INTERNACIONAL
Iran poses a far more dangerous military test for the US than Venezuela, experts warn
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Fresh off a successful operation in Venezuela, the U.S. is weighing its options as Iran’s leadership launches a violent crackdown on anti-government protesters — raising questions about whether similar military pressure could be applied to Tehran, Iran.
In Caracas, Venezuela, U.S. special operators moved quickly to capture Nicolás Maduro. In Tehran, Iran, any comparable effort would unfold against a state with greater military depth and the ability to strike back well beyond its borders.
«Thinking of this as an operation, as in the case of Venezuela or the nuclear program, is the wrong framing,» Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Fox News Digital. «This has to be seen as a campaign.»
Iran is a larger, more capable military power than Venezuela, with security forces designed to protect the regime from both foreign attack and internal unrest. Power is distributed across clerical institutions, security services and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — a structure built to survive the loss of individual leaders rather than collapse with them.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei faces mass protests in Iran. (Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)
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«Musical chairs at the top is highly unlikely to work in Iran,» Taleblu said.
He pointed to the central role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which he described as «the tip of the spear of the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism,» warning that removing a single figure would leave a hardened security apparatus intact — and potentially more dangerous.
That structure is backed by a military capability Venezuela never possessed: a resilient missile force that gives Iran credible options for retaliation if it believes the regime itself is under threat.
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«The retaliatory capability of the Islamic Republic is still fairly intact, which is their missile program,» Taleblu said.
During heavy Israeli strikes in the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, Iran’s missile force was degraded but not eliminated. While air defenses and launch infrastructure were damaged, Tehran, Iran, retains a significant inventory of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles and the ability to disperse and fire them from mobile launchers.
Analysts say the conflict reinforced Iran’s reliance on missiles as its primary deterrent, even as it accepted that air defenses could be penetrated. During the war, Israel degraded Iran’s air defenses while the U.S. moved in to strike its nuclear facilities.
Iran’s armed forces also are far larger than Venezuela’s, with nearly 1 million active and reserve personnel compared with roughly 120,000 troops in Venezuela — a disparity that underscores the very different military environments U.S. planners would face.
Iran’s antagonism toward the United States is rooted in the ideology of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which cast opposition to Western influence — particularly the U.S. and Israel — as a core principle of the state. Venezuela’s clashes with Washington, by contrast, largely have been driven by political power, sanctions and control over oil revenues, rather than a revolutionary ideology aimed at opposing Western society itself.
Iranians have taken to the streets to demonstrate against the regime across the country. (UGC via AP)
In Venezuela, Trump administration officials framed the operation not as regime change, but as a limited action to advance U.S. interests — prosecuting Maduro on drug trafficking charges and securing leverage over the country’s oil sector. After Maduro’s capture, Trump allowed Vice President Delcy Rodríguez to assume power on an interim basis and expressed doubt that opposition leader María Machado had sufficient internal support to govern.
In Iran, by contrast, any military action would be interpreted as a direct challenge to the regime itself.
Unlike Venezuela, where the state apparatus remained intact after Maduro’s removal, targeting Iran’s leadership risks expanding the mission from a narrow strike into a broader campaign against the regime’s security forces.
«You could conduct an attack against the leadership, including the supreme leader, but that raises lots of questions about who comes next,» Seth Jones, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former Pentagon official, told Fox News Digital.
«Is it Khamenei’s son? Is it Sadegh Larijani? Is it Hassan Khameini?» Jones said, referring to figures often discussed as potential successors. «Or do you start to look at other options?»
Nicolás Maduro is seen in handcuffs after landing at a Manhattan helipad, escorted by heavily armed federal agents. (XNY/Star Max/GC Images via Getty Images)
That uncertainty, Jones said, is what turns a leadership-targeting strike into a far broader and riskier proposition.
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«The more this starts to be not just the removal of a leader, but regime change, the more it becomes an expansive targeting problem,» Jones said.
Jones added that the core challenge for U.S. planners is not whether military force could be used, but what political objective it would serve.
«The big question then becomes what’s the objective — not just militarily, but what’s the political objective in Iran and how does that translate into what types of military resources you need?» he said.
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Such an expansion, Jones warned, would raise the risk of a prolonged and destabilizing conflict in a country of Iran’s size and complexity.
«The more you start looking at regime change and using military force for that, the more messy the situation in Iran could get,» Jones said. «It’s really hard to social engineer from the outside.»
iran,venezuelan political crisis,ali khamenei,nicolas maduro
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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., condemned President Donald Trump’s plan to deploy U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to U.S. airports on Sunday.
Schumer made the comments while speaking on the Senate floor Sunday, saying Trump’s decision is «impulsive» and could make the situation at airports worse.
«Today, Donald Trump and [Tom] Homan are saying they will deploy ICE agents to airports starting on Monday. This is really disturbing. ICE agents who are untrained and have caused problems everywhere they’ve gone lurking at our airports. That’s asking for trouble, and it will certainly make the chaos at the airports even worse,» Schumer said.
«No one has any faith in ICE agents. They haven’t received training. They don’t know what it is to be a TSA person and do what you need to do,» he continued. «And the real problem here is they have no plan for using these ICE agents. Trump says, send them there. They send them there. And Homan says they’re still drawing up plans with less than a day’s notice. What is this? We know what it is. It’s another impulsive action by Donald Trump.»
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President Donald Trump and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are clashing over funding plans for the DHS. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images; Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
«Some idea pops into his head and he announces it. And then the people working for him, a few of whom do have some degree of talent and ability. Not many underlings. They have to rush to try and implement what they know is an idiotic plan,» he said.
