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Nothing Good Will Come of Trump's Quest to Make Regime Change Great Again
The one thing that should be clear by now is that pursuing such global regime-change campaigns would sow chaos and instability, while harming untold numbers of innocent civilians, all in pursuit of a futile quest for renewed US global supremacy.
Jan 25, 2026
The Trump administration’s exercise in armed regime change in Venezuela should have come as no surprise. The US naval buildup in the Caribbean and the attacks on defenseless boats off the Venezuelan coast—based on unproven allegations that they contained drug traffickers—had been underway for more than three months. By the end of December 2025, in fact, such strikes on boats near Venezuela (and in the Eastern Pacific) had already killed 115 people.
And those attacks were just the beginning. The US has since intercepted oil tankers as far away as the North Atlantic Ocean; run a covert operation inside Venezuela; and earlier this month, launched multiple air strikes that killed at least 40 Venezuelans while capturing that country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.
Both of them are now imprisoned in New York City and poised to face a criminal trial for narco-terrorism and cocaine importing conspiracies, plus assorted weapons charges. Even more strikingly, President Donald Trump recently told the New York Times that the US could run Venezuela “for years.” On how that would be done, he (of course!) didn’t offer a clue. Naturally, a Venezuelan government forged in the face of a possible US occupation would comply with the whims of the Trump administration—assuming that such a government, capable of stabilizing the country and earning the loyalty of the majority of its people, can even be pulled together.
Trump’s rush to war in Latin America is a phenomenon that, until recently, seemed long over. Its revival should raise multiple red flags, given the history of Washington’s failed efforts to install allied governments through regime change. (Can you spell Iraq?) In fact, given this country’s lack of success with such attempts since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it’s a good bet that regime change in Venezuela will not end well for any of the parties concerned, whether the Trump administration, the new leaders of Venezuela, or the people of our two countries.
Trump’s fixation on actually grabbing territory and his hyper-militarized interpretation of the 200-year-old Monroe (now, Donroe) Doctrine suggest that perhaps he wants to take America back to the 1850s.
In the meantime, Trump has already suggested that he might entertain the idea of launching military strikes on neighboring Colombia. After a White House phone call between that country’s president Gustavo Petro and him, however, Time Magazine speculated that, when it comes to “who’s next?,” it might not be Colombia but Cuba, Mexico, Greenland, or even Iran. What’s not yet clear is whether Trump and crew will use the US military, CIA-style covert action, economic warfare, or some combination of all of them in pursuit of their goals (whatever they might prove to be).
The one thing that should be clear by now is that pursuing such global regime-change campaigns would be sheer madness. Going that route would sow chaos and instability, while harming untold numbers of innocent civilians, all in pursuit of a futile quest for renewed US global supremacy.
When, long ago, President Trump first started using the term “Make America Great Again,” I assumed he was thinking of the 1950s, when a surge of post-World War II economic growth and government investment lifted the prospects of a select group of Americans (while pointedly excluding others). That period, of course, was when the efforts that produced the modern civil rights, women’s rights, and gay and trans rights movements were in their early stages. Prejudice was the norm then in most places where Americans lived, worked, or got an education, while McCarthyism cost untold numbers of people their jobs and livelihoods and had a chilling effect on the discussion or pursuit of progressive goals.
Such a return to the 1950s would have been bad enough. However, Trump’s fixation on actually grabbing territory and his hyper-militarized interpretation of the 200-year-old Monroe (now, Donroe) Doctrine suggest that perhaps he wants to take America back to the 1850s. If so, count on one thing: We’ll pay a high price for any such exercise in imperial nostalgia.
Intervention as the Norm: The History of US Aggression in Latin America
The Trump administration’s attempt to control Latin America and intimidate its leaders and citizens is, of course, nothing new. At the start of the 20th century, President Teddy Roosevelt announced his own “corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which went well beyond the original pronouncement’s warning to European powers to avoid challenging Washington’s dominance of the Western Hemisphere. Roosevelt then stated that “chronic wrongdoing… may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”
The Office of the Historian at the US State Department points out that, “[o]ver the long term, the [Roosevelt] corollary had little to do with relations between the Western Hemisphere and Europe, but it did serve as justification for US intervention in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.”
