Venezuela: No relief on the horizon

Jackson Diehl writes on Venezuela and the eclipse of American leadership (emphasis added)

Once again observers were predicting that Maduro’s days in power were numbered — that he would be forced to agree to the opposition’s demand for elections, or a group of patriotic generals would remove him in the name of restoring order. Perhaps this time they will finally be right. But Venezuela has proved remarkably resistant to the fail-safe mechanisms that usually break the fall of a middle-income country. Instead, it is looking more and more like the Zimbabwe of the Western hemisphere — a depraved dictatorship where no amount of misery seems sufficient to bring about a breaking point

Read the whole thing.