The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the Islamic Republic of Iran may seem an unlikely pairing in the effort to make sense of the world at the moment, but the dramatic events unfolding in these two decrepit kleptocracies aren’t just coinciding in an inconvenient competition for front-page headlines.
It’s all part of the same story. If you get it wrong you’ll end up badly misreading U.S. President Donald Trump’s theatrically brilliant exfiltration of the Venezuelan caudillo Nicolás Maduro over the weekend. You might even conclude that the United States is truly “locked and loaded and ready to go,” as Trump himself put it last Friday, to defend Iran’s protesters against the Khomeinist regime’s guns.
