Hamilton Nolan on Trump’s attack on Venezuela:

For those of us interested in reality, the question becomes: Might there be some downsides of kidnapping the president of a sovereign nation, because he is not sufficiently in America’s pocket? One thing we have done is to supercharge the urgency of almost all smaller nations on earth to unite with one another to protect themselves against our aggression, and to seek out competing superpowers—China, most obviously—to align themselves with in order to have some protection against what just happened to Maduro. It is easy, for the sort of shallow, power-drunk, unwise people who currently control our government, to imagine that because we have the biggest military, there can be no consequences from us attacking a much smaller nation. But anyone who has read history, and who is able to conceptualize its progress in time frames longer than an election cycle, knows that strong nations who imagine themselves to be invulnerable and therefore decide to exploit everyone else at their leisure plant the seeds of the coalition that will one day overtake them on the world stage.