THE GUARDIAN: He took office promising to annex Greenland and take back the Panama Canal. Now that he has ousted Maduro, other countries could be next
“This is genius,” Donald Trump enthused. It was February 22, 2022. Vladimir Putin had just declared parts of eastern Ukraine to be independent and sent in Russian troops to serve as so-called peacekeepers. The once and future American president was impressed, even inspired. “We could use that on our southern border,” Trump mused.
Trump didn’t know then that he was speaking at the start of a full-scale invasion that has lasted nearly four years and inflicted upwards of 1.5 million casualties and counting. And Trump doesn’t know now what he has unleashed in Venezuela. The South American country is not Ukraine, nor, for that matter, is it Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya. But by ordering military strikes to seize dictator Nicolás Maduro, Trump has thrown a country of around 28 million people into uncertainty and tossed aside the most obvious, hard-won lesson of decades of US foreign policy failures: regime-change wars are easy to start and hard to win, much less to turn into anything resembling genuine success.
So far, Trump has taken step one, if that. He has yet to bring down Venezuela’s regime, only to decapitate it, scooping up the man at the top. In his speech announcing the war, however, Trump played the conquering hero. The president boasted at length about the “overwhelming military power” he had exhibited, as though the United States did not possess a long record of smashing operational triumphs — recall “shock and awe” in Baghdad — that gave way to strategic disaster. » | Stephen Wertheim* | Sunday, January 4, 2026
* Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School
