not a scary bedtime story? The recent 25-page indictment of the President of Venezuela, Maduro.

It doesn’t accuse Maduro of trafficking fentanyl. Odd, no?

So let me get this straight. When it came time to file an actual indictment — a document signed by real lawyers who can be sanctioned, disbarred, or laughed out of court — fentanyl disappeared. Gone. Not mentioned. Not charged. Not even redacted with Epstein ink.

So why did we start blowing up fentanyl-packed fishing boats? Put a pin in that.

Instead, prosecutors charged what they believed they could plausibly argue: cocaine conspiracy (allegedly), narco-terrorism (built on inference and witnesses only), and weapons counts to pad jurisdiction and sentencing (because gun-toting Americans love the “weapons of mass destruction” narrative. Again, polls well.)

Other hypocrisies are more flagrant. Trump claims to be policing drugs while simultaneously pardoning Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was convicted of running an actual narco-state that funneled tons of cocaine into the United States. You know…actually killing Americans.

Then, in a recent press conference, Trump really let the truth fly. He confessed that we invaded Venezuela to grab oil. Shocker.

Now, you have to understand something about Trump. He is tired. His bloated and bruised body is giving out on him. Pair the cheeseburger fatigue with the fact that lying is exhausting, and we are left with a cognitive load that cuts into Grandpa’s nap time. Trump, like every aging authoritarian, is long past the point of pretending he doesn’t plan to sell anything not bolted down.

Case in point: If you are wondering why Trump declared war without Congress’s approval, he gave reporters an equally “I am too exhausted to lie” answer. Trump responded that Congress would “leak” info, so they can’t be trusted.

Congress is the enemy. Let that sit for a moment.

When a president bypasses Congress because they will “leak” or “undermine” the state, you’re no longer in U.S. precedent territory. You’re in Weimar Germany (Article 48 emergency powers), Putin’s Russia, or Erdogan’s Turkey.

Then came the usual testosterone theater. Trump said he was not opposed to putting U.S. “boots on the ground.”

Say what? His whole campaign promise was that wars were for barbarians. Trump promised deal-making, not deaths. Now, Trump — a five-time draft dodger who spent a lifetime keeping his boots off the ground — plans to send other people’s children to die in their boots. This isn’t abstract. “Boots on the ground” is not a metaphor. It is bodies. It is mothers getting phone calls. It is flag-draped coffins. And it was offered up with all the seriousness of a man ordering an appetizer.

As I said, Grandpa is tired.

He is not the only one. Congress, having been functionally castrated, responded with a flurry of strongly worded letters, which is Washington’s version of lighting a scented candle while the house burns down. Allies are rattled, Colombia is nervous, Maduro’s people are still in place, and the president is playing foreign policy like a toddler slapping his cards face-up on the table and declaring victory.

And we are only on day four of 2026.

So once there are boots on the ground, what next? It turns out, America will “run” Venezuela.

Run it how, exactly? Venezuela is not a casino you can bankrupt and rebrand. It is a vast country of nearly thirty million people, with a military, entrenched power brokers, regional alliances, and neighbors already on edge. It did not sign up to be a vassal state, and it is not going to submit because an American president used the word run like a hostile takeover memo.

Not to mention, whatever drug lords exist in Venezuela are salivating. Power vacuums make great homes for narcoterrorists.

And then there is the little problem of paying for running a country one and a half times larger than Texas. According to Trump, none of this will cost taxpayers anything because the money will come from “what’s in the ground.” Just wait for your oil check to arrive after the DOGE check. I hear billionaires give bonuses to randos if you ask nicely.

Let’s be clear, Maduro needed to go, but Trump is burning options that actually work. Want to squeeze Maduro without turning Venezuela into Iraq with tropical weather? Sanctions are the classic pressure tool — targeted sanctions, debt restrictions, asset freezes, oil-sector constraints, and licensing. The U.S. already has years of sanctions architecture in place for Venezuela, including the 2015 executive order and subsequent OFAC frameworks.

Negotiations (even ugly ones) let you trade exits for concessions — amnesties, exile, monitored elections, oil licenses contingent on reforms — whatever works. You don’t have to like negotiating to admit it’s cheaper than invasion.

Instead, Trump chose the most expensive resource extraction method ever invented: war.

