Candidate of Peace!
By 
Awfully interesting report on Trump’s effort to overthrow Venezuela’s government…
Meanwhile, fractures within the administration deepened. Even by the hawkish standards of the Trump administration, the Bolton camp’s Venezuela strategy was considered aggressive. At one point, officials created a working group focused on Venezuela. It included the CIA and the State, Treasury, and Defense departments. One group it—intentionally—did not include: Bolton and his allies on the National Security Council, says a former State Department official. The CIA “sort of thought they were dealing with Oliver North,” another official says, adding that the spy agency “reacted in an equal and opposite direction” to what they felt was Bolton’s aggressiveness by trying to avoid any operations that could cause blowback for the CIA.
Schisms even opened between administration hawks. By March 2019, the security situation in Venezuela was spiraling ever-downward. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo decided to shut down the US embassy in Caracas that same month. Some administration officials believed Pompeo was primarily worried about the political fallout of presiding over “another Benghazi”—the 2012 attack by Islamist militants on US government facilities in Libya that killed four Americans, including the ambassador. “Pompeo made part of his career criticizing the Obama administration on the failures in Benghazi,” Bolton says. “And I do think that was kind of etched in his mind.” Pompeo did not respond to requests for comment.
Yet other former officials emphasized the existence of specific, credible threats of violence by the Maduro regime to embassy personnel, including to the top US diplomat in the country. (“It definitely was not a sort of middle-of-the-night Pompeo panic,” says a former State Department official. “There were direct threats that had been made.”)
It’s safe to discount the intellectual honesty of anyone claiming that Trump represents a non-interventionist mindset or is in any way the candidate more likely to lead to reduce international conflict.