Why Venezuela Is Not Iraq

History says regime change can actually work

I have a new piece in The Boston Globe on why the Trump administration should in fact consider forcibly overthrowing Maduro. You can pay for the article there or over here. Below the break, I’ll also add some thoughts that didn’t make their way into the article.

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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.