The arrogance that led to Iraq now threatens catastrophe in Venezuela.
The United States is the world leader in regime change, toppling 35 foreign heads over the past 120 years, by one reckoning. It’s a record built on a dangerous combination of unparalleled military might, a large group of perceived enemies—and a sunny self-confidence that has repeatedly proven mistaken.
No one has shown himself more tempted by the power to unleash the world’s strongest army and economy to win arguments, take territory, smack down adversaries, and cow allies than President Donald Trump. Washington is leading a growing military and covert campaign targeting President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, after already striking Iran and Yemen and issuing other, vaguer threats against Nigeria, Mexico, Panama, and even Denmark and Canada.
Overthrowing another country’s leader is a routine enough tactic that it has its own acronym among academics: FIRC, or foreign-imposed regime change.
According to a tally by Alexander Downes, an associate professor and political scientist at George Washington University and the author of the book Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong, the United States carried out nearly a third of all of about 120 forced ousters of foreign leaders around the world between 1816 and 2011.
Regime change and other strong-arm interventions rarely go as planned, but some of those that Trump is threatening, such as going “guns-a-blazing” into Nigeria, with its armed extremists and ethnic and sectarian divides, seem like obvious disasters. But past failures should remind Americans of how catastrophic the consequences of hubris can be—both on an individual human scale and a national one.
Take U.S. Foreign Regime Change No. 34, Iraq, and the series of military patrols that I tagged along with as a reporter in Baghdad in May 2006.
Three years after the United States had forced out Saddam Hussein based on false claims about weapons of mass destruction, there was no sign of the wave of democratization that President George W. Bush’s team had promised would follow in the Middle East. Instead, the 10th Mountain Division patrols, when I accompanied them, had devolved into a de facto body-removal service. Nightly, they picked up and hauled away the corpses of Iraqis that other Iraqis were dumping on Baghdad’s streets and sidewalks.
The dead, mostly young men, some with hands clutching the air in shock or wired behind their back by their killers, were victims of a sectarian civil war that was unforeseen by the Bush administration. Toppling Saddam’s Sunni-based government and security forces proved easy for the U.S. military. Dealing with the ensuing power struggle between the vicious, Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite militias and Sunni insurgent groups that arose in the security vacuum that followed did not. The consequences would empower Iran, foster the Islamic State as a global threat, and stick U.S. troops in the region to this day.
Long after American forces chased out Saddam, the consequences were still cascading for ordinary Iraqis. Every day, they endured a gamut of abductions, torture and killing, car bombs and suicide bombs and other attacks.
On one of those nights in Baghdad, the Americans had already taken a hit from an improvised explosive device. The blast left some of the young soldiers limping or dazed. It flipped back the head of an Iraqi driver who had been nearby, killing him.
Will Shields, the 23-year-old second lieutenant leading the patrol, had gone that same night to a post of the Baghdad police, one of the Shiite-dominated security forces that the United States had created to bring order to Iraq. Alternately haranguing and bargaining, he prodded frightened Shiite police to step outside their offices, under American protection, long enough to help the U.S. patrol collect the night’s bodies.
“You do realize that this is your job?” the frustrated lieutenant, asked of the Iraqi police that night. “How do you expect Americans to do anything, when you won’t do anything?”
The scale of sectarian killings deprived the Iraqi dead of names and stories, reducing them to a succession of entrance and exit wounds, noted as soldiers swung the bodies into the back of vehicles.
Venezuela would be a return to a long U.S. tradition of regional interference. According to Downes’s research, about 20 of those 35 U.S.-backed regime changes were in Central and South America or the Caribbean.
In some of those countries, the United States removed and replaced leaders again and again, with the concentration of someone kicking a vending machine to get the right candy bar to drop. In 1954 alone, for example, Washington ousted three Guatemalan leaders in succession.
Globally, a third of all forced regime changes by all countries led to civil wars in the targeted nation within 10 years, Downes, the researcher, found.
One frequent path to disaster is when regimes collapse outright, leaving armed and disaffected security forces at loose ends. Another is when a foreign-installed new leader finds himself “pulled like Gumby,” Downes said, between the conflicting wants of his people and the foreign power that installed him.
“The whole problem with regime change is you tend not to think about what comes after. Like, ‘What’s the plan there?’” Downes told me.
