Regime decapitation in Venezuela, and the consequences of competence. By John Carter.

The message to Washington’s European vassals is that America is playing hardball, again. The rules-based international order is a thing of the past. America will do what it is in America’s interests to do, because America has the power to do it….

Joe Biden and Mark Milley would never even have thought of this:

Over the last several months of military buildup in the Caribbean, many have issued dire predictions of the inevitable boondoggle that would result if the US allowed itself to be drawn into an invasion and occupation of Venezuela. …

I certainly never expected them to simply descend like Odin with the Wild Hunt and snatch the country’s president in a lightning raid. …

Neither, of course, did anyone else expect such an audacious manoeuvre. Which was the point.

Rather than attempting to grind their way through tens of thousands of Venezuelan soldiers, with all the carnage and wreckage that would entail, the US military simply conducted a decapitation strike.

They cut the head off of the snake, and with that one act threw not only the Venezuelan government, but governments all over the world, into terrified disarray. If the Americans can do that in Venezuela, after all…

Competence makes a comeback:

The theme of decapitation is not only found in the raid’s climax, but in the very conditions that made it possible. …

The 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment “Night-Stalkers” spent months training on a 1:1 mock-up of Maduro’s residence, endlessly drilling procedures for entering the compound, blasting their way through steel doors, clearing resistance, and reaching el presidente before he could hide or escape. This was no cake-walk. Maduro was guarded by dozens of supposedly elite Cuban officers; America’s spec ops team cut them down in minutes, without taking a single casualty. 

The absurdly complex operation was executed with smooth perfection. It is probably the most impressive feat of combined arms that has been seen in living memory. It was both a tactical coup and a strategic masterpiece, rearranging the geopolitical chess board in America’s favour with one decisive cut.

Not only that, but it was incredibly civilized. For all the mewling about violations of fictive international law, no one could help but notice that casualties were kept to an absolute minimum. Not a single American death; Venezuela and Cuba combined lost some 50 or 60 military personnel; there were only two civilian casualties.

This is the same American military that spent twenty fruitless years fighting to replace the Taliban with the Taliban, climaxing with a humiliating route from Kabul in which billions of dollars of military equipment were abandoned to the very Taliban that the military fought so hard to replace the Taliban with.

It is the same American military that, until just a year ago, was struggling to fill its ranks, because the warrior class had concluded that it was not a military worth belonging to, that a government which held them in such contempt was not a government worth fighting for.

Regime decapitation in the US occurred in 2025:

Only one thing changed: a year ago, when Trump won the election, the American state was decapitated.

Because Trump won the election, he could fire the fat bureaucrat Lloyd Austin as Secretary of Defence, and appoint in his place the energetic, muscular young Hegseth as Secretary of War. Because Hegseth was the Secretary of War, he could begin eliminating the dross of the Cancelled Years and refocus the American military on its actual mission.

Biden’s SecDef

Trump’s SecDef

It turned out to be that simple. Change the leadership, replace the dance troupe of hollow men and men in dresses that has cavorted through the halls of power for far too long with platoons of competent men, and allow the competent men to do what they know how to do, without interference from politicians, lawyers, and ideologues. Just point them in the right direction and get out of their way. …

Chris Bray is the first person I’ve seen to intuit the meaning encoded in the thematic symmetry of regime decapitation that bookends the drama of Caracasian raid, and its illumination of the essential paradox of brilliant failing institutions:

“A bunch of extraordinarily capable people inside the services just put their heads down and kept going. A military that couldn’t plan or execute…could. The Mark Milleyfication of the American armed forces was imposed and discardable, a Potemkin transgendered village. …

“This is both heartening and tragic to see. It means that we’re in better shape today than we thought we possibly could be, but it also means that a brutal twenty-year shambles was entirely avoidable.”

We didn’t have to put up with any of this:

This applies much more broadly than the US military.

For decades now we have known nothing but decline. Decline in living standards, in civil liberties, in the quality of goods and services, in the reliability of institutions, in the trustworthiness of information, in our fertility, in the career prospects of the young, in the social cohesion of our communities. Even our entertainments have become uninspiring and insipid. The trajectory of everything has been relentlessly downwards, to the degree that our plummet has seemed like a consequence of some gravitational law of history, a recapitulation of the Fall of Rome, just another catabolic collapse of civilization, another entree to a long and dismal dark age about which we can do nothing save set our jaws and prepare our heavy hearts to endure.

