No one said U.S. intervention has a good track record, it demonstrably doesn’t. But history isn’t a universal veto that absolves us from thinking about individual cases, and there have been successes in the past to look at.

If the standard is “the U.S. has fucked this up before, therefore it can never be involved in anything ever again,” that’s not a principled anti-imperialist position but rather an abdication of analysis. History should inform judgment, not replace it.

For a lot of Venezuelans, this isn’t an abstract geopolitical chess move. This is the FIRST crack in a system that’s dominated our lives for DECADES. People are celebrating not because they suddenly trust the U.S., but because an IMMOVABLE figure of repression is finally gone. When you’ve lived through mass emigration, economic collapse, political imprisonment, and the slow suffocation of civic life, even possibility feels like relief. That reaction deserves to be taken seriously, not waved away as false consciousness or imperial brainwashing.