For the first two years of his administration, Donald Trump couldn’t seem to decide what country he wanted to invade and overthrow more. One day Iran was in the crosshairs, the next North Korea, then Syria or China or some other country that had triggered Trump’s rage.

So far, other than a missile strike on Syria in 2017, Trump hasn’t acted on any of his foreign policy temper tantrums. But for some time now, the president’s obsession with imperial warmongering has focused on toppling the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro, whether via economic pressure, a U.S.-sponsored military coup, or provoking a joint invasion by Brazil—led by that great democrat Jair Bolsonaro—and Colombia, where “democracy” has been built on mass graves for the past half-century.

In his quest, Trump is clearly being led by the nose of the Troika of Terror: Florida Senator Marco Rubio, U.S. national security adviser John Bolton, and the Trump administration’s special envoy for Venezuela, Elliott Abrams. (Abrams’s sterling successes have included false testimony over the Iran-Contra affair, propping up murderous regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador, and helping to promote the Iraq War.) In recent weeks, both Rubio and the Miami Herald have been predicting Maduro’s impending demise.

I don’t like Maduro much. But for now, I think those predictions are wrong: Maduro is pretty well ensconced in his presidential post. And any attempt to remove him would be foolish.

In early 1989, the U.S.- backed neoliberal government of Carlos Andrés Pérez, or CAP as he was known, ordered out army troops to shoot demonstrators who took to the streets against an IMF austerity plan. Hundreds or even thousands of people were slaughtered, with the exact number proving impossible to determine since many were dumped in clandestine graves.