The guillotine rose to fame during the French Revolution. Although Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin did not invent the machine, he championed it as a more humane alternative to the brutal, common methods of his time, like the axe or sword, which did not always cause immediate death (woof). Sometimes the executioner missed, or sometimes he didn’t swing hard enough. You get the idea…

In a society as rigidly stratified as pre-revolutionary France, not only were clothes, food, and behaviors often dictated by class, but so was death. Beheading was generally reserved for the rich, while poor were hanged - a slower and far uglier business that could take a while, especially before execution became… refined. According to the One Source of All Truth, Wikipedia, punishments also included burning at the stake, the breaking wheel, boiling, and dismemberment. Guillotin reasoned that if executions could not be abolished, they could at least be made more humane.

But let me clue you in on the obvious: decapitation is still death.

What the U.S. just carried out against Nicolás Maduro resembles decapitation at a geopolitical scale - you remove the head and then the body collapses, or so the thinking goes.

I have no idea how this will develop. Nobody does. While the U.S. has helped remove heads of state before, this operation was novel in both its form and context, which means the aftermath may be equally unique.

In other words, decapitation leads to varied results. Sometimes, you get complete bodily decay, and fast. Other times, you get something else.

We can look at a few examples from history. Everyone knows what happened in Iraq in 2003. The U.S. invaded and overthrew the dictator Saddam Hussein. Not as well-versed in state-building as invasion, the U.S. withdrew, and the country descended into sectarian violence, paving the way for ISIS to emerge.

In 2011, in Libya, the U.S. supported rebel forces to take down the dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The country descended into years-long civil war, and they have yet to fully recover.

However, in 1989, under George H.W. Bush, the U.S. executed Operation Just Cause, in which the U.S. invaded Panama and arrested their dictator, Manuel Noriega. Panama stabilized relatively quickly afterwards, for a variety of reasons.

It’s impossible to do apples-to-apples, but you may be surprised by how this turns out.

Rome’s golden years arguably followed the assassination of their dictator, Julius Caesar.

The Catholic Church burned the heretic Jan Hus at the stake in the 1400s, only for the true shockwave to manifest nearly one hundred years later in the form of Martin Luther and the Reformation.

In the Game of Thrones series, it’s not about who becomes king. That’s not important. Kings are replaceable. Holding the crown is a hollow, symbolic power. What really matters is understanding who are the ones wielding real power and successful at playing the game.

CEOs come and go - some companies are worse off for it, while other companies thrive.

The key is understanding where power lies and how it's distributed. Some entities are nothing without their leader, like a cult. Others are hydras - you cut one head off and two more spawn in its place. Then others are like schools of fish: large and unified at first glance, but powerless and hopelessly independent upon closer examination.

How nations are run is a complex thing, obviously, but there’s a seductive appeal of simple solutions to complex problems. Decapitation feels like a solution. It’s clean, decisive, final, especially when confronting complex systems like nation-states.

French historian Alexis de Tocqueville spent years trying to understand how the French Revolution ended the way it did. He grimly concluded that, in the revolutionaries’ passion to create a new world, their violence burned down the whole system. What rose from the ashes was not a shining phoenix, but a horrific monster of chaos - Emperor Napoleon, whose wars of conquest inflicted even greater destruction upon France and Europe.

In Venezuela’s case, the cure may be worse than the disease. Venezuela has massive oil reserves and a hopeful people, but it’s hollowed out by criminal networks, drained of domestic talent, and more vulnerable than ever to competing foreign interests.

It’s impossible to predict outcomes, especially in geopolitics.

Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin learned this the hard way: “In November 1795, a letter was published in the Moniteur claiming that the guillotine's victims survived for several minutes after beheading. Guillotin was shocked, and for the remainder of his life, he deeply regretted that the machine was named after him. His continued efforts to abolish the death penalty were hampered by the widespread belief that as the very person who proposed using a decapitation machine, he must surely be in favour of it.”

History is full of perverse and unintended consequences because, as historian Steve Kotkin reminds us, "causality is not linear. Intentions are insufficient."

Decapitation, whether literal or metaphorical, promises something it can’t cash in - simplicity. But the body always squirms after it loses its head, even for a second, so what squirms loose now that Maduro is gone?

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

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