Has Venezuela Overtaken a Historic Opportunity in Iran?

“If they start killing people, which they tend to do during their riots,” President Donald Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt on January 8, “we’re going to hit them very hard.”

Here’s where America’s carrier strike groups were positioned on January 8:

Coming off extended deployments or in need of maintenance, much of America’s fleet of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers are not in the field. Several are (understandably and desirably) positioned in the Western Pacific, but a significant amount of U.S. firepower is still stationed off the coast of Venezuela.

The unusual absence of a significant U.S. naval presence in the Gulf region may be limiting the president’s capacity to make good on his threat to execute punitive strikes on the Iranian regime in support of the historic anti-government uprising in the Islamic Republic’s streets. Today, nearly one week on from Trump’s first warning to the Iranian regime, there are as yet no indications that the Pentagon will reroute a carrier group to the Middle East anytime soon.

That limits America’s options in the region, compelling U.S. forces to rely on long-range bombers (à la Operation Midnight Hammer) or allied airbases in the region to support strikes on Iranian regime targets. Worse, the lack of substantial naval firepower in the Gulf increases the risk that the U.S. will be unable to comprehensively defend its troops, assets, and allies against an Iranian counterattack.

The problem associated with the paucity of defensive weapons platforms in the region is compounded by America’s dwindling stocks of defensive ordnance. Per Politico:

If the administration strikes and Iranians retaliate forcefully, the U.S. may have a limited stockpile of interceptors to defend American forces against Tehran’s formidable rocket and missile arsenal. The Pentagon stations 10,000 U.S. troops at Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar and smaller groupings in Iraq, Syria and Jordan.

“If it does become a longer-term volley of strikes, then your interceptor capacity becomes all the more important,” one unnamed “defense official” told the outlet’s reporters. “We could get in a sticky situation very quickly on that front.”

Revealingly, the U.S. is evacuating some personnel from the American military’s Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar — a facility that was targeted by Iran in a face-saving retaliation for the June strikes on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear weapons program.

No one can predict how or even if punitive U.S. strikes on Iranian regime targets would help the anti-regime protesters in the streets. But if such an operation is worth doing at all, it’s worth doing now.

An unprecedented slaughter of innocent, liberty-loving Iranian civilians is underway. The regime has pulled out all the stops — an indication of how precarious its position has become. The mullahs appear to believe that they can massacre their way out of this, and they might not be wrong.

Eventually, the protest movement will become exhausted and disheartened, its ranks thinned by Iran’s murderous security forces. The opportunity to topple this monstrous regime and enjoy the material benefits associated with no longer having to contain its terroristic aggression could be lost for another generation.

That would be tragic, and posterity will record that this moment was lost because America was engaged in another military exercise in the Caribbean.

There should be no mistake: The Chavista regime in Venezuela is a nagging thorn in America’s side. It’s aligned with anti-American powers, including Cuba, Russia, China, and, yes, Iran, and the regime serves as a crucial node of logistical and material support for America’s adversaries. Defanging that regime is in keeping with U.S. grand strategy. But is the gangster regime in Caracas a greater menace than the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism — a threat that absorbs untold U.S. resources and has drawn countless gallons of American blood over the decades? No.

The raid on Caracas that resulted in Nicolás Maduro’s capture was a tactical coup as well as a strategic success. Trump was almost certainly presented with options for a combined arms assault on Venezuela that would have entailed less risk to U.S. troops than the one he greenlit. Trump’s instincts were right. It was a bold and all but flawlessly executed operation that conveyed American resolve and demonstrated the fearsomeness of its capabilities to our enemies.

But history may not be so kind to that operation in retrospect if it is seen as a flight of fancy that precluded the provision of speedy assistance to Iran’s dissidents.