The ICE deployment is Trump’s latest move in the battle with Democrats over funding for the Department of Homeland Security.
Schumer also used his time on the Senate floor Sunday to criticize Trump’s actions in Iran.
«Donald Trump said, ‘you know, I may have a plan or I may not for a war,’» Schumer said. «There’s people’s lives are at stake. Billions are being spent on an almost daily basis. And he says, you know, ‘I may have a plan or I may not.’ These are the words of the commander in chief in the middle of a war involving one of the most dangerous regimes on Earth. ‘I have a plan, or I may not.’»
«That’s unhinged and dangerous. Lives are on the line. The president says he may not even have a plan. Tens of billions are being wasted. No plan. Troops being killed and injured, no plan. Civilians being killed and injured. No plan. Gasoline costs $3.94 a gallon on average. And Trump, ‘I have no plan’,» Schumer said.
Meanwhile, Schumer and his allies have refused to approve DHS funding without reforms to immigration enforcement.
TSA agents across the country have gone more than a month without a paycheck, with no clear end in sight.
Travelers wait in line at a TSA checkpoint at William P. Hobby Airport in Houston, Texas, on March 9, 2026. (Mark Felix/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Trump first threatened to deploy ICE to airports on Saturday, demanding that Democrats «immediately sign an agreement» to fund DHS.
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Airports across the country have reported huge numbers of employees calling out sick or not showing up for work. More than 400 TSA employees have quit their jobs.
TSA Agents scan luggage at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Virginia. (Valerie Plesch/Getty Images)
«On Monday, ICE will be going to airports to help our wonderful TSA Agents who have stayed on the job despite the fact that the Radical Left Democrats, who are only focused on protecting hard-line criminals who have entered our Country illegally, are endangering the USA by holding back the money that was long ago agreed to with signed and sealed contracts, and all,» Trump wrote Sunday on Truth Social.
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Trump also predicted blowback from Democrats, saying they would complain «no matter how great a job ICE does.»
chuck schumer,donald trump,politics,travel
Eugenio Dittborn, figura central del arte contemporáneo en Chile, presenta por primera vez en la Argentina una muestra individual que reúne obras de distintas etapas de su carrera y expone su particular abordaje conceptual sobre la representación y circulación de las imágenes.
A diferencia de muestras retrospectivas convencionales, Historias del rostro, en el Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, con curaduría de Justo Pastor Mellado, presenta solo dos piezas principales y un conjunto de documentos históricos fundamentales dentro del recorrido del artista. Este enfoque, según detalló Mellado, busca demostrar “la potencia conceptual del universo creativo” de Dittborn, utilizando recursos mínimos pero de gran densidad visual y simbólica.
La obra destacada de esta exposición, según Mellado, es “XXII Historia del rostro”, una pintura aeropostal realizada en 1998 que condensa veinte retratos impresos, conformando lo que el curador describe como “una pequeña enciclopedia de la representación del rostro”.
En la pieza convergen dibujos infantiles, caricaturas, retratos hablados, imágenes de personas con afecciones mentales, fichas de identificación policial y fotografías de pobladores originarios tomadas de un álbum etnográfico.
Esta obra, además de su contenido visual, integra el procedimiento singular que distingue al artista desde los años ochenta: la pintura se pliega, se envía en un sobre a diferentes destinos internacionales y se exhibe junto con su envoltura, cuestionando los sistemas tradicionales de circulación y legitimación de las obras de arte.
Las pinturas aeropostales constituyen una estrategia desarrollada por Dittborn a inicios de la década de 1980. A través de este formato, el artista no solo introduce métodos de experimentación gráfica y crítica visual, sino que también propone un sistema alternativo de circulación que desafía la noción de obra única y su permanencia física en el espacio expositivo. Cada pintura, compuesta por iconografías e inscripciones heterogéneas, es doblada y enviada físicamente a distintos países, donde se despliega temporalmente junto al sobre que la contiene.
La otra producción principal de la muestra, creada en 2022, es “Todas las caras del rostro”, que reúne diez dibujos en carboncillo sobre sudarios. Mellado describe que estos rostros aparecen “con sus cuencas vacías, mostrándonos con descaro sus dientes apretados, sus cráneos pelados o adornados con rizos, sus narices puntiagudas dispuestas sobre patrones de damero vistos en escorzo, combinando tramas que delatan la textura de la tela”. De este modo, la obra dialoga directamente con los materiales y gestos gráficos constitutivos de la trayectoria de Dittborn.
El recorrido de la exposición se completa con dos publicaciones producidas por Eugenio Dittborn entre 1976 y 1979, que según el director del Bellas Artes, Andrés Duprat, “se convirtieron en acontecimientos de la historia editorial y visual chilena”. Para Duprat, el gran mérito de la curaduría radica en que, mediante una selección precisa y acotada, se “logra reactualizar la escena de origen del artista, y subraya la persistencia de la línea como principio organizador de su práctica”.
Eugenio Dittborn nació en Santiago de Chile en 1943 y cuenta con obras en instituciones internacionales de relevancia. Esta exposición en el Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, que cuenta con el apoyo del Centro Cultural Matta de la Embajada de Chile, constituye la primera oportunidad de observar de cerca algunos de los núcleos conceptuales y formales de su producción, a partir de piezas que exploran tanto la representación del rostro como los circuitos que permiten a la imagen persistir y desplazarse en el tiempo y el espacio.
*“Eugenio Dittborn. Historias del rostro” podrá visitarse hasta el 31 de mayo en la sala 33 del primer piso del Museo, de martes a viernes, de 11 a 19.30 (último ingreso), y los sábados y domingos, de 10 a 19.30.
Bellas Artes,Eugenio Dittborn
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