Eve, here. It should no longer be difficult to understand that regime change means that the United States would rather the country become a failed state or be marred by internal divisions than succeed by putting in office someone it doesn’t like. But so many people seem to get paid to rely on not understanding that.
The last time the Trump administration tried to impose regime change on Venezuela, Tulsi Gabbard was even more adamant in condemning the policy.
Here, in May 2019, she rejected that the United States should play any role in ousting President Maduro. Because it only brings results. pic.twitter.com/nK7q5KIso6
— Michael Tracy (@mtracey) October 16, 2025
Written by Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davis, authors of The War in Ukraine: Understanding a Senseless Conflict, now in its second revised edition. Mehdi Benjamin is the co-founder of CODEPINK for Peace and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of Iran Islamic Republic of Iran. Nicolas JS Davies is an independent journalist, CODEPINK researcher, and author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and destruction of Iraq.
United Socialist Party rally in Caracas, August 3, 2024. Photo: Morning Star
For decades, Washington has sold the world the deadly lie that “regime change” can bring freedom and that American bombs and blockades can somehow bring about democracy. But every country that has experienced this euphemism knows the truth. It instead brings death, mutilation, and despair. Now that the same strategy is being dispelled against Venezuela, the parallels with Iraq and other U.S. interventions are an ominous warning of what may come next.
As the U.S. Armada gathers off the coast of Venezuela, a U.S. special operations aviation unit aboard one of the warships conducts helicopter patrols along the coast. This is the same unit from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) — the “Night Stalkers” — that worked with the Wolf Brigade, the Interior Department’s most feared assassination squad, in U.S.-occupied Iraq.
Western media portrays the 160th SOAR as an elite helicopter unit for covert missions. But in 2005, officers from the regiment blogged about joint operations with the Wolf Brigade as they cleared Baghdad and captured civilians. On November 10, 2005, he described a “cooperative battalion-sized operation” south of Baghdad and boasted that “a long wolfish grin appeared on my face as we passed vehicle after vehicle full of blindfolded detainees.”
Many people captured by the Wolf Brigade and other US-trained special police commandos were never seen again. Others were found in mass graves or morgues, often far from where they were taken. The bodies of those captured in Baghdad were found in a mass grave near Badra, 110 miles away, well within range of the Night Stalkers’ MH-47 Chinook helicopters.
This is how the Bush-Cheney administration responded to Iraq’s resistance to the illegal invasion. The devastating attacks on Fallujah and Najaf were followed by the training and deployment of death squads to terrorize civilians and ethnically cleanse Baghdad. The United Nations reported more than 34,000 civilian deaths in 2006 alone, and epidemiological studies estimate that approximately 1 million Iraqis died overall.
Iraq never fully recovered, and the United States never got the spoils it sought. The exiles set up by the US government to rule Iraq have stolen at least $150 billion from Iraq’s oil revenues, but Iraq’s parliament has rejected a US-backed effort to give Western companies a stake in the oil industry. Currently, Iraq’s largest trading partners are China, India, the UAE, and Turkey, not the United States.
The neoconservative dream of “regime change” has a long and bloody history, with methods ranging from coups d’état to full-scale invasions. But “regime change” is a euphemism, and the word “change” means improvement. In more frank terms, it would be the “elimination of the government” or simply the destruction of the country and society.
Although coups usually involve less immediate violence than full-scale invasions, they raise the same questions: who or what will replace the government? A number of U.S.-backed coups and invasions have created rulers who enrich their own pockets through embezzlement, corruption, and drug trafficking, while making life worse for ordinary people.
These so-called “military solutions” rarely solve problems, real or imagined, as their proponents promise. They often leave countries plagued by decades of division, instability and suffering.
Kosovo was separated from Serbia in an illegal US-led war in 1999, but remains unrecognized by many countries and one of the poorest countries in Europe. Hashim Thaci, America’s main ally in the war, is currently in a prison cell in The Hague, accused of horrific crimes committed under cover of NATO bombing.
After two decades of bloody war and occupation in Afghanistan, the United States was finally defeated by the Taliban. The Taliban were the very forces that invaded Afghanistan to eliminate them.
In Haiti, the CIA and U.S. Marines overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s popular democratic government in 2004, plunging the country into an ongoing crisis of corruption, gang rule, and despair that continues to this day.
