Editing Openai/695befc4-bd88-800c-8faa-3a817e670a41 (section)

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Not intelligence.
Not a battlefield trigger.
Not a diplomatic incident.

Those alone are insufficient.

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===== Specifically, one of the following would have occurred: =====
* A classified Congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) explicitly naming Maduro
* Or a novel executive legal theory treating Maduro as: - a non-sovereign criminal actor - outside head-of-state protections - analogous to a transnational terrorist leader

This is the hard gate. Without it, nothing else matters.

===== This is crucial. =====

The U.S. does not abduct heads of state — but it does capture:
* enemy commanders
* designated narco-terrorists
* actors reclassified as illegitimate sovereigns

The most likely trigger would be:

: 

That collapses decades of restraint in one move.

===== For this to happen, the following would already have been secured before Jan 4: =====
* DOJ sign-off
* DoD execution authority
* Intelligence community concurrence
* Quiet congressional leadership notification
* Assurances to markets and allies

In other words:
the institutional survivability test you cited would have flipped from “no” to “yes.”

That is the change.