In fact, there were dozens of US interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean in the wake of Roosevelt’s statement of his doctrine. Later in the century, there were US-aided coups in Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964) and Chile (1973); invasions of Cuba (1961), the Dominican Republic (1983), and Grenada (1983); armed regime change in Panama (1989); the arming of the Contras in Nicaragua (1981) and death squads in El Salvador (1980 to 1992); and support for dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay in the 1970s and 1980s.
In all, according to historian John Coatsworth, the United States intervened in the Western Hemisphere to change governments 41 times from 1898 to 1994. Seventeen of those cases involved direct US military intervention.
In short, the Trump administration is now reprising the worst of past US policies toward Latin America, but as with all things Trumpian, he and his cohorts are moving at warp speed, and on several fronts simultaneously.
The Perils of Regime Change
Although Trump officials are no doubt celebrating their removal of Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela, the battle there is far from over. When the US drove Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in a six-week military campaign in 1991, there was a great deal of celebratory rhetoric about how “America is back” or even that the United States was the single most impressively dominant nation in the history of humanity. But as historian Andrew Bacevich has pointed out, the 1991 Gulf War was just the start of what became a long war in Iraq and the greater Middle East. In Iraq, the ejection of Hussein was followed by relentless bombing, devastating sanctions, and a 20-year war of occupation that ended disastrously.
Wishful thinking was rampant in the run-up to the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, with administration officials bragging that the war would be a “cake walk” and would cost “only” $50 to $100 billion. When all was said and done, however, that war would last 20 years at a cost of well over $1 trillion; hundreds of thousands of civilians would die; and hundreds of thousands of US military personnel would be killed, maimed, or left with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI).
The Venezuelan debacle—which is surely what it will be considered once all is said and done—is but another sign that the Trump administration’s tough-guy rhetoric and bullying foreign and economic policies are, in fact, accelerating the decline of American global power.
The opportunity costs of America’s post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere have indeed been enormous. The Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates that the taxpayer obligations flowing from those conflicts exceeded $8 trillion. As the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies has noted, that $8 trillion would have been enough to decarbonize the entire US electrical grid, forgive all US student-loan debt, and triple the investment in green energy and related items initiated by the Biden administration under the Inflation Reduction Act (investments that have since been rolled back by the Trump administration).
Of course, that money is gone, but given the experience, you might think that this country’s leadership (such as it is) would go all in to avoid repeating such costly mistakes, this time in Latin America, by attempting to dominate and control the region through force or the threat of it. Consider it a guarantee that such a policy will never end well for the residents of the targeted nations. And count on this as well: It will also exact a high price on Americans in need of food, housing, education, a robust public health system, and a serious plan to address the ravages of climate change.
Why Venezuela? Oil, Ego, and the Quest for Dominance
The Trump administration’s original rationale for pursuing regime change in Venezuela was to stop the flow of drugs into the United States, a position that didn’t stand up to even the most casual scrutiny. After all, Venezuela isn’t faintly one of the more significant sources of drugs heading into this country and, in particular, it isn’t a supplier of fentanyl, the deadliest substance being imported.
Donald Trump has since stated repeatedly (as in a January 3 press conference), that the intervention he ordered was, in fact, about seizing Venezuela’s oil resources and developing them to the benefit of the US through the activities of American oil companies. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world,” he said, “go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”
Writing in The Nation, Michael Klare pointed out that upping Venezuela’s oil output would, in fact, be no simple matter. Trump’s comments, he suggested, were “imbued with nostalgia and fantasy” and “all this flies in the face of economic and geological reality, which stands in the way of any rapid increase in Venezuelan output and oil profits.” That country’s oil supplies are, in fact, mostly in the form of heavy crude, which is particularly difficult to extract, and its infrastructure for accessing such oil is decrepit, thanks to years of sanctions and neglect. As Klare points out, the London-based consultancy firm Energy Aspects has suggested that it would take “tens of billions of dollars over multiple years” to restore Venezuela’s oil production to the higher levels of years past.
Realism, however, has never been Donald Trump’s strong suit, and his dream that seizing Venezuela’s oil resources will be a piece of cake only reinforces that point. The same can be said for his assertion that the United States could rule Venezuela, perhaps for years, and that everything is bound to go smoothly. The disastrous consequences of the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, among other places, suggest otherwise.
Beyond oil, the intervention in Venezuela satisfies Trump’s personal will to power, advances Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s goal of weakening and perhaps overthrowing the government of Cuba (by denying it Venezuelan oil), and puts progressive governments in Latin America on notice that if they don’t bend the knee to US economic and political demands, they may be next.
