trying to relive the glory days of the Cold War where you could coup any country with a well-oiled covert operations machine. But all those people who made up that machine are too old or dead. And the younger generation that came after them are sicko freaks who shouldn’t run a bath without the coast-guard standing by. They’re not as sharp or competent so when they tried to re-create the magic, it failed.

I don't know if that's right, specifically the part about the old machine being made of more competent people. Say we transplant Venezuela and all its people back into the 1960s with all its institutions and general popular awareness of the full history of US intervention in Latin America intact, would the old Cold Warriors have managed to pull of the coup successfully, or would it have run up against the same issue that a large chunk of Venezuela's populace is armed, militant, and ready to defend against right wing paramilitary violence? Would their attempts at smuggling weapons into the country have succeeded against a state and public that's aware of the tricks they've historically used to do so? Would they have been more successful in compromising the military leadership that played along with the recent coup plots just long enough to get them to tip their hand?

Maybe the same people who built that machine would be better at innovating its approaches to overcome a target that's aware of its tricks, but at the same time the primary way that US intelligence found its successes in the Cold War was just throwing piles of money at the worst people they could find, running an almost unlimited budget when it came to buying fancy equipment or undertaking ridiculous projects, and building a reputation as generous towards and protective of valuable defectors.

Like their successors are clearly as gormless as they are monstrous, but I'd argue that their targets are also generally more aware and guarded against their methods now while the old standby move of "just roll over them with air superiority and an occupation" is no longer available thanks to modern AA defenses, the institutional rot of the MIC, and a general reluctance to throw American soldiers into a meatgrinder on the pretext of "lmao I just feel like it" since that's generally become an unpopular move that would endanger their stable base of power domestically.