Washington has spent over ten years being lectured by the same class of foreign policy caretakers who confuse timidity with wisdom. They warned that pressuring Maduro would spark chaos, that confronting a narcostate would destabilize the region, that any assertive move by the United States would summon ghosts from a century ago. They sold fear as strategy. They were wrong every time. And the loudest of them, Juan González, was a political adviser elevated into a national secu