The 2016 election which first brought Trump to the White House was supposed to have marked a foreign policy shift within the Republican Party: a turn away from wars of choice to America First. Trump broke the Bush family’s dynasty, and famously called the Iraq War “a big, fat mistake” (to the face of then-presidential aspirant Jeb Bush). In 2023 his now-vice president, JD Vance, who had been deployed to Iraq as a Marine public affairs officer, called the war an “unforced disaster”.
The military operation in Venezuela, which captured its autocratic president Nicolás Maduro but left his government otherwise intact, is the latest in Trump’s military adventures that fly in the face of this promise of restraint. In the last year the US has carried out airstrikes on Iran, Yemen, Somalia, as well as Syria and Nigeria just a week ago. The Venezuela campaign was a greater escalation, which began with the extrajudicial killings of over 100 people on boats, alleged but not proven to be drug traffickers, and culminated in the kidnapping of a head of state by US Special Forces.
In proclaiming the “Donroe Doctrine”, a return to classic US imperial ambitions – at least in the Western Hemisphere – Trump and his team would, understandably, wish to avoid comparisons to the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan. And the lessons from the forever wars are at least somewhat informing Trump’s preferred style of intervention: airstrikes with no subsequent ground invasion, assassinations of often non-military targets, a policy that eschews nation-building and humanitarian assistance in favour of naked resource extraction. The in-and-out nature of the Venezuela raid was meant to reassure war-weary voters that this is not the beginning of an occupation.
Instead, the closer comparison appears to be the 1989 invasion of Panama. This is, at least, the type of intervention the Trump administration would like to sell to voters. Unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, the Panama invasion was quick, did not cost trillions of dollars, and did not result in a bloody insurgency or a decades-long commitment of ground forces. Trump’s portrayal of the raid as a police operation, not a war, echoes the elder Bush administration’s language in 1989: framing the invasion as a targeted capture of a rogue head of state wanted by the US for drug trafficking. That operation has been seen in defense circles as largely successful: it installed as president Guillermo Endara, a US ally who won the previous annulled elections. The captured president, Manuel Noriega, was tried and convicted of drug trafficking – a charge the US knew to be true given that he had been a longtime CIA asset whose involvement in the cocaine trade the US allowed due to his support for Reagan’s Contra War in Nicaragua. A decade later, Panama took control of the Panama Canal as per the 1979 treaty (which Trump has disparaged), and later widened it. A quarter century later it became, through its secret banks and extremely favourable tax regime for foreign investors and speculators, both a centre for money laundering and the richest country in Latin America.
The Panama parallel starts to fall apart as you look more closely, as I and others have pointed out. Notably, Panama was a de facto US protectorate from the start, when the US orchestrated its independence from Colombia in order to create a more pliable negotiating partner to secure exclusive rights for the Canal and surrounding territory. Notoriously, Panama’s revolution was planned, its Declaration of Independence drafted and its original flag designed at the Waldorf Astroria Hotel by Philippe Bunau-Varilla, French engineer and negotiating partner to Teddy Roosevelt. A result of the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty imposed on the newly independent country was the creation of the Panama Canal Zone, a US colony that provided the headquarters of Southcom, the Pentagon’s command centre for the Americas. By 1989, the US had multiple military bases and 13,000 troops already in the country, which were doubled to 27,000 by the time of the invasion, which also served to advertise the US’s new stealth aircraft, the F-117. The Panama Defense Forces, which totalled 16,000 and had none of the advanced weaponry of the US, were quickly routed and subsequently dismantled.
Even with such lopsided numbers, there were disasters, including a notorious battle in which Navy SEALS were stranded without air cover at the Paitilla airport and suffered heavy casualties. The worst casualties were to Panamanian civilians, however: several hundreds or possibly thousands killed, many left homeless. I lived in Panama as an adolescent, moving there three years after the invasion. Even then, parts of Panama City were in ruins – especially El Chorrillo, the working-class neighbourhood that was the home of Manuel Noriega and Panama’s boxing hero Roberto Duran, and former headquarters of the Panamanian military.
There was no need for an occupation of Panama because the US already effectively occupied it. The US military could serve as the country’s national defense after dismantling Panama’s defense forces. It could guarantee an America-friendly administration in a country it had created for its exclusive domain, and whose main economic engine was a waterway the US controlled.
Venezuela is 12 times larger than Panama and twice as large as Iraq. Unlike Panama, its economic engine is oil, which gives it close relations with a great number of foreign powers, notably China, as well as OPEC, of which it is a founding member. The Venezuelan military is deeply entrenched in all areas of the economy, both licit and illicit, performing roles far beyond that of national defense. An attempt to occupy the country and fully dismantle the regime, an Iraq-style “de-chavistication” campaign, would be an impossible task even if Trump had the stomach for it.
Thus he has opted for a faustian bargain. Throwing the Venezuelan opposition headed by Nobel laureate Maria Corina Machado under the bus, Trump has left the Chavista regime intact and endorsed former VP Delcy Rodriguez as president. Rather than occupy and direct a rebuilding, the US will keep its navy deployed offshore, maintain sanctions and pressure the interim government into US-friendly policies, most likely around oil concessions. As of now, political prisoners remain in prison and there are no clear plans for a democratic transition.
Political science scholarship tells us some important lessons: leadership change is not the same as regime change, and regime change is not the same as democratisation. Most of the time, leadership changes are from one regime official to another, eg from Maduro to Rodriguez, and regime changes are from one style of authoritarian regime to another, eg chavismo to direct military rule. The Trump administration has secured the former, and the latter is a distinct possibility, perhaps one that Trump would prefer over a democratic government led by the winner of last year’s election, Edmundo Gonzalez.
The reported demise of the GOP’s hawks and neocons has always been exaggerated. Many still populate Trump’s foreign policy team, up to the cabinet level, most prominently Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio. Even Rubio, who has long pushed for regime change in Venezuela, sees this as instrumental to his personal crusade for regime change in Cuba, and is thus willing to sell out the Venezuelan opposition. The Donroe Doctrine is not anti-interventionist, nor is it anti-authoritarian. It is perfectly compatible with corrupt and autocratic regimes like Venezuela’s chavistas. Seeing the world through an extractivist lens frees the US from concerns with democracy, stability and rule of law, even if it does little to free those who have long suffered under the regime now partnered with Trump.
[Further reading: America kidnapped a president. Keir Starmer said nothing]
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