Interventionism on Steroids: A Recipe for American Decline
Since the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and his wife in Venezuela, administration rhetoric about possible attacks on Colombia and the seizing of Greenland has only accelerated. At another moment in history, perhaps such claims could have been dismissed as the idle bluster of an aging oligarch. But the Trump administration has already acted on too many of its most outlandish policy proposals—with its attempt to seize and control Venezuela high on the list—for us to treat the president’s aggressive statements as idle threats.
The Venezuelan debacle—which is surely what it will be considered once all is said and done—is but another sign that the Trump administration’s tough-guy rhetoric and bullying foreign and economic policies are, in fact, accelerating the decline of American global power. The question is, given the administration’s costly and dangerous military-first foreign policy, how much damage will this country do to people here and abroad on the way down?
Were Washington to put down its sword and invest in the real foundations of national strength—a healthy, well-educated, unified population—it could play a constructive role in the world, while delivering a better quality of life and a more responsive government to the American public.
It doesn’t have to be this way, of course. There could be a shift from this country’s current addiction to war as a central feature of its interactions with other nations to a policy of restraint that would recognize that the days when the United States could presume to run the world are over. In truth, US dominance was always overrated, given fiascos like the interventions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, where the US could not impose its will on much smaller nations with far fewer resources and far less sophisticated weaponry. Those experiences should have taught policymakers of both parties to proceed with caution, but the learning curve has, at best, been slow, painful, and erratic—and in the era of Donald Trump, seemingly nonexistent.
Warmed-over appeals to restore American greatness through the barrel of a gun are, of course, dangerously misguided, as our recent history has so amply demonstrated. It is long past time for us to demand better stewardship from our elected and appointed leaders.
Were Washington to put down its sword and invest in the real foundations of national strength—a healthy, well-educated, unified population—it could play a constructive role in the world, while delivering a better quality of life and a more responsive government to the American public. This would not mean eliminating the ability to defend the country by force if need be, but it would mean acknowledging that the need to do so should be rare, and that a more cooperative approach to overseas engagement, grounded in smart diplomacy, is the best defense of all. That, in turn, would mean a smaller military (and a far more modest military budget) that could free up resources to address urgent needs, from dealing with climate change and preventing new pandemics to reducing poverty and inequality.
At this moment in our history, the vision of a less militarized America may seem like a distant dream, but striving for it is the only way out of our current predicament.
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Critics See Echoes of Iraq as Corporate Media Carries Water for Unlawful Act of War Against Venezuela
“None of these acts of brazen aggression, violence, and violations of international law have, in any sustained or meaningful way, been referred to as acts of war, a coup, or invasion in US mainstream media reporting."
Jan 05, 2026
By the time the Trump administration began its operation this weekend to illegally kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro before taking control of the country and its oil reserves, two of the United States’ most storied media outlets were well aware that the attack was about to happen.
According to a Saturday report from Semafor, “the New York Times and Washington Post learned of a secret US raid on Venezuela soon before it was scheduled to begin Friday night—but held off publishing what they knew to avoid endangering US troops, two people familiar with the communications between the administration and the news organizations said.”
Semafor wrote that the decision "to maintain official secrecy is in keeping with longstanding American journalistic traditions." But critics say it's part of a different tradition: One in which corporate media outlets act as dutiful stenographers for the US military establishment to help legitimize lawless, imperialist military adventures.
Prior to this weekend, the leading example of this deference was seen during the lead-up to then-President George W. Bush's war in Iraq, where legacy media outlets had been criticized for parroting the government's claims that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be false.
In 2023, the 20-year anniversary of the invasion, which led to the deaths of an estimated half a million people, Adam Johnson wrote for the Real News Network that many of the journalists who pushed the lies that led to war—including the Atlantic's now-editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, the marquee MS NOW (formerly MSNBC) morning host Joe Scarborough, and New York nagazine and Atlantic contributor Jonathan Chait—never suffered career consequences for helping to midwife a historic foreign policy crime, and have since seen their careers blossom.
