For decades, Washington has sold the world a deadly lie: that so-called regime change, in which the United States removes other countries’ governments by force, can somehow deliver freedom to these countries. But those who have lived through this process know U.S. bombs and blockades cannot deliver democracy outside its borders, and that “regime change” only brings death, dismemberment, and despair. Now, President Donald Trump’s administration is dusting off that same playbook for Venezuela.
Right now, as a U.S. armada gathers off the shores of Venezuela, a special operations aviation unit aboard one of its warships has been flying helicopter patrols along the coast. This is the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR), also known as the Night Stalkers—the same unit that worked with an infamous Iraqi Interior Ministry death squad called the Wolf Brigade as part of its operations in U.S.-occupied Iraq twenty years ago.
Western media portray the 160th SOAR as an elite helicopter force employed for covert missions. But in 2005, an officer in the regiment blogged about joint operations with the Wolf Brigade as they swept through Baghdad, detaining civilians. He described a “battalion-sized joint operation” in southern Baghdad, and boasted, “As we passed vehicle after vehicle full of blindfolded detainees, my face stretched into a long wolfish smile.”
Many of the people seized by the Wolf Brigade and other U.S.-trained Special Police Commandos were never seen again; others turned up in mass graves or morgues, often far from where they’d been taken. Bodies of people detained in Baghdad were later found lying in desert graves seventy miles away near Badra, Iraq, but that was well within the combat range of the Night Stalkers’ MH-47 Chinook helicopters.
The Bush Administration responded to Iraqi resistance to the illegal U.S. invasion with catastrophic assaults on the Iraqi towns of Fallujah and Najaf, then ordered the training and unleashing of Iraqi death squads to terrorize civilians and ethnically cleanse Baghdad. The United Nations reported more than 34,000 civilians were killed in 2006 alone; epidemiological studies estimate roughly a million Iraqis died overall.
Iraq has never fully recovered from the U.S. invasion—and the U.S. never reaped the spoils it sought. The mainly Western-based Iraqi exiles Washington flew in to rule Iraq after the invasion stole at least $150 billion from the country’s oil revenues. However, the Iraqi parliament rejected U.S.-backed efforts to grant shares of its oil industry to Western companies, even as economic devastation roiled the nation. Today, Iraq’s largest trading partners are China, India, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey—not the United States.
The neoconservative dream of regime change has a long, bloody history, its methods ranging from coups to full-scale invasions. But a more honest way of describing this pattern of action toward other countries is “government removal.”
U.S.-backed coups usually entail less immediate violence than a full-scale invasion by the U.S. in another country, but they pose the same question: Who or what replaces the ousted government? Time after time, these coups and invasions have installed rulers who enrich themselves through embezzlement, corruption, or drug trafficking, all while making life worse for ordinary people.
These so-called military solutions rarely resolve problems, real or imaginary, as their proponents promise. They more often leave countries plagued by decades of division, instability, and suffering thereafter. Kosovo, which was carved out of Serbia by an illegal U.S.-led war in 1999, is still not recognized by many nations, and remains one of the poorest countries in Europe, while the leaders of the U.S.-backed KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) are on trial at the Hague for horrific crimes committed during the war. In Afghanistan, after twenty years of bloody war and occupation, the United States was eventually defeated by the Taliban—the very force it had invaded the country to remove.
Central and South America are also filled with examples. After the CIA and U.S. Marines toppled the popular democratic government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti in 2004, the country plunged into an ongoing crisis of corruption, gang rule, and despair that continues to this day. Similarly, when the Honduran military removed its president, Manuel Zelaya, in a coup in 2009, the Obama Administration supported an election to replace him, but the U.S.-backed president Juan Orlando Hernandez turned Honduras into a narco-state, fueling mass emigration—until Xiomara Castro, Zelaya’s wife, was elected to lead a new progressive government in 2021.
The United States has been trying to overthrow the Venezuelan government ever since Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998. Its failed efforts have included the attempted 2002 coup; crippling unilateral economic sanctions; the farcical recognition of Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s interim president even as President Nicolás Maduro still governed the country; and the 2020 Bay of Piglets fiasco, in which mercenaries and U.S.-trained Venezuelan exiles mounted a dismal attempt to overthrow Maduro.
But even if “regime change” in Venezuela were achievable, it would still be illegal under the U.N. Charter, which prohibits “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” Contrary to what Trump seems to think, U.S. presidents are not emperors, and leaders of other sovereign nations do not serve at their pleasure, as if South America were still a continent of colonial outposts.
Trump’s opening moves toward a regime change effort in Venezuela—attacks on small civilian boats in the Caribbean—have been condemned in Congress as flagrantly illegal, even by some U.S. Senators who routinely support America’s illegal wars.
By framing his counter-narcotics efforts as a war, Trump has claimed the right to treat suspected drug smugglers as “enemy combatants” and legitimate targets for lethal military force. But drug smuggling is normally a criminal matter, not a pretext for war. For this reason, the United Kingdom and Colombia have suspended some intelligence sharing with the U.S. to avoid complicity in what they view as murders of civilians.
And yet, despite Trump’s illegal threats and uses of force against Venezuela and other countries, he still claims to be “ending the era of endless wars.” His most loyal supporters insist he means it—and that his anti-war agenda was simply sabotaged in his first term by the “deep state.” This time, he has surrounded himself with loyalists and sacked National Security Council staffers he identified as neocons or warhawks—but he has still not ended America’s wars.
Alongside Trump’s piracy in the Caribbean, he is a full partner in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and bombing of Iran. He has maintained the global empire of U.S. military bases and deployments, and supercharged the U.S. war machine with a trillion dollar war chest—draining desperately needed resources out of a looted domestic economy.
Trump’s appointment of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor was an incendiary choice for Latin America, given Rubio’s history of open hostility toward Cuba and Venezuela. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made that clear when he met Trump in Malaysia, saying at the end last month that “There will be no advances in negotiations with the United States if Marco Rubio is part of the team.”
Trump’s manufactured crisis with Venezuela exposes the deep contradictions at the heart of his foreign policy: his disastrous choice of advisers; his conflicting ambitions to be both a war leader and a peacemaker; his worship of the military; and his surrender to the same war machine that ensnares every U.S. President.
If there is one lesson from the long history of U.S. interventions, it’s that “regime change” doesn’t bring democracy or stability. As the United States threatens Venezuela with the same arrogance that has wrecked so many other countries, this is the moment to end this cycle of imperial U.S. violence once and for all.