The Pottery Barn Rule.

The late, great U.S. secretary of state and General Colin Powell called it that. It was the Summer of 2002, and President George W. Bush was contemplating invading Iraq and removing the dictator Saddam Hussein from power.

“You break it, you buy it,” Powell allegedly told Bush. “You break it, you remake it.”

History will of course show that Bush went ahead anyway – and the cost in American and Iraqi lives was steep. A generation later, Iraq remains a cesspool of conflict, corruption and chaos.

Getting into armed conflict, getting into war, is always easy. The getting out part? Not so much.

The Pottery Barn Rule will accordingly be on the minds of many in Washington and world capitals this weekend as tall foreheads contemplate what comes next for Venezuela.

Does Donald Trump permit the oil-rich South American country to descend into sectarian turmoil, as in Libya, when Colonel Mu’ammar Qaddafi was removed from power in 2011?

Or, is a Manuel Noriega outcome possible? In that case, the U.S. used force to capture the drug-dealing Panamanian strongman in 1990, and the country entered into a period of relative stability and prosperity. (And, ironically, Noriega was deposed on the very same day – Jan. 3 – that Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro was, 36 years later.)

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