Back to the future: Trump revives an old US habit of intervention

The overthrow of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro by American military forces is a
revival of a custom of ousting leaders, most of them Latin American dictators, to bend
their countries to the will of the United States.

Not all such efforts, which date back more than a century, ended with long-term or even short-term success in shaping governance for the better.

Expanded to Asia from the Western Hemisphere in the 21st century, the practice of what is now known as “regime change” failed to convert a pair of lawless dictatorships into
model democracies.

In Afghanistan, a government that had hosted the Saudi mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, attacks on Washington and New York City, Osama bin Laden, lost power but regained it after 20 years of battling US occupation forces.

American forces largely abandoned Iraq in 2011, eight years after overthrowing dictator
Saddam Hussein, leaving the country rife with corruption and bedeviled by anti-US
Iraqi guerrilla as well as militias backed by Iran.

US President Donald Trump, who ordered the seizure of Maduro, appears to have
weighed the pros and cons of such action and concluded that success can be had. His plan is for the US to rule Venezuela directly for an indefinite period and make it into a functioning
and benign democracy.

“We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious
transition,” the president said when he announced Maduro’s abduction in television. “We
can’t take a chance that somebody else takes over Venezuela that doesn’t have the good of
the Venezuelan people in mind. We’re going to run it, essentially, until such time as a
proper transition can take place.”

Some analysts point out that Venezuela lacks the ethnic and religious divisions that undermined unity in both Iraq and Afghanistan and nourished opposition to the US occupations.

Maduro came to power not within a sectarian coflict but in the wake of a leftist populist movement promoted by the late Hugo Chavez. He won presidential elections in 1999 and died in office in 2013. Maduro had ruled ever since.

Trump is relying on a well-worn foreign policy tool – intervention and overthrow of
governments to undo “Chavismo.” Backers say the strategy “may help Washington find
its confidence and get over its Iraq-Afghanistan hangover,” wrote Matthew Kroenig, senior
director at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

Critics counter that backers of the invasion ignore dangerous realities that can undermine
efforts to pacify the county.

“The risks of violence in any post-Maduro scenario should not be downplayed,” wrote the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based peace promotion organization. “Many [Venezuelan] senior military officers could resist regime change. Even with a deal on the terms of a transition, it is not inconceivable that parts of the security forces could rebel and even wage a guerrilla-type war against the new authorities.”

The analysis warned: “The plethora of armed groups operating across much of the
country would likely exploit any power vacuum to entrench or even extend their territorial
control.”

To avoid those disasters, Trump is trying to avoid a perceived blunder that doomed
American efforts to pacify Iraq: the exclusion of even nominal supporters of Saddam
Hussein from government work and access to other jobs that required membership in
Saddam’s Baath Party.

During his Saturday press conference, Trump said that US officials would run Venezuela for
an unspecified period, but would also work with Maduro’s hand-picked vice-president
Delcy Rodriguez and other Maduro-era officials. After Maduro’s exit, Rodriguez was
quietly elevated by a Venezuelan judge to replace him. She then pledged to cooperate with
the US occupation.

Trump’s decision surprised longtime political opponents of Maduro. They had expected to
dominate a new government. Maria Corina Machado, a popular politician whom Maduro
barred from running against him in 2024 elections, celebrated the America invasion and
called it the “hour of freedom.”

Trump didn’t welcome her intervention. Instead, he verbally pushed her aside “I think it
would be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn’t have the support within or the
respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect.”

Trump added that he had not been in contact with Machado, who had publicly invited the
US to invade. She was also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year.

Trump’s attitude toward Machado roughly parallels his expressed disdain for Volodymyr
Zekensky in Ukraine. In peace negotiations that Trump is overseeing, the US President has
placed the Ukrainian democratic leader on a par with Russia’s authoritarian leader
Vladimir Putin, who besides invading Ukraine has jailed hundreds of democraitc opponents
of his regime.

For a century, the US had specialized in overthrowing governments of small Latin American
governments – 40 since 1898, when Americans joined Cuban rebels to end Spanish
colonial rule on the Caribbean island.

Before Maduro’s ouster, the most recent Latin president to be overthrown was Manuel Noriega, a military dictator in Panama. To achieve that outcome, some 14,000 US troops invaded Panama in 1989,. They fought their way to Noriega’s headquarters and eventually captured him at the Vatican embassy in Panama City, where he had taken refuge.

Noriega’s fate may be a template for Maduro’s. The Panamanian was put on trial in the
United States and sentenced to 40 years in prison on drug trafficking charges. The French
jailed him for another seven years for money laundering. He finally died in a Panamanian
prison in 2017 after being jailed there on murder and corruption charges.

As in the case of Noriega, the US is charging Maduro with exporting cocaine into the
United States, along with weapons trafficking.

Maduro’s fall from power may unnerve his two top Caribbean allies: communist-run Cuba, which depended on oil supplies from Venezuela, and leftist Nicaragua, a country where, in the 1990s, the US supported rebels aiming to bring down a Marxist government. Remnants of that governent returned to power years later and rule today.

Legal objections to Maduro’s overthrow and indictment will likely be argued in a US
court. They are unlikely to deter Trump any more than they deterred President George H.W. Bush, who put Noriega on trial. Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi predicted that
Maduro “will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American
courts.”

Daniel Williams’s long career as a foreign correspondent has included covering the Caribbean, Central America and Mexico for the Miami Herald and Los Angeles Times.