Collapsing empires are often presided over by emperors who are both evil and insane. We don’t know why this is so, it just is. But on the other hand, as the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Travelled, People of the Lie) observed, “It is well that evil is so stupid.” And we can be thankful that the entire Trump administration is so epically dumb that it cannot do all the damage to the world that it wants to do. Case in point: their Keystone Kops maneuvers to impose their imperial will on Venezuela.

Why Venezuela? Simple. The country sits astride the largest reserves of undeveloped crude oil in the world — an estimated 300 billion barrels. Yes, that’s more than Saudi Arabia claims, and almost 10 times estimated US reserves. So once again, God has played a cruel joke by putting our oil under someone else’s country, but there’s more about Venezuela that irritates the hell out of American imperialists.

For one thing, Venezuela is persistently, maddeningly socialist. Hugo Chavez, good friend to Fidel Castro, served as president for 14 years, during which time he won eight elections and referenda, won approval of a new constitution that guaranteed unprecedented rights and freedoms to the people (71% of the voters approved it) and became the most popular head of state in the Western Hemisphere if not the world.

After Chavez died in 2013 he was succeeded by Nicolas Maduro, who was re-elected in 2018. He ran against six opponents. Nine million people voted, six million for Maduro. American hawks insist the election was rigged, and that Maduro is not the legitimate winner. But former president Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Center has monitored 92 elections around the world, says flatly that “the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.” On the other hand, he says, the money-drenched American electoral system “is one of the worst.”

Thus for many years and many reasons, American imperialists have wanted to get their hands on Venezuela, if not by direct invasion then by installing an avatar to run the country according to America’s best interests. The current candidate for avatar-in-chief is Juan Guaido, beloved of the CIA but unknown to 80% of Venezuelans.

After years of refining its plans and spinning its stories, the empire struck (again — it tried to overthrow Chavez in 2002) at 0600 hours local time on April 30. Strutting at the head of a clutch of men in military uniforms, Guaido announced (via Tweet, that’s how we do it now) that the revolution was at hand: “At this moment I meet the main military units of our armed force initiating the final phase of Operation Freedom.” Guaido pretended to be speaking from the huge Carlota Air Force base, from which he and “the main military units of our armed force” would presumably march on the presidential palace and carry the day. (No doubt they were humming “Do You Hear the People Sing” from Les Mis.)

Excited war hawks in the United States jumped the shark: Senator Marco Rubio “announced” that the rebels had taken Carlota Air Force Base, and National Security Adviser John Bolton, whose principal duty in the Trump administration is to make Donald appear sane, frantically urged top Venezuelan government officials to betray President Maduro and join the “revolution”; and Secretary of State Mike “Get Back the Swagger” Pompeo announced that Maduro’s plane was idling on the tarmac, ready to carry him away to Cuba.

Alas, wishing does not make it so. Turns out Guaido was not announcing the coup from inside a conquered air force base, but from a highway overpass nearby. To be fair, you could see the base from there. And he was at the head, not of “the main military units of our armed force,” but a few dozen thugs carrying Colt M4 assault rifles, not the Kalashnikovs used by Venezuelan forces. When the would-be coup leaders marched 500 meters north of their highway bridge to Plaza Altamira, a square where they intended to rally the country to their cause, they attracted a few hundred people who listened briefly to Guaido and then went home. As did everybody else.

All this would be hilarious, if it were not for the hideous danger involved. These American idiots are casually striking kitchen matches in a powder magazine, which they share with not only the Venezuelan people (and armed forces, who are no slouches) but with Russian and Chinese imperial expeditions there to challenge America’s boarding-house reach.

So far, evil has proved too stupid to set off a regional war that Trump seems to think would get him re-elected in 2020 and some experts believe would be more expensive in blood and treasure than our war with Iraq. But you can’t fix stupid, and stupid is still in charge.

[See also: “The Tragedy of Venezuela is the Tragedy of the US,” by Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell.]