Who’s Next?
Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2026 6:03 pm
China into Taiwan? Russia into Moldova? USA into Greenland?
It’s all very depressing
It’s all very depressing
The US has quite a record of invading places over the last 40-odd years, though before the recent Venezuela operation it organised international partners for the previous three - Iraq (2003), Afghanistan (2001) and Haiti (1991). What just happened in Venezuela is more comparable to a couple of US invasions in the 1980s, Panama and Grenada.
In 1989, the US, under Bush I, invaded Panama. The main objective was to capture General Manuel Noriega, who wasn't officially president but was the effective ruler of the country, appointing puppet presidents. This operation took a few days. A little over 500 Panamanians died in the action, and a handful of US troops. As with Maduro, Noriega had recently stolen an election for his chosen puppet. Noriega had also made himself fabulously rich through drug trafficking, and was tried for that in the US. Certainly some of Maduro's wife's relatives have been caught with a lot of drugs, in 2015, in the so-called Narcosobrinos affair.
In 1983, the US, under Ronald Reagan, invaded Grenada, with the cooperation of some other Caribbean nations, to enforce a regime change. I think they were a bit too left wing for Reagan.
Neither the Panama nor Grenada incidents led to much thought that the US was going to go around routinely invading nations like that. After that, it was more careful to get its friends in on the act. But in those days there wasn't an issue of giving other countries excuses to invade places, countries like the Soviet Union invaded places if they felt like it regardless of whether the US also did it.
What is rather different is that in Panama and Grenada, such was the might of the US in comparison to those places they invaded, that they did literally enforce regime change. Noriega was quite brazenly a criminal running a mafia state. Grenada was rather more shocking at the time. Those countries both put themselves on better courses after the interventions.
But Haiti has been a disaster, only getting more and more ungoverned and ungovernable since the intervention intended to stabilise the place. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq have been advertisements for the policy either.
Probably the place the US would most like to enforce a regime change is Cuba. But what happened in Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan are awful warnings of what can go wrong when you try to do that. Panama and Grenada were more successful, and it would be interesting to assess the reasons for that.