It Isn’t Always 2003

Washington cafes and Signal chats were abuzz with chatter, gossip, and rumor. It was December 2025, and the Trump administration was weighing a decision to intervene in Venezuela and overthrow its embattled president, Nicolás Maduro. Skeptics of the plan had one word on their lips and fingertips. It was not Venezuela, Maduro, Caracas, or corollary.

It was Iraq.

The intervention, skeptics held, would be like the Iraq War and the broader global war on terror—long, deadly, and likely to fail.

One analyst, writing in Foreign Policy, argued that American-led regime change “is usually disastrous,” comparing it to “the arrogance that led to Iraq.” TIME’s headline blared that President Donald Trump was “forgetting the lessons of the Middle East.” Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) warned that America’s potential intervention into Venezuela mirrored foreign wars like those in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and, of course, the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Both the Foreign Policy and TIME analyses scoffed at anyone arguing that an intervention into Venezuela could be anything like our historical successes, such as 1989’s intervention into Panama to capture Manuel Noriega. One expert dedicated an entire column to arguing that such a comparison was wrong-headed, as unlike Panama, Venezuela’s military was large and powerful, and Venezuelan citizens might “relish the chance to fight invading Americans.”

Then came the intervention, which turned out to be even easier than Panama’s, shocking observers with its swiftness and the ease with which American forces operated. Maduro and his wife were captured within three hours, and American troops suffered no fatalities.

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