Venezuela is another triumph for President Trump, and another defeat for Russia, Communist China, and Iran, and another opportunity for the Democrats to leap aboard a sinking political ship that will be avoided and despised by most Americans. Napoleon famously said that “The best marshals are the luckiest ones.” In military matters, perhaps the same rule applies to American presidents.

President Ford famously rescued the hijacked freighter Mayaguez in 1975, but he lost 37 men in a helicopter crash during the operation. The fiasco of Jimmy Carter‘s failed attempt to rescue the Tehran hostages just illustrated the apparent weakness at that point of the United States. The hostages were released as Ronald Reagan was taking the oath as successor to President Carter.

Presumably, we will learn one day what he promised to do to the Iranian Islamist regime if the hostages were not released by the time he became president. In these matters, Mr. Trump appears to be fortunate, as well as thorough. Both the attack that destroyed the Iranian nuclear research facilities in October and the removal to the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center from Caracas of the president of Venezuela and his wife on Saturday were flawlessly executed operations in which America did not sustain a single casualty.

The crisp professionalism with which American aircraft silenced ground fire and assisted in the invasion of the presidential residence, and the seizure and removal of its chief occupants make a remarkable and reassuring contrast with the sanguinary floundering of the Russian army in Ukraine.

Next Friday, Russia’s blunderbuss invasion of Ukraine, which was widely forecasted, including by the chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, the hapless General Mark Milley, to be wrapped up in Russian victory within a month, will exceed in length the epic Russo-German war of June 22,1941, to May 8,1945.

In that titanic struggle more than 35 million people died, and most of European Russia, eastern Germany, the Baltic non-Scandinavian states, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and much of Romania, Bulgaria, Greece. Yugoslavia, and Finland were smashed to rubble and scorched to ashes. The great Russian victories at Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin are widely regarded as the three greatest and bloodiest battles in the history of warfare, and Stalin’s Red Army broke the back of Hitler’s Wehrmacht.

The United States Delta and other elite forces’ surgical removal of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife from their residence and their abrupt transfer to prison at Brooklyn, was a work of military art. There is room for argument that America ventured into a grey zone of murky legality in apprehending and forcing into a criminal trial in the United States the president of a foreign country. Yet there is no argument that it was clearly illegal.

Mr. Maduro had emasculated Venezuelan democracy and his own legitimacy many years ago with rigged elections, redesignation of the legislature to an impotent forum, packing the supreme court, and intimidating the media of the country while repressing the population and driving more than 20 percent of Venezuelan, 7.7 million people, out of the country as refugees.

Mr. Maduro  has not been recognized by most of the Inter-American governments as the rightful head of Venezuela for years. His de facto opponent in the last election, Maria Machado, has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her services to democracy. Of course, the American federal justice system, with its 98 percent conviction rate, thanks to vast abuse of the plea bargain system, offers no assurance of a fair trial, but in this case, there is little doubt of the defendant’s guilt.     

The strategic implications of this action are positive and profound. It is a victory over the narco-gangsters, and it is a powerful blow against the Latin American left, which was to some extent legitimized by the late pope, Francis I. The elections in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, and Paraguay have all moved the continent toward the moderate right. The Chavez-Maduro regime of 27 years took Venezuela from its status as the most prosperous country in Latin America to one of the poorest.

Most importantly, America will quickly triple Venezuela’s oil production as Mr. has promised, by repairing it after decades of negligence since much of the nation’s oil industry infrastructure was stolen from the United States. This will enable America via Venezuela effectively to supply a substantial part of the oil needs of Europe and remove that continent as a customer of Russian oil, unintentionally funding the Russian war in Ukraine.

These developments in Caracas will provide instant momentum toward a more serious peacemaking posture in Ukraine by the Kremlin. It should also provide modest downward pressure on gasoline prices in America. It admirably reminds the world, that the era of President Obama’s self-erasing red lines and President Biden‘s partial approval of the Russian invasion of Ukraine are as much a part of the past as American military misadventures from the Bay of Pigs to the regime change in Iraq to the shambles in Afghanistan.

This technique that Mr. Trump has perfected of bringing international disagreements slowly to a boil, and then suddenly and completely resolving them with no American casualties, and none of the ghastly complications of the world’s policeman of yesteryear, has effectively eliminated American public toleration and foreign credulity over the argument that Mr. Trump is a reckless warmonger and a bully who will lead the country to humiliation and sorrow. The Monroe Doctrine was really enforced by the Royal Navy for its first forty years and opposed recolonization in Latin America, which had just expelled the Spanish. What we have now is Trump’s assertion that it will not be threatened in its hemisphere.

Mr. Trump is just finishing a year that in all of the 236 years of America’s presidency is rivaled in varied and comprehensive accomplishment only by the year beginning in March 1933 when Franklin D. Roosevelt assured his countrymen that “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”