Adam Tooze: How special forces became modern warfare’s go-to solution

Adam Tooze: Pearl-clutching about the Venezuela operation ignores the history of US military strategy.

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Whatever its ultimate motive, this is no throwback to gunboat diplomacy or a rupture with familiar norms. We have seen this before. The template for the Maduro operation was the Obama administration’s killing of Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden, of course, was not a head of state. In that regard the closer parallel is to the toppling of Libyan leader Muammer Gaddafi in 2011. Compared to those operations, the capture of Maduro was smoothly executed and almost quaintly legalistic…