Following the 2003 Iraq war, the words “regime change” became Washington’s foreign policy’s third rail. Barack Obama’s anti-war vote lifted him all the way to the White House. President Trump, ever the transactional, wondered why we didn’t at least take Iraq’s oil. So-called neo-conservatives are still struggling to justify the overthrow of Saddam. Isolationists in the MAGA fringes are using  the words as a curse. What, though, to do about Nicolas Maduro?

The Venezuelan caudillo and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, turned a once thriving oil-rich democracy into a basketcase dictatorship where residents can’t rub two pesos together and where even 2 million bolivars can buy nada. America’s foes — Communist China, Russia, the Islamic Republic of Iran — erect hostile bases less than 2,000 miles from Florida. The regime’s top source of income is narcotics that end up killing Americans.

Plus, too, Mr. Trump’s Secretary of State and national security adviser, Marco Rubio, is a foreign policy hawk whose Cuban roots help him better understand the region that President Monroe highlighted in his famous doctrine. Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua are the “enemies of humanity,” Mr. Rubio said at San Jose, Costa Rica, in February, when he chose the Western hemisphere for his first foreign trip.

Meanwhile, a democracy-oriented, America-friendly Venezuelan leader, Nobel laureate Maria Corina Machado, is waiting in the wings, hiding inside the United States embassy at Caracas for fear of Mr. Maduro’s thugs. Once it returns to democracy “Venezuela has the capacity to finance its own recovery,” Ms. Machado told the Wall Street Journal in an important recent interview. The stars for regime change, it seems, are aligned. 

No wonder the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, United States Ship Gerald Ford, is on its way to the Caribbean, where it will join an already impressive array of firepower. Thousands of Marines and sailors are at the ready, but is a ground invasion next, as Ms. Machado yearns and Mr. Maduro dreads? For now, the president says he merely wants to stop exports of hard core prisoners to America and end the flow of fentanyl.

It’s hard to deny, though, that one of the reasons for the American show of force is to instill fear in the Caracas regime, evidently with the hope that top players, most notably in the army, might finally turn on Mr. Maduro. If it was only about drugs, the Mexican cartels, which are responsible for most of the exports of fentanyl to el Norte, would get more military attention than their partners in Venezuela. Is Mr. Trump pulling an old-style hemispheric coup?

In the early days of the 20th century, American revolutions led our neighbors away from democracy. We backed caudillos like Haiti’s “Papa Doc” Duvalier, the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo, and Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza. “He’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our s.o.b.,” President Roosevelt said of Somoza. Reagan did better with Grenada, as did President Bush père in Panama. Ending the Hitler and Hirohito regimes made America a top global power. 

In the leadup to the Iraq war, columnist David Brooks made a joke about its advocates. Con, he wrote, is short for conservative and Neo is short for Jewish. The canard stuck. “I remember when people said that the president of the United States was gonna’ get us into a multi-hundred thousand regime change war for Israel,” Vice President Vance said this week. “I wonder if they step back and say, ‘You know what, we were wrong about that.’”

Well, Ms. Machado is Israel-friendly. Venezuela may be far away from the Mideast or from Jerusalem’s agenda. It is an American interest, though. The “increase in pressure and the escalation that’s taken place is the only way to force Maduro to understand that it’s time to go,” Ms. Machado tells Bloomberg. She clearly reckons that pressuring a thuggish American enemy would force Mr. Maduro to flee and, say, share in Moscow a room with Bashar Al-Assad.