It Isn’t Always 2003

Trump’s Venezuela intervention isn’t an Iraq War retread.

Washington cafes and Signal chats were abuzz with chatter, gossip, and rumor. It was December 2025, and the Trump administration was weighing a decision to intervene in Venezuela and overthrow its embattled president, Nicolás Maduro. Skeptics of the plan had one word on their lips and fingertips. It was not Venezuela, Maduro, Caracas, or corollary.

It was Iraq.

The intervention, skeptics held, would be like the Iraq War and the broader global war on terror—long, deadly, and likely to fail.

One analyst, writing in Foreign Policy, argued that American-led regime change “is usually disastrous,” comparing it to “the arrogance that led to Iraq.” TIME’s headline blared that President Donald Trump was “forgetting the lessons of the Middle East.” Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) warned that America’s potential intervention into Venezuela mirrored foreign wars like those in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and, of course, the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Both the Foreign Policy and TIME analyses scoffed at anyone arguing that an intervention into Venezuela could be anything like our historical successes, such as 1989’s intervention into Panama to capture Manuel Noriega. One expert dedicated an entire column to arguing that such a comparison was wrong-headed, as unlike Panama, Venezuela’s military was large and powerful, and Venezuelan citizens might “relish the chance to fight invading Americans.”

Then came the intervention, which turned out to be even easier than Panama’s, shocking observers with its swiftness and the ease with which American forces operated. Maduro and his wife were captured within three hours, and American troops suffered no fatalities.

One would have expected this development to slow some of the Iraq comparisons. But it did not. The Washington Post continued afterward, portraying Vice President J.D. Vance’s support for the raid as at odds with his previous criticism of the Iraq War. The New York Times editorial board accused Trump of abandoning his non-interventionist principles.

Nearly a full week after the raid, Francis Fukuyama wrote that Trump’s Venezuela policy risked mirroring the nation-building of Iraq and Afghanistan. In my own private chats with individuals involved in the global war on terror, I was warned that events in Venezuela were proceeding just as Iraq had—a puzzling claim, since Maduro was captured in about an hour by roughly 200 special operations forces while Saddam Hussein was captured after a nine-month manhunt and a 160,000-man invasion. Effectively, the prophets of doom who had preached disaster were still preaching disaster, failing to take even a moment to consider whether their original preaching was off base.

The shadows of the global war on terror, and particularly the Iraq War—which was, to be clear, a disastrous war of choice—loom long over American foreign policy. Waging a war to combat a nebulous ideology like terrorism was a mistake, as was attacking Iraq. But those shadows should not loom too long. On both technical and philosophical levels, comparisons between Trump’s Venezuela action and the 2003 Iraqi invasion are fundamentally flawed.

On a technical level, many of the loudest critics predicted that an invasion of Venezuela, as in Iraq, would require a massive amount of force, and therefore mass casualties. Suggestions that such an intervention could instead look like Panama in 1989 were swept aside: Venezuela’s army was too big and too anti-American. The country was too large. Skeptics literally could not imagine the Trump administration succeeding because they, by default, assumed that the Iraq strategy was at play (even though, in five years as president, Trump has never launched a massive invasion of any country and repeatedly expressed frustration with his predecessors for having done so).

Even after Maudro’s ouster, skeptics were unfazed. The Times’ critique that Trump had abandoned his anti-war principles was particularly telling. Never in any of his three presidential runs or his two terms in office has Trump proclaimed a hesitancy to use military force (recall his famous “bomb the shit out of ‘em” threat against ISIS in 2015). He did argue against forever wars, but an hours-long intervention into Venezuela hardly qualifies. Likewise, warnings of getting bogged down in a regime change war hardly seem relevant absent an ongoing war.

There is, admittedly, some merit to warnings about promoting democracy, as the Trump administration did make noise about ending Maduro’s rule and bringing “freedom” to Caracas. Democracy promotion was indeed central to George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion. But most of the recent Venezuela democracy comments were off hand; far more prominent were oil and evicting Chinese and Russian influence. Senior Trump administration officials quickly established that they were content with Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez—no champion of democracy herself—taking the reins, so long as she was more pliant than he was.

