Richard Hanania is president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, which funds policy research. His Substack newsletter is at richardhanania.com.
The Trump administration appears to be pushing for regime change in Venezuela. There have been reports of negotiations aimed at getting President Nicolás Maduro to step down, and the United States has made provocative military moves in the Caribbean, namely air strikes against alleged drug traffickers from the country and this week’s seizure of an oil tanker. The idea of potentially removing a government by force has naturally invoked parallels to Iraq. One might also make comparisons to Libya and Afghanistan, which both involved the United States overthrowing a dictatorship only to bring about years of civil war.
It is often said that generals are always fighting the last war. We are prone to take principles learned from past mistakes and apply them in the present, without realizing that we are facing a different set of circumstances. In this case, the possibility of regime change in Venezuela should not be understood as a reprise of what happened during the war on terror and the Arab Spring. Instead of looking at recent Middle East wars, we might learn better lessons from two invasions in the Western Hemisphere in recent decades that have worked out well.
To understand why Venezuela is nothing like Iraq or Libya, we simply need to compare the political situation in each country. The two Middle Eastern states had parliaments at one point but nothing resembling deep democratic traditions. They were in each case a dictatorship under the absolute control of one man who ruthlessly eliminated any potential challengers. Both Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gadhafi justified their rule in part by presenting themselves as bulwarks against Islamic extremism, which indeed flared up in both countries after they were gone. In Afghanistan, the Taliban were an authoritarian Islamist movement, which the United States spent two decades fighting only for them to end up ruling Afghanistan again. We are also living in a period in which transnational jihadism draws fighters from across the world into global hot spots, making it difficult if not impossible for any force to establish a new order.
Venezuela, by contrast, was considered a flawed democracy until the late 1990s. It then shifted to what political scientists called “competitive authoritarianism,” in which elections were somewhat competitive, but the playing field became heavily skewed by state control of media, institutions, and resources. Not until Maduro did we see a full-fledged dictatorship. The watershed moment was in 2017, when the Supreme Court, stacked with Maduro loyalists, stripped the opposition-controlled National Assembly of its powers. Nonetheless, elections still take place, and it is widely believed that Maduro lost to challenger Edmundo González in the 2024 presidential race. Afterward, protests that killed dozens and led to thousands of arrests erupted across the country. Such things would have been impossible to imagine in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya before American intervention. The Venezuelan people have real democratic institutions, albeit now heavily eroded ones, and a history of free and fair elections and protections for civil liberties like freedom of speech. They have also shown a willingness to mobilize against their current regime and fight for something better.
In Venezuela, there is no reason to worry about Islamic extremists acting as spoilers. Conflicts are much harder to resolve when religious fundamentalism heavily influences politics. Venezuelans have nothing like the Sunni-Shia split of Iraq, nor is any significant segment of the population willing to fight and die for the promise of a better afterlife. This means we can expect post-Maduro politics in Venezuela to be less complicated and violent than post-Saddam Iraq.
For all these reasons, Middle East regime change wars are not analogous to the current situation in Venezuela.
Are there positive examples we can point to instead? Although they are little remembered today, the United States engaged in two regime change wars in Latin America in the 1980s that worked out well for both American interests and the well-being of the people of that country.
The first was the 1983 invasion of Grenada. A Marxist military junta had seized power on the Caribbean island in 1979, aligned itself with Cuba and the Soviet bloc, and then imploded in an internal power struggle in October 1983, when the prime minister and several of his supporters were executed. The United States, together with a coalition of nearby Caribbean democracies, launched Operation Urgent Fury on Oct. 25, 1983, quickly overthrowing the junta and restoring the authority of the British-appointed governor general. In December 1984, Grenada held its first competitive election since the 1970s, returning a civilian government to power. Since that time, Grenada has remained a stable democracy, and it is now an upper-middle-income tourism and services economy, open to global capitalism rather than closed off and suffering like Cuba, the old Marxist regime’s ally.
Similar successes arose from the American invasion of Panama. By the late 1980s, General Manuel Noriega had become a classic personalist dictator: He controlled the security forces, annulled the 1989 election that his opposition had clearly won, and was deeply implicated in drug trafficking and money laundering, prompting US grand jury indictments. This led to Operation Just Cause, which ended with the United States destroying Noriega’s military forces and flying him to Miami to face charges. Unlike the open-ended occupations in Iraq or Afghanistan, the post-invasion transition in Panama was relatively quick and left real authority in the hands of local elites who already had electoral legitimacy. Economically, Panama has done exceptionally well: Its GDP per capita in purchasing-power terms has more than tripled since 1990, making it one of the wealthiest and fastest-growing economies in Latin America over the last few decades. Its living standards are now slightly below those of European countries like Romania and Hungary.
No analogy is perfect. But if we’re going to make comparisons, the wars in Grenada and Panama are much more analogous to the situation in Venezuela today than the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya. These were Latin American countries with some history of democratic institutions. They did not require a long-term occupation or sustained efforts at nation-building from the outside in order to stand on their feet. And as in Venezuela, there were local elites who had legitimacy at home and were ready to take over the state.
None of this necessarily means that Trump should launch a war to overthrow Maduro.
Such decisions depend on a host of considerations and on information that those of us outside government lack access to. But we should all at the very least be open to the idea that it can work.
It is difficult to exaggerate the extent to which the Maduro regime has eroded democratic institutions in Venezuela and created an economic catastrophe. According to the International Monetary Fund, its real GDP contracted by 75 percent between 2013 and 2021, a record of failure that is unheard of absent a major civil war. Maduro has immiserated his people, taken away their liberties, allied with Russia, and unleashed a migrant crisis that has reverberated in the United States.
It would be a dereliction of America’s leadership role, globally and in the Western Hemisphere, not to at least consider whether we — and the people of Venezuela — might be better off if the current Venezuelan regime is toppled. The Trump administration should not let faulty analogies close its mind to the possibility that American force can still do a great deal of good for the world.