The Dog Caught The Car

You ever watch a dog chase a car?

That dog is committed. He’s barking, running full speed, absolutely convinced that catching that Buick is the most important thing he will ever accomplish.

But nobody ever asks the obvious question:

What the hell is the dog going to do if he catches the car?

And sometimes I think that’s the problem with regime change.

We become incredibly focused on getting rid of the guy in charge. Saddam Hussein has to go. The Taliban has to go. Maduro has to go. Whoever the villain of the moment happens to be—we focus enormous energy on removing that person.

And then one day we succeed.

Great.

Now what?

Because destroying a government and building a country are two completely different things.

Look at Iraq.

In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s government collapsed remarkably quickly. From a purely military standpoint, that initial operation demonstrated the enormous power of the United States military.

But Saddam Hussein wasn’t Iraq.

Underneath him were ministries, police, an army, courts, bureaucracies, tribal relationships, religious divisions and millions of ordinary people who still needed electricity, water, food, jobs and security the morning after the government fell.

You can knock the king off the chessboard.

The other pieces don’t disappear.

And that’s where things became extraordinarily complicated.

Occupation. Insurgency. Abu Ghraib. Sectarian warfare. Al Qaeda in Iraq. Iranian influence. American withdrawal. Then ISIS takes huge portions of the country, and American forces come back.

And now, more than twenty years after the invasion, the last American forces are leaving again.

Think about that.

The dog caught the car in 2003.

We’re still figuring out what happened afterward in 2026.

And that’s why Venezuela should make us think.

Taking out an authoritarian leader doesn’t automatically create democracy. Democracy isn’t something you drop out of an airplane in a cardboard box.

You’ve still got institutions.

You’ve got courts.

You’ve got police.

You’ve got an economy.

You’ve got political opposition.

You’ve got people who supported the old government.

You’ve got people who suffered under it.

You’ve got neighboring countries with their own interests.

And you’ve got millions of ordinary citizens who don’t wake up every morning thinking about geopolitics.

They’re thinking:

Can I feed my family?

Is my neighborhood safe?

Do I have a job?

Can I take my kid to the doctor?

That’s government at the human level.

And here’s where I think America repeatedly gets into trouble.

We’re extraordinarily good at thinking about Day One.

We’re not always nearly as good at thinking about Day 1,001.

The television cameras show the dictator falling. Everybody celebrates. Mission accomplished.

But history doesn’t end when the cameras leave.

That’s when the difficult part begins.

Because there’s another danger.

Nature hates a vacuum, and politics does too.

If you remove a powerful government and don’t have legitimate institutions capable of replacing it, somebody fills that space.

Maybe it’s another authoritarian leader.

Maybe it’s militias.

Maybe it’s religious extremists.

Maybe it’s organized crime.

Maybe it’s a neighboring country.

Or maybe several of them start fighting over it.

That’s one of the lessons Iraq should have burned permanently into American foreign policy:

Before you remove something, you better understand what’s going to replace it.

And that doesn’t mean dictators should simply be left alone. Sometimes governments commit terrible abuses, and countries have legitimate security interests.

But military capability and political wisdom aren’t the same thing.

The question shouldn’t simply be:

Can we remove this government?

The questions should also be:

What happens the next morning?

Who governs?

Who provides security?

Who has legitimacy?

When are elections?

Who protects minorities?

What happens to the old military?

What happens to the bureaucracy?

How do you prevent revenge killings?

How do you keep the economy functioning?

And most importantly:

When do we leave?

Because if you can’t answer those questions before you go in, you’re essentially saying:

“We’ll figure it out when we get there.”

And history has shown us how expensive that sentence can become.

Thousands of American lives.

Far larger numbers of Iraqi lives.

Trillions of dollars.

And more than two decades of consequences.

So when I look at Venezuela, Iraq is exactly what I want us to remember.

Not because Venezuela is Iraq. They’re radically different countries with different histories, institutions and circumstances.

But because the fundamental question is the same.

Removing a leader is an event.

Building a stable political system is a process.

One might take days.

The other might take a generation.

So maybe the most important foreign-policy question America can ask isn’t:

How do we catch the car?

Maybe it’s:

What the hell are we going to do once we’ve caught it?