President Donald Trump’s campaign for the Nobel Peace Prize no doubt fueled his decision to launch an unprovoked invasion of Venezuela. Instead, the military strike is more likely to yoke him to a bipartisan history of presidential adventurism abroad, from Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam fiasco to Republican George W. Bush’s Iraq debacle.

Closer to home, the record of U.S. intervention in Latin America is a tragic tale of usurpation, torture and outright military failure. To name two sorry chapters: Democrat John F. Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs farce still taints his aborted White House tenure, while Republican Richard Nixon oversaw the CIA-backed overthrow of democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende. Successive administrations looked the other way while his successor, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, “disappeared” political opponents.

Even Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, done with broad public support after the September 11 attacks, became a two-decade quagmire. Days after that invasion, I flew to Moscow, where I’d worked as a correspondent, and spent a week interviewing Russian veterans of the failed Soviet war there. They told me that for all its might and technical sophistication, the U.S. military would suffer the same fate.

Their warnings proved prophetic. Today, the jihadist Taliban are back in power and women’s human rights, which Bush boasted of having restored as a sign of democratic progress, have been stripped away once more.

In the period since the U.S. strike on Venezuela, the shifting rationales by Trump and his senior aides carry worrisome echoes from our Iraqi occupation. Trump’s typically premature claim that Washington would “run” Venezuela prompted a quick semantic pullback from Secretary of State Mario Rubio, who explained that what the president really meant was that it would “run policy” — a diplomatic distinction without a difference. Now, Trump says it’s really about the oil.

As neoconservative commentator William Kristol noted, great powers going back to Britain and well before have underestimated the dangers of foreign occupation and overestimated their ability to curb local opposition. He quoted poet Rudyard Kipling’s admonition lest his countrymen, then struggling to control restive populations in 85 countries and territories across its empire, become “drunk with the sight of power.”

Kipling also warned British leaders to refrain from “frantic boast and foolish word,” wise counsel that Trump routinely flouts. The most egregious example is his repeated claim to have “ended eight wars.” An analysis by the Associated Press found limited successes mixed with various setbacks. It gives him some credit for helping negotiate the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza and brokering a ceasefire in the Jewish state’s 12-day war with Iran.

Notably, though, the U.S.-Israeli effort to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons came only after Trump in 2018 ended an accord that President Barack Obama had signed with Iran three years earlier, under which Tehran had allowed international inspectors into the country.

And Trump’s boast ignores his biggest failure — not fulfilling his absurd campaign promise to end the Ukraine war “on Day 1” of his second term. It also ignores his deplorable decision to shut down the foreign-aid program, ending a six-decade initiative that had earned the United States global goodwill.

The neoconservative movement Kristol promoted found an enthusiastic follower in Bush, who vowed as a White House candidate to reject U.S. failed nation-building, from Vietnam and Somalia to Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. Once in office, he tried repeatedly to install pro-American governments in Iraq and Afghanistan — at a cost of $8 trillion and 6,651 U.S. warriors’ lives. Unlike Trump in Venezuela, Bush at least followed U.S. law by gaining congressional approval for the Iraq invasion, however much his prewar justification was built on phony evidence.

In his presidential campaigns, Trump vowed to stay out of “forever wars.” His Venezuela gambit risks devolving into a protracted military engagement with unforeseen consequences. And it highlights his herky-jerky governing style. On one hand, he used military force to overthrow Maduro even before his formal indictment on federal narco-terrorism charges. Yet, a month earlier, Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who a New York jury convicted in 2024 of running what Attorney General Merrick Garland branded as “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”

Trump must hope that Venezuela follows the example of Panama, which became a U.S.-allied democracy after invading American forces removed strongman Manuel Noriega in 1989.

Trump, who infamously ignored intelligence briefings during his first term, has never been one to heed the lessons of history. No, in Venezuela and beyond, Trump will follow his own contradictory and ever-changing foreign policy — while the Nobel Peace Prize fades into the distance.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

James Rosen is a former political reporter and Pentagon correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers. He has received awards from the National Press Club, Military Reporters and Editors, and the Society of Professional Journalists, which in 2021 named him top opinion columnist. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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