Regime change in Venezuela won’t work

OPINION:

Regime change has long been one of Washington’s preferred instruments of coercive diplomacy, a blunt tool promising decisive results, often at the expense of long-term stability.

Time and again, it has created the illusion of progress while planting the seeds of disorder. The U.S. removal of Nicolas Maduro is the latest instance in which short-term triumph is likely to collide with long-term consequences.

Images of Mr. Maduro being taken into U.S. custody sparked celebration, criticism and a familiar sense of deja vu. They recall past “turning points”: Saddam Hussein pulled from a hole, Manuel Noriega photographed under arrest, Salvador Allende clutching a weapon in his final hours. The implied message was simple then, as now: Remove the strongman, and the problem is solved.

History suggests otherwise.

This thinking was institutionalized early in the Cold War by a small circle of U.S. policymakers. Foremost among them was George F. Kennan, a senior State Department official often described as the intellectual father of containment. While resisting Soviet expansion, he also championed covert political warfare and helped shape the 1948 National Security Council Directive 10/2, which authorized clandestine operations including coups, propaganda and political manipulation.

Regime change thus became embedded in U.S. foreign policy from the late 1940s onward. Though Kennan later revised his views, containment endured for decades.

Kennan’s ideas were operationalized by successors such as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles, under whom covert regime change became routine. Although today’s methods differ from Cold War coups, the underlying impulse remains. With Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s rhetoric and President Trump’s embrace of an expanded national security apparatus, now augmented by private contractors, data-driven surveillance firms and platforms, the infrastructure for intervention has been normalized.

Supporters of the Venezuelan intervention point to its low cost, noting that not a single American life was lost. Still, bloodless intervention offers little reassurance that rebuilding a society hollowed out by two decades of authoritarianism will be easier. Mr. Trump’s promise of a “safe, proper and judicious transition” echoes familiar refrains. From Cold War coups to Iraq and Afghanistan, regime change has rarely delivered orderly outcomes. More often, it delays crises, whether civil war, insurgency or state collapse. Venezuela is unlikely to be different.

The instinct to equate the removal of a ruler with the resolution of a society’s problems predates Venezuela by decades. In 1952, the CIA backed Egypt’s Free Officers coup against King Farouk, viewing Britain as an overextended colonial power whose presence risked fueling Arab nationalism and Soviet influence. Washington claimed an early success. Egypt entered decades of military rule, culminating in the 1956 Suez crisis and the 1967 war, illustrating how externally influenced regime change can entangle regional and global conflict.

In 1953 in Iran, the United States helped overthrow Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister, after he nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. Orchestrated by the Dulles brothers through bribery and political manipulation, this coup secured short-term gains at the cost of legitimacy, paving the way for authoritarian repression and the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

This confidence resurfaced after the Cold War era. After Saddam’s removal in 2003, Washington assumed it could manage Iraq’s transition. Military success gave way to insurgency, sectarian conflict and the conditions that produced the Islamic State group. Regime change didn’t eliminate instability; it deferred it, allowing grievances to fester.

Afghanistan remains the most comprehensive rebuke to this logic. In 1979, the Soviet Union installed a friendly government, triggering a prolonged war that ended in withdrawal and collapse. In 2001, the U.S. removed the Taliban and imposed a new political order backed by vast resources. The outcome: two decades of conflict, institutional dependence on foreign support and rapid collapse once that support ended.

Syria offers a more recent caution. External support for opposition forces was framed as a moral imperative, yet the result has been fragmentation, extremist ascendance and persistent human rights abuses.

Mr. Maduro is now in custody, and Washington speaks confidently of managing Venezuela’s transition. Yet, with Cairo, Tehran, Baghdad, Kabul and now Caracas, the same assumption persists: that removing a ruler restores legitimacy.

Decades after the Cold War, regime change remains embedded in the policy toolkit. Kennan himself cautioned in February 1948 against allowing “vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization” to obscure political realities.

Today, Washington continues to chase slogans over substance. The question is not whether regime change works but why its repeated failures have not been enough to abandon it. History demonstrates that the hardest part begins after the cameras stop rolling.

• Tanya Goudsouzian is a Canadian journalist who has covered Afghanistan and the Middle East for more than two decades. Ibrahim al-Marashi is an associate professor of Middle East history and a visiting faculty member at The American College of the Mediterranean and the Department of International Relations at Central European University.