This hints at the wider philosophical driver behind both conflicts. The Iraq War was conducted under the auspices of the Bush Doctrine. As Bush himself later defined it in his memoir, Decision Points, one of the main pillars of the doctrine was to “advance liberty and hope as an alternative to the enemy’s ideology of repression and fear.” In other words, promote democracy. Democracy would be promoted anywhere and everywhere, even in places where it had never existed, like Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was a mistake, a mix of ideological naivete and an attempt to sustain America’s post-Cold War unipolar hegemony. With the former, members of the administration, including President Bush himself, believed in the “democratic peace theory,” which (erroneously) holds that democracies do not go to war with one another. For the latter, the Bush Doctrine gave the United States cover to effectively act anywhere in the name of spreading liberal democracy.

President Trump’s focus on Venezuela, by contrast, stems from an entirely different calculation. Last December, the administration announced a Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The original Monroe Doctrine, a foundational text for American foreign policy since its introduction in the 1820s, demanded that European powers stay out of the Americas. Later presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt expanded the doctrine through a corollary declaring the United States could intervene anywhere in the Americas in the event of “chronic wrongdoing” by hemispheric states. The Trump Corollary added to this by laying out exactly when such actions would be necessary: to prevent “hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets,” to ensure “critical supply chains” are uninterrupted, and “to ensure [America’s] continued access to key strategic locations.”

Democracy promotion is entirely absent from Trump’s corollary, as is any broader, globalistic creed. It does not require constant globe-trotting for ideological purposes, though it may require military action, as it did in Venezuela and as it may in Greenland, the latter a part of the American hemisphere and a critical component for control of the North Atlantic. Though even in the case of Greenland, the Trump administration, as President Trump himself said at Davos, is not seeking to territorialize the island by force.

While an aversion to needless violence is unabashedly positive, too strong of an aversion genuinely injures the interests of the United States. Take the Monroe Doctrine and its Roosevelt and Trump corollaries for example. These doctrines reflect an objective geographic truth: if the United States can keep adversarial powers away from the Americas, and can keep hemispheric states from rising to challenge it, the country can effectively remain safe regardless of what happens in the rest of the world (absent disasters like a nuclear war).

Compare that approach with the fate of the Soviet Union, which found itself increasingly hemmed in over the course of the Cold War. First, the U.S. was able to harden its control of Western and Central Europe. Missiles stationed in Turkey directly threatened Moscow, and Richard Nixon’s opening to China gave us a foothold on Russia’s eastern flank. Toward the end of the Cold War, U.S.-provided weapons bogged down the USSR in border-state Afghanistan, draining our adversary of its strength.

When the Soviets tried to play the same game, creating a militarized foothold in the Americas vis-à-vis Cuba, Washington brought the world as close as it has ever come to Armageddon.

Twenty-first century multipolarity means more potential adversaries, which means even more potential avenues for those powers to find their way into the Americas. They had already done so in Venezuela, which hosted Russian troops and bombers. China too sought to increase its footprint in Caracas; at the time of Maduro’s capture, Venezuela owed China at least $10 billion in loans, and a Chinese trade delegation was in the country during the intervention.

Beginning the multipolar era in a hemisphere largely free of adversaries is an incredible advantage. China has to contend with American troops in Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea. It cannot even break out of its own region, hemmed in by America’s first island chain (and if it does manage to break through that, the United States still has two more island chains). Russia was so concerned with adversarial forces on its border that it launched a preventative full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which has only caused more states to join the U.S.-led NATO alliance.

It would be foolish to let the ghosts of Iraq stop America from ensuring our advantage. Quick interventions like the seizing of Maduro may not be ideal—in an ideal world, no interventions would be necessary at all—but they are infinitely better than large-scale conflicts. That is what the United States will get if it allows adversaries to, slowly but surely, encroach on our hemisphere.