WASHINGTON, D.C. May 11 (DPI) – The US media has gone on for years now about the “imminent collapse” of Venezuela – a country of 31 million controlled now by Havana and Moscow, and its regime brazenly indifferent to human life. But the collapse – in practical terms at least – has long since taken place, as ordinary people in Caracas are forced to scavenge in dumpsters and sick people die for lack of medicine.

Just when the humanitarian crisis can’t get worse, it does, and thousands continue to flee each week to neighboring Brasil and Colombia.

Few nations in the Western Hemisphere match the strategic importance of Venezuela, a country with the world’s largest oil reserves and once a reliable supplier of oil to the US.  The country’s oil output keeps falling, due largely to mismanagement and corruption.

Now, slowly, the public dialogue in the US is beginning to shift: After years of hand-wringing and moralizing from DC foreign-affairs experts – most of them Left-leaning, and some of those once sympathetic to Chavismo – the tone is changing. The New York Times, of all publications, recently gave space to one expert – former Bush era diplomat Roger Noriega – who declared that the US is “out of good options” in dealing with Venezuela and we in the US should encourage a coup by the nation’s military.  He wrote:

If the military were to depose Mr. Maduro tomorrow, the Venezuelan people would likely regard it as a rescue mission more than a coup. Even within the military, regime insiders have told me, no more than 20 percent of the soldiers, whose own families are suffering from hunger and repression, would defend Mr. Maduro.

That last sentence suggests some new thinking: That the idea of military intervention – for stem the humanitarian crisis there – is no longer such a dangerous idea, and in fact, doing nothing may be more dangerous for millions of Venezuelans.

The idea of military intervention has been around for a while, but it is clearly gaining traction. A Harvard-based Venezuelan intellectual wrote in the Miami Herald in January that pro-Democracy forces in Venezuela should seek outside military help.