Now, let’s put aside that the world (especially China) is no longer worshipping nineteenth-century fossilized sludge as fuel dependence. Even by oil terms, Trump’s oil grab is remarkably shortsighted. Venezuela’s oil sector is degraded, production has collapsed compared to its historical peaks, infrastructure is decaying, debt and legal disputes are tangled, and “revival” takes years and massive investment even under optimistic scenarios. You don’t “get” oil quickly — you get chaos, blowback, reconstruction bills, and a region that learns to treat the U.S. like an arsonist with a gas can.

More importantly, if this is what passes for power — loud threats, sloppy motives, and boots casually volunteered by people who will never wear them — then it’s worth asking a very old, very unromantic question: what does actual deal-making look like?

For that, we have to rewind to a president who understood leverage so well he could stare down Armageddon without breaking a sweat: John F. Kennedy.

In October 1962, the United States discovered Soviet nuclear missiles ninety miles from Florida. The Cuban Missile Crisis is often remembered as a testosterone showdown — eyeballs to eyeballs, who blinks first — but that’s the cartoon version.

The real story is quieter, nastier, and far more instructive. Kennedy didn’t pound the table. He didn’t announce his motives. He didn’t tell the world what he really wanted. He created ambiguity. He gave Khrushchev exits. He let the Soviets save face. Publicly, the U.S. demanded missile removal. Privately, Kennedy cut a deal: the U.S. would quietly remove American missiles from Turkey. No chest-thumping. No branding exercise. No “Operation Freedom Something.” Just power exercised with discipline.

Flash forward to a year later. On June 11, 1963, after Alabama Governor George Wallace literally stood in a schoolhouse door to block the integration of the University of Alabama, Kennedy went on national television to address civil rights. Most people remember his speech for its moral backbone, but that flattens Kennedy’s brilliance.

Kennedy wasn’t just appealing to conscience. He was diagnosing a credibility crisis.

“We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it. And we cherish our freedom here at home,” Kennedy said. “But are we to say to the world — and much more importantly, to each other — that this is the land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes?”

Kennedy’s speech wasn’t lofty. It was surgical. He pointed out a contradiction so obvious that it had become dangerous. The United States was selling freedom abroad as a cornerstone of Cold War strategy while television screens around the world showed Black children being escorted into schools by federal troops.

Segregation didn’t just offend moral sensibilities — it made America look weak, incoherent, and unserious on the world stage. How exactly are you supposed to lecture newly independent nations about self-determination when your own citizens are being beaten on television for trying to attend school? Nah, you don’t get to tell other countries how to run their affairs when your own house is visibly on fire.

Simply put, segregation wasn’t just a moral embarrassment. It was a strategic liability.

Kennedy understood that soft power is a social contract. That’s why he founded USAID — not only to feed starving kids, but to make American influence cheaper, quieter, and harder to resist than tanks.

Which brings us back to the present. What’s being offered now is not soft power. It’s not even hard power used intelligently. It’s a dick-measuring contest dressed up as diplomacy — threats shouted, motives confessed, strategy abandoned. (And judging by Stormy Daniels’ testimonial, Trump won’t win the dick-measuring contest.)

The strategic point is larger: a country that won’t deliver freedom to its own citizens doesn’t get trusted to deliver it to anyone else. Once that contract is visibly broken, you don’t look righteous — you look fake and weak, which is worse in geopolitics because it’s actionable. Rivals exploit it. Allies hedge against it. Everyone stops believing you when you say “transition,” “stability,” or “freedom.”

Now look at the clown show we’re exporting.

Grandmas and kids in zip ties, brown people sent to concentration camps without due process, Pam Bondi releasing memos threatening to persecute “anti-Christians,” healthcare that costs more than a black market lung, rent and childcare costs that are cartoonishly high compared to peer nations, and a pedophile ring the president is openly protecting.

I say this because I love my country. America, clean up the shit in your own backyard before you tell other countries what to do with their backyards.

This is the Kennedy point, updated: if you look incoherent at home, you don’t get to cosplay as the world’s referee. Not because it’s immoral — because nobody buys it. And when nobody buys it, you lose the one thing that fuels superpowers: the ability to shape outcomes without firing a single shot.

Kennedy didn’t avoid catastrophe by being nicer than his enemies. He avoided it by being smarter, quieter, and far more disciplined about when to shut up. Saying the quiet part out loud isn’t bravery. It’s amateur hour.

And in geopolitics, amateurs don’t look tough — they get played.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.