Gonzalez, a harmless former diplomat whom the opposition put up as a candidate when its leader, Maria Corina Machado, was barred, was made to sign a document declaring Maduro the winner as a condition of being allowed to leave for Spain. After eight weeks of riots and repression, the socialist dictatorship looks secure.

At almost any previous moment in its history, the United States would have regarded such a situation in its own hemisphere as intolerable. The Monroe Doctrine had been foreshadowed by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, even by George Washington. The U.S. would keep out of European affairs but, in return, reserved a special interest in the Americas.

Policy toward the Old World veered between isolationism and interventionism. From World War II to the Iraq War, the U.S. was unusually interventionist, and it is arguably now returning to a more traditional approach.

But Latin America was always in a different category. Policymakers on both sides of the aisle understood that the U.S. could not be indifferent to regimes in their backyard that started wars, exported chaos, or provoked mass population movements.

As Theodore Roosevelt put it in 1904: “Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere, the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.’

Donald Trump, whom no one calls a neocon, recognized the force of that argument in 2017, when Venezuela exploded in violence following the dissolution of the National Assembly, where opposition parties had had a majority.

“I’m not going to rule out a military option for Venezuela,” he said. “This is our neighbor. We have troops all over the world in places that are very, very far away. Venezuela is not very far away, and the people are suffering and they are dying.”

Since 2017, Venezuela has slipped from crisis into cataclysm. Some 7.7 million Venezuelans, more than a quarter of the population, have been turned into refugees. Those who remain suffer from malnutrition and political repression.

The population displacement is reason enough for the U.S. to intervene. But there are other reasons, no less compelling. Venezuela has taken over from Cuba as the local proxy for Russia, Iran, and other enemy powers. It exports its ideology, funding subversive groups in neighboring democracies. And let’s not be coy about saying that with the Ukraine war pushing up energy prices, it is in everyone’s interest to see oil companies investing once again in a democratic Venezuela.

Opinion in Latin America is divided. Argentina, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, and Uruguay have recognized Gonzalez as the legitimate president, while the neighborhood delinquents — Cuba, Nicaragua, and Honduras — have recognized Maduro. Most countries, including those run by elected left-wing populists, such as Chile, Colombia, and Brazil, are hedging, pointing to irregularities in the poll and asking for more details. A decisive intervention now, while anger about the fraud and the arrests remains hot, would rally many of these countries to a new and democratic Venezuelan government.

But the U.S. appears reluctant to go beyond disapproving words. I say “appears” because it is conceivable that things are happening out of sight, that wavering generals are being sounded out, that the way is being prepared for a decisive putsch.

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It seems likelier, though, that the U.S., caught up in its presidential election, lacks the energy to open a new front. The Iraq debacle shifted the public mood, showing how high the cost of intervention could be. Yet there is also a cost to nonintervention. Some of the things that will follow from leaving the Bolivarian dictatorship in place include stronger migratory pressures on the southern border, a local base for Wagner, the destabilization of the region (Hugo Chavez picked fights with Colombia, Maduro has picked one with Guyana), and, not least, more of the anti-Americanism that spreads across Latin America whenever the yanquis look weak.

Not just across Latin America. What happens in Caracas is being keenly observed in Moscow and Beijing. There is, as I say, a cost to nonintervention.