If you're really planning to do an Afghanistan-style commitment, and we know how that ended, right, that is an extraordinarily complex undertaking and one that requires a lot of planning and commitment.

Short of that, and I think we're probably planning to do something well short of that,

it's probably, you know, you're going to try to remove the government of Venezuela, walk away,

and just hope things work out with massive consequences for the people of Venezuela and the region.

Hello and welcome. Why is this happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

As I'm speaking to you, the U.S. has carried out multiple strikes on boats in the Caribbean off of Venezuela, killing dozens of people.

We don't know who these people are, their names, whether or not they were even trafficking the drugs they've been accused of.

But it's, as far as I can tell, an unprecedented set of military strikes against civilian targets undertaken by the Trump administration with very, very, very little legal rationale.

But it's also not just a one-off. It's part of a larger military buildup against Venezuela.

We have moved a whole bunch of naval assets into the waters

around Venezuela. We've been carrying out these strikes. We have, according to reporting,

and then the president himself saying it, authorized CIA covert activities. The lead opposition

leader in Venezuela who recently won the Nobel Prize has said she wants

U.S. military intervention and has dedicated the prize to Trump. There are lots of people

obviously pushing for basically a war, a U.S. war of regime change in Venezuela. This is a pretty

sharp turn for U.S. policy in Venezuela. This was something that the first Trump

administration flirted with a bit. John Bolton very famously came out to an event where he had a legal

pad and scratched on the back of it with some number of troops that would be necessary for Venezuela,

and people didn't know if it was a sci-op. He intentionally was showing this to the cameras or not.

And the U.S. has had a very fraught history of Venezuela, part of which we'll get into today.

But on the eve of what looks to me like the preparations for a war that I got to say, I think there is zero domestic political appetite for.

I mean, truly zero. If you were like, cross-section

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