“And it’s amazing just how prevalent that is,” he said. “Countries just keep doing it, and either they don’t think about what will happen next, or they think … that won’t happen to us.”
A few regime changes have led to much better things—most notably in Japan and Germany and other Western European countries at the close of World War II. Those, of course, were conflicts the United States was forced into rather than chose.
By the numbers, regime changes have the best odds of succeeding in installing a democracy when they happen in countries that already have experience of democracy, are well-off economically, and have a relatively homogeneous population, such as Japan or Germany immediately following World War II, Downes and fellow researchers found.
When those criteria don’t apply, you get situations such as the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan or the eventual rise of the Islamic Republic after the United States and United Kingdom aided the Shah of Iran by removing his political opponent. After two decades of killings and insurgencies, Iraq has reached a kind of stability, but a net effect has been to frighten other countries in the region away from democratic experiments. Experts see warning signs for any attempt at regime change in Venezuela, a petrostate where misgovernment by socialist autocrat Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chavez, coupled with international sanctions, have trashed the economy and created millions of refugees.
The Trump administration has accused Maduro of being in league with drug traffickers, although the United States overstates Venezuela’s role in drug smuggling into the United States. Washington has moved its largest aircraft carrier to the region as part of a military buildup. It has killed dozens of people in strikes on speedboats that the United States says, without evidence, are carrying drugs.
The Trump administration has been vague on its plans, including whether it was considering force to drive out Maduro, who has manipulated elections to stay in power, or whether U.S. actions such as airstrikes would be aimed at encouraging Venezuelans to do the job themselves.
A more peaceful U.S. approach in Trump’s first term—imposing financial sanctions to increase pressure on Maduro and proposing a power-sharing deal to ease him out of power—failed to empower Venezuela’s opposition as hoped. Trump is resorting to military and CIA deployment this time, either to scare Maduro into ceding power or to force him out directly.
“We have seen this movie before,” said Jacqueline Hazelton, a former instructor in the political effects of military power at the Naval War College and now the executive editor of the journal International Security, noting that the usual result was factional violence
Venezuela has a large and motivated democratic opposition, led by Maria Corina Machado, the winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. But Maduro has had years to strengthen and diversify his hold on the country’s institutions. Machado lacks the ability to break that hold and repress challengers, Hazelton said.
Supporters of a U.S. intervention in Venezuela have cited No. 31 in the U.S.-led regime change list—in Panama in 1990, which replaced a military ruler with democratic government.
But Panama is a fraction of Venezuela’s size in territory and population, and it had a resident U.S. military force that Venezuela lacks, Downes noted.
Supporters of intervention in Venezuela are working to overcome any such U.S. doubts. A Venezuelan opposition writer and supporter of U.S. intervention rejected the very term “regime change” when it comes to his country.
Maduro sits at the top of a drug-trafficking criminal network, so there’s no sitting government to topple, Walter Molina, who fled Maduro’s Venezuela and lives now in Buenos Aires, told me. Molina and others have argued that Venezuela has an elected government, led by the opposition candidate who the United States and others say won 2024 presidential election that was overridden by Maduro, waiting to return.
Any U.S. intervention will be “about respecting the will of the Venezuelan people,” he said.
That may be, and the combination of resentment toward Maduro’s misrule from inside Venezuela and the overwhelming attack from outside might be enough to usher out an autocrat and usher in democracy. But that’s uncertain enough to warrant caution, and the world has heard this kind of urging before, such as when then-U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney declared that U.S. armed forces would be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq.
“The temptation is to just do it and say, ‘Well, what happens can’t be worse than what was before,’” Downes said of foreign regime change. “But that’s sometimes not true.”
this is not a joke to me btw. i genuinely support violence because no true liberation can be achieved without violence. you're a terrorist in eyes of state when you challenge a colonial power. as Malcolm X once said "You don't get freedom peacefully. Freedom is never safeguarded peacefully. Anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn't deserving of a peaceful approach by the ones who are being deprived of their freedom. The only way you can have peace is to eliminate those injustices and the American white man is not going to eliminate them, he's going to talk that pretty talk but he'll still continue to participate in those inhuman deeds." and when Kwame Ture said "In order for non-violence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none, has none." and when Martin Luther King Jr. said “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” and when Frantz Fanon said “Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.” and when Subhas Chandra Bose said “Give me blood, and I will give you freedom.”
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