At what point is it reasonable for an outside intervention?
Incidentally, "humanitarian aid" is how the person the USA convicted as a criminal - Elliot Abrams - sent weapons to contras in and out of Nicaragua.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/07/americas/venezuela-aid-blocke...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/with-...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-diplom...
Picking a 'side' here could not possibly be done in good faith. And thinking that armed citizens would improve matters is beyond absurd.
The point here is that there's a difference between destroying a location and controlling it. Of course an armed population is not going to stop aerial bombardment and mass destruction, but at the same time it's practically impossible to control a territory when there is a hostile armed population. And there are also morale issues. The government doesn't own the military. Even the military doesn't own the military. The military is made up of real people who, though trained to act as a group, are still independent actors. And when there is real resistance between a population and a government, you can't rely on the military to behave as you might like. Once again - Iraq and the general failure of the Iraq military to enforce western interests is a perfect example here.
Ultimately there is a reason that governments who expect there may be major resistance to future actions tend to work to ban gun ownership. Mao took control of the government by arming a population, and then went to every effort to disarm that very population before engaging in actions leading to the deaths of tens of millions. Shortly after the Bolsheviks overthrew czarist Russia through force of arms - they began working to seize arms from the people. Stalin was already well entrenched in the nation and his actions, once taking absolute control, would come to cost the lives of tens of millions. And perhaps the most well publicized example - Hitler seized all arms from Jews in 1938. The holocaust started 3 years later.
Venezuela banned gun ownership/sales in 2012. This was likely done at the behest of then vice president Maduro. Chavez was terminally ill and would die several months later. It was supposedly done to combat Venezuela's rising murder rate. This [1] is that murder rate. It didn't stop the criminals from having guns, but it did stop the citizenry. Despotism and gun control are invariably tightly linked. So, at the minimum, I think we would be in a different place today if Venezuela did have an armed citizenry. While it's impossible to predict exactly what effect this would have culminated in, I do not find it absurd to suggest it would have been better than the present.
[1] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/79/19...
"Linked" is a tabloid weasel word in this context. It may or may not be true that most despots favour gun control. I'm not familiar with the evidence in that case. But the reverse is not remotely true. Tight gun control has been hard fought for by citizenries of many democracies, and as with other rational policies (eg. real health care systems), once won, populations are loathe to allow corporate lobbies to remove it.
Armed citizenries have a measurably lesser chance of usefully opposing a government (and its military) than do unarmed ones (again, see Chenoweth and others). The post-revolutionary consequences of armed rebellions are invariably unending tales of multigenerational trauma and reciprocal violence.
For instance, I've never heard of Chenoweth. I'd assumed it was some significant revolutionary event I was not familiar with. Search results turn up an actress I've also never heard of. With some degree of effort, I surmise you are talking about some person who wrote some book. Why not share what you find to be the most compelling incident from the book? Major modern events every child is familiar with, from Vietnam to Iraq, demonstrate the power of an armed population. I'm sure your author must have covered this, so why not summarize their logic in practice, offer examples you found particularly compelling and representative, and ultimately perhaps persuade me to their merit?
Incidentally, the Venezuelan government is not refusing aid delivered by genuine humanitarian organizations such as the Red Cross - they were refusing "aid" delivered by agencies of the U.S. government, on behalf of an insurrectionist leader currently attempting a coup d'etat. This refused aid was later burned down by the paramilitary arm of the rebels.
Imagine that the Iranian government declared that it was recognizing a random U.S. congressman as the legitimate president and then demanded that the Revolutionary Guard be permitted to deliver aid to this congressman's new government. That's basically the situation
No, it isn't. The situation is that a despot is in control of Venezuela and it has failed in its contract with the people to provide the basic services required of government, so it is no longer a legitimate government regardless of your rationalizations of the situation.
If Trump refused to cede control, our inflation rate was over 100000%, and there were rampant food shortages and electricity failures then I hope there would be a revolution.
That's up to the people of Venezuela, who by and large have continued to stand by the Maduro government, which is why the opposition has resorted to attempting to incite a foreign invasion to seize power.
It's really pretty disgusting that you're so callously willing to condemn the Venezuelan people to the horrifying fates suffered by Iraqis and Libyans after the United States destroyed their countries. It's not your decision to make, it's not the decision of the United States government, and it's certainly not the decision of a cluster of Reagan-era war criminals with long histories of supporting right-wing Latin American death squads.