Now the truth is plain.

Decline is a choice.

A choice being made, every day, in every way, by the usurpers and pretenders who insinuated themselves into the key nodes of power and influence in our societies so that they could murder our civilization with malice aforethought while claiming that it is succumbing to natural causes in its senesence.

• Mass third world invasion is a choice.
• Economic sabotage in the name of preventing the weather from changing is a choice.
• Ruining the lives of young men with DEI is a choice.
• Blackwashing our history and mythology is a choice.
• Predatory taxation is a choice.
• Overregulation is a choice. Brainwashing the young to hate themselves is a choice.
• Yasslighting the young women into choosing girlbossery over family is a choice.
• Sacrificing the lives of the young to the fears of the old during the COVID lockdowns was a choice.

Allowing the incompetent to run things in the name of ‘social justice’ is a choice, and the contrast between the litany of inept fumbles that has resulted in and the smooth professionalism on display in the Caracasian raid has thrown the consequences of that choice — and the consequences of its alternative — into sharp relief. …

Competence is a choice too:

All we have to do to reverse the decline is decapitate the beast, put the right men in charge, and everything will follow naturally from there. Nature will begin to heal, as surely as Yellowstone’s ecology repaired itself once wolves were returned to their rightful place at the predatory apex.

That is why leaders across the Western world are squealing so loudly. …

The concern is [that] the rest of the rotting West will look at the remarkable results obtained by regime decapitation in the United States, and start getting ideas.

Want to fix the United Kingdom, and make Great Britain again? Sweep the traitors of the Labour Party out of Parliament, remove that pusillanimous android Two-Tier Queer from power, put Nigel Farage and 300 Reform MPs in their place, and watch as they invoke the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy to cast off three decades of Blairite Fabianism in a Great Repeal Act that frees the British state to remigrate the foreign invaders, rebuild the country’s industry, and revive the British military.

Want to fix Europe? Cast down the old women in Brussels — they have no popular legitimacy in any case — and remove their creatures, like Macron or Merz, who keep their peoples yoked to the suicidal EUrocracy. Raise up nationalists in their place – Le Pen, the AfD – and watch as Europe’s natural creative genius and martial spirit reasserts itself. No more Net Zero incapacitating industry, no more European Court of Human Rights preventing invaders from being remigrated, no more Digital Services Act censoring the Internet, no more micromanagerial bureaucratic overregulation strangling the economy. …

Regime decapitation is necessary but not sufficient:

Obviously, regime decapitation is not an immediate fix. At first, bureaucracies, universities, media organizations, and judicial systems will all remain full of partisans of the ancien régime. So long as the top leadership remains in the hands of Western civilization’s enemies, however, it is wholly impossible to replace those further down in the org charts, because those at the top will block any such attempt.

Regime decapitation is an iterative process: circulate the upper leadership, and task them with replacing the people immediately below them, who replace the people immediately below them, and so on until the system has been flushed. …

The US military is almost certainly a unique case, in that its underlying competence remained relatively untouched through the Great Awokening: nothing more than a new coat of rainbow paint, that did not corrode the armour underneath and expose the mechanisms it protected to the elements. Other institutions are almost certainly not so fortunate. The rust and rot in the universities, for instance, is extensive; there is good reason to suspect that they simply cannot be reclaimed, that the decay is too deep, that the cancer goes all the way to the bone. The same is probably true in much of the corporate sector. …

Military power underlies political power:

Trump has just handed the military its first unambiguous victory since Operation Iraqi Freedom rolled over Saddam’s military over twenty years ago, and he did it without, it seems, getting the US sucked into a quagmire.

There is nothing the troops like more than a victory, particularly one that comes at no cost in blood, and which improves the circumstances of their country in numerous and obvious ways.

Trump was already popular with the trigger-pullers; in the afterglow of Operation Absolute Resolve, they are probably burning incense to his effigies in the barracks. As Roman history tells us, the support of the legions is often politically decisive on the home front, particularly when there are influential enemies at home with whom the sovereign can deal only by declaring a state of exception.

Politics in Australia usually lags the US by about five years.