Johnson wrote in the Intercept on Sunday that the Western media's reaction to yet another regime change war in Venezuela has been similarly uncritical of the Trump administration's justifications, even as it states, overtly this time, that its primary aim is to commandeer another country's natural resources:
The administration invaded Venezuela’s sovereign territory, bombing several buildings, killing... its citizens, kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife from their bed, and announcing they will, henceforth, "run" the country.
And yet none of these acts of brazen aggression, violence, and violations of international law have, in any sustained or meaningful way, been referred to as acts of war, a coup, or invasion in US mainstream media reporting.
He added that the media has spent months adopting a "pseudo-legal framing" of President Donald Trump's threats against Venezuela and his seizure of its oil tankers.
In particular, he noted that both the Times and CNN had referred to “international sanctions” against Venezuela, which are actually just US sanctions. The Times also cited a Navy lawyer who claimed that by stopping Venezuela from trading its oil by seizing its vessels, the US was enforcing the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a convention that the US itself has not signed.
"It needed to feel vaguely rules-based and international-y, so unilateral US dictates were passed off as ersatz international law," Johnson wrote.
As numerous legal scholars have pointed out, Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter plainly states that "all members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations," making Trump's actions against Venezuela a blatant violation of the nation's sovereignty.
However, since Trump's invasion of Venezuela on Saturday, many media outlets have continued to adopt the dubious framing that US law, which has remained the Trump administration's sole justification for its kidnapping of Maduro—whom the Department of Justice indicted for alleged drug trafficking—somehow applies across borders and entitles the US to take over the country.
Assal Rad, a fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, DC and a frequent critic of US media coverage of foreign interventions, noted on social media that many outlets—including the Times, as well as Reuters, CNN, and the Associated Press—ran headlines framing the legality of Trump’s kidnapping of Maduro and subsequent assertion of authority to “run” the country as open questions.
"This framing is meant to cast doubt on the most basic principles of international law and sovereignty," Rad said.
Other outlets have simply denied that Trump's actions constituted acts of war at all. CBS News said the US had simply "ratcheted up" its "campaign" against Maduro. The Wall Street Journal used similar euphemistic language, describing it as a “pressure campaign” rather than a war. And others, including CNN, described the attack as a limited law enforcement "operation," rather than the opening salvo of what the White House itself has suggested may be a years-long project of ruling Venezuela for the purpose of converting it into a client state.
While the New York Times editorial board has since criticized Trump's action in Venezuela as "illegal and unwise," the Washington Post's editorial board—which was given a directive by its billionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos earlier this year to use its pages to promote "free markets," issued unconditional support for Trump's attack and plans to govern Venezuela on Saturday, calling it a "triumph" and a "a major victory for American interests."
Other outlets have given explicit directives to use whitewashed language to refer to the US's unilateral snatching of Maduro.
Owen Jones, an independent British journalist and columnist, reported that the BBC had directed reporters not to refer to Maduro—who was whisked away in the dead of night by US soldiers along with his wife and shown bound and blindfolded by the US government—as having been “kidnapped” by the US, but rather “seized” or “captured.”
According to Johnson, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, who has previously spiked stories damaging to the Trump administration at the behest of the network's new owners, directed the network's newly installed "Evening News" anchor to always refer to Maduro as a "dictator," echoing the government's line.
Johnson pointed out that the owner of CBS, Trump-aligned billionaire David Ellison, “recently partnered with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates” as part of his bid to take over CBS parent company Paramount, “so rest assured these dictatorships will not be getting the label.”
The New York Times has since updated the death toll from Trump's bombing of Caracas and other sites in Venezuela to at least 80 civilians and military personnel.
Sarah Lazare, an investigative reporter for Workday magazine, questioned why the Times and Post were concerned with the safety of US personnel, but "the danger posed to the Venezuelans killed in the bombing did not enter into the equation" when they decided to keep the story from public view until after the damage was done.
"This kind of fealty to perceived US interests is so ordinary because it's rewarded—it's the surest way to rise as a foreign policy reporter," Lazare added. "Makes me think of all the Iraq War cheerleaders who failed upward, now helm major news outlets, and narrate the events unfolding today. Being wrong about WMDs, being on the wrong side of history, did not hurt them professionally, and probably helped."
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From Powell to Venezuela: The High Cost of Evidence-Free Escalation
We are witnessing the reemergence of a dangerous repetition: one where the pattern of assertion becomes the prelude to action, and where action can lead to irreversible consequences.