In 2006, the United States militarily supported Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia to establish a new government, but the intervention created the Islamic resistance group al-Shabab, which still controls large swaths of the country. In 2025 alone, U.S. Africa Command conducted 89 airstrikes in al-Shabaab-held areas.
In Honduras, the military ousted President Mel Zelaya in a coup in 2009, and the United States supported an election to replace him. U.S.-backed President Juan Orlando Hernández turned Honduras into a narco-state and fueled mass immigration until Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro, was elected to head a new progressive government in 2021.
Libya, which has vast oil reserves, has not recovered from the 2011 invasion by the United States and its allies, which led to years of militia rule, a resurgence of slave markets, destabilization of neighboring countries and a 45% drop in oil exports.
Also in 2011, the United States and its allies escalated protests in Syria into an armed rebellion and civil war. It gave rise to ISIS and led to the US-led massacres that destroyed Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria in 2017. With support from Turkey, al-Qaeda-linked rebels finally took control of the capital in 2024 and established a transitional government, but Israel, Turkey and the United States remain in military occupation of other parts of the country.
The overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government with US support in 2014 ushered in a pro-Western leadership, but only half of the population recognized it as the legitimate government. This forced the withdrawal of Crimea and Donbas and put Ukraine on a collision course with Russia, setting the stage for a Russian invasion in 2022 and a further widening and escalating conflict between NATO and Russia.
In 2015, when the Ansar Allah (Houthi) movement took power in Yemen after the resignation of the US-backed interim government, the US joined a Saudi-led air campaign and blockade that triggered a humanitarian crisis and killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis, but still failed to defeat the Houthis.
Which brings us to Venezuela. The United States has been trying to overthrow the government since Hugo Chávez was elected in 1998. In 2002, a coup failed. unilateral and devastating economic sanctions. the farcical recognition of Juan Guaidó as a presidential candidate; and 2020’s “Bay of Piglet” mercenary debacle.
But even if “regime change” were possible in Venezuela, it would still be illegal under the United Nations Charter. The president of the United States is not an emperor, and the leaders of other sovereign nations do not serve “at the emperor’s favor” as if Latin America were still a colonial outpost continent.
In Venezuela today, President Trump’s opening shot, an attack on a small civilian vessel in the Caribbean, is condemned as grossly illegal, even by U.S. senators who routinely support America’s illegal wars.
However, President Trump still insists that he will “end the era of endless wars.” His staunchest supporters insist he means it and claim his first term was sabotaged by the “deep state.” This time, he has surrounded himself with loyalists and fired National Security Council officials he deemed neoconservatives or war hawks, but he has not yet ended America’s wars.
Along with piracy in the Caribbean, Mr. Trump is fully cooperating with Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its bombing of Iran. He has maintained a global empire of U.S. military bases and deployments, supercharged the U.S. war machine with $1 trillion in military spending, and drained desperately needed resources from the plundered domestic economy.
President Trump’s appointment of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser was an incendiary choice for Latin America, given Rubio’s open hostility towards Cuba and Venezuela.
Brazilian President Lula made this clear when he met with President Trump at the ASEAN meeting in Malaysia, saying, “If Marco Rubio is part of the team, negotiations with the United States will not move forward. He is against our allies in Venezuela, Cuba and Argentina.” At Lula’s insistence, Rubio was excluded from talks about U.S. investment in Brazil’s rare earth metals industry, the world’s second-largest after China.
Cuba-bashing may have served Rubio well in domestic politics, but as secretary of state he would no longer be able to responsibly manage America’s relations with the world. President Trump will have to decide whether to pursue constructive engagement with Latin America or push Mr. Rubio into new conflicts with neighboring countries. Rubio’s threat of sanctions against countries hosting Cuban doctors has already alienated governments around the world.
The Venezuelan crisis that Trump has manufactured exposes the deep contradictions at the heart of his foreign policy. His conflicting ambitions are to be both a war leader and a peace builder. Worship of his army. And his capitulation to the same war machine that ensnares every American president.
If there is one lesson from America’s long history of intervention, it is that “regime change” does not bring about democracy or stability. Now is the time to end the cycle of American imperial violence once and for all, as the United States threatens Venezuela with the same arrogance that has destroyed so many other countries.