Dec 29, 2025
In the annals of modern international relations, few moments carry as heavy a legacy as the speech given by US Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003. With solemn authority, Powell presented what he called “facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence” regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. The world watched. The Security Council listened. The invasion of Iraq soon followed.
Yet nearly every core assertion Powell made that day collapsed under post-war scrutiny. Iraq, it turned out, had no active WMD program. The biological labs, the chemical weapons, the nuclear revival—none existed. The damage, however, had been done: hundreds of thousands of lives lost, regional instability that persists two decades later, and a critical blow to the credibility of the international system.
The latest fact-checking report on statements made by the US ambassador to the United Nations at the Security Council emergency meeting on December 23, 2025 evokes Powell’s fateful moment with uncomfortable clarity. Assertions regarding Venezuela—about narco-terrorism networks, stolen oil, and naval interdictions—were advanced with the same kind of urgency and confidence that once shaped the Iraq invasion narrative. But just like 2003, these claims are not being matched by publicly verifiable evidence.
The Dangerous Shortcut from Assertion to Action
At the center of the current controversy is the claim that Venezuelan oil revenues finance a powerful criminal entity known as the “Cartel de los Soles.” Yet no evidentiary chain has been produced to establish this link: no verifiable financial tracing, no adjudicated findings, and no independent corroboration by multilateral investigative bodies. Even UN human-rights experts have questioned the coherence and existence of the cartel as a unified organization.
What the 2003 Iraq experience makes painfully clear is that institutional credibility depends on the ability to separate fact from political fiction.
Equally troubling is the claim that this alleged cartel poses a major narcotics or terrorist threat to the United States. The US Drug Enforcement Administration’s own 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment identifies Mexican transnational criminal organizations—not Venezuelan entities—as the principal threat. The Venezuelan organization does not even appear in the assessment.
Assertions have also been used to justify naval interdictions—military actions that, in legal terms, dangerously approach the definition of a blockade. But UN experts have been clear: Unilateral sanctions do not confer a right to enforce them through armed action. Under Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, the use of force is prohibited unless specifically authorized by the Security Council or justified in self-defense under Article 51. Neither condition has been met.
Finally, the idea that Venezuelan oil is “stolen” US property collapses under legal scrutiny. Venezuela nationalized its oil industry in 1976. While disputes over contractual terms and compensation have existed, these have historically been handled through arbitration and diplomacy—not force. No international court has ruled these oil shipments to be stolen under law.
Repeating the Iraq Mistake—This Time at Sea
What the 2003 Iraq experience makes painfully clear is that institutional credibility depends on the ability to separate fact from political fiction. Colin Powell’s posthumous regret—that his speech was a “blot” on his record—remains a chilling reminder that when unverified intelligence is used as justification for coercive action, the cost is not borne by the speaker, but by the people affected on the ground.
The December 2025 Security Council meeting reminds us how dangerous it is when urgency displaces evidence, as happened in Iraq in 2003. Unverified assertions create policy momentum. That momentum can foreclose diplomacy, manufacture inevitability, and normalize coercive actions like blockades or seizures—justified not through law, but through narrative inertia.
The Need for Procedural Rigor and Accountability
For policy analysts and scholars of international relations, this moment demands clarity. We are not debating ideology or even the internal legitimacy of a foreign government. The question is one of process: Do the claims being made meet minimum evidentiary thresholds before they are used to rationalize actions with international consequences?
Especially when coercive measures—economic or military—are on the table, the evidentiary bar must be high, not symbolic.
The UN Security Council’s authority rests not just on its legal charter, but on its credibility as a deliberative body. When that credibility is weakened by unsourced or politically convenient assertions, the council itself becomes a platform for escalation—not prevention.
The lesson from Iraq is not rhetorical—it is institutional. Intelligence must not be permitted to morph into justification before it becomes verification. Assertions, no matter how confidently delivered, are not evidence. When the international system forgets that distinction, the consequences are paid in blood and legitimacy.
Conclusion: Proof Before Policy
It is not enough to feel certain. Policy must be grounded in demonstrable truth. Especially when coercive measures—economic or military—are on the table, the evidentiary bar must be high, not symbolic.
We are witnessing the reemergence of a dangerous repetition: one where the pattern of assertion becomes the prelude to action, and where action can lead to irreversible consequences. Whether in Baghdad or Caracas, this is a pattern we cannot afford to repeat.
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