The U.S. Gamble in Venezuela: Learning from Covert Coups, Air Campaigns, and Failed Invasions

By Ephraim Agbo  

On paper, the U.S. response to Venezuela’s crisis is a carefully calibrated blend of law enforcement, financial pressure and targeted force: counternarcotics strikes at sea, expanded sanctions, and juridical labels that widen the net of criminality. In practice, however, the mix looks dangerously familiar. Washington is testing whether a combination of deniable force, legal pressure and covert tools can produce political outcomes without the burdens of occupation or long-term state-building. History suggests that gamble often fails — usually in three predictable ways: it produces short-term tactical wins that yield long-term political liabilities; it legitimizes escalation under legal façades; and it leaves a governance vacuum that rivals, traffickers and external patrons eagerly fill. The record from Iran (1953) to Libya (2011), from Chile (1973) to Somalia (1993), offers a bleak road map for what might happen next in Caracas.

The present moment: escalation dressed as precision

Since September 2025, U.S. forces operating in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have carried out a sustained campaign of strikes on suspected drug-trafficking vessels; reporting attributes at least 21 strikes and some 83 deaths to those operations. At the same time Washington has moved to place Venezuelan networks — described in U.S. statements as the Cartel de los Soles — on terrorism lists, dramatically expanding criminal liability for anyone who assists them and changing the legal framing available to U.S. agencies. Those two developments — lethal interdiction plus terrorism designation — are the contours of a new posture: pressure plus punitive law. That posture is politically attractive in Washington: it signals action to domestic audiences, frames the problem as criminal/terrorist rather than geopolitical, and keeps the optics of boots on the ground at arm’s length. But the tactic has three structural flaws. First, designations and sanctions are blunt and can entrench hardliners; second, deniable lethal force invites legal and moral blowback when things go wrong; third, kinetic pressure without an agreed, resourced transition plan risks producing the very fragmentation that makes a country a long-term headache for its neighbors and for global security.

Short-term fixes, long-term costs: historical analogues

Operation Ajax (Iran, 1953) — covert success, generational blowback

The CIA-backed coup that removed Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh succeeded on its immediate objective: securing a pro-Western government and access to oil. But the operation planted legacies of popular resentment and distrust toward foreign interference that helped shape Iran’s later trajectory. The lesson: clandestine regime-change gambits can achieve tactical aims while creating durable, anti-foreign legitimacy that outlasts any short-term geopolitical gain.

Chile (1973) — economic and political sabotage as covert pressure

U.S. covert programs to destabilize Salvador Allende’s government — economic pressure, support for opposition media, contacts with military conspirators — show how external pressure that prioritizes removal over a political settlement can usher in prolonged human-rights abuses and authoritarian rule. If the U.S. backs elite fractures in Caracas without a democratic roadmap, the Chile case demonstrates how messy and morally fraught the aftermath can be.

Guatemala (1954), Nicaragua (1980s), and proxy patterns

Cold-war cases like Guatemala’s 1954 coup and the Contra war in Nicaragua underline another risk: when external actors treat domestic politics as a battlefield, civil conflict and long-term instability frequently follow. Proxy support to opposition forces or insurgents can transform a domestic governance crisis into a regional one — a scenario with obvious resonance if Venezuela’s political splits widen and external patrons deepen involvement. (These cases are less about legal justification and more about the strategic and humanitarian consequences of proxy escalation.)

Libya (2011) — air power that toppled a regime but failed to build a state

NATO’s 2011 no-fly-zone and air campaign helped remove Muammar Gaddafi without committing to a robust post-conflict stabilization plan. The result was state fragmentation, militia rule, arms proliferation and migration flows that destabilized the wider region. That episode is the clearest caution against kinetic measures that can remove a leader but not replace institutions — a warning Washington should take seriously before pursuing actions that could suddenly unravel Venezuela’s fragile governance.

Panama (1989) and Somalia (1993) — the hidden costs of limited wars

Operation Just Cause in Panama achieved the tactical goal of deposing Manuel Noriega but produced contested casualty counts, legal debates about sovereignty, and reputational costs for the U.S. Similarly, the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993 illustrated mission creep and the political limits of humanitarian or law-enforcement missions that evolve into kinetic urban fights — domestic backlash followed and U.S. appetite for sustained interventions waned. These episodes show how even “surgical” interventions can have disproportionate human and political costs.

Kosovo (1999) — when air campaigns are paired with a credible postconflict architecture

Kosovo is a useful counterexample: NATO’s air campaign was followed by a robust U.N. transitional administration (UNMIK) that, while imperfect, demonstrated how pairing coercion with an international post-conflict plan changes outcomes. Libya’s contrast with Kosovo is instructive: air power without a credible, resourced stabilization plan is a recipe for chaos.

Iraq (2003) and Afghanistan (2001-2021) — When Intervention Begets Occupation and Protracted Crisis

The invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) stand as the most consequential examples of the ultimate failure of the gamble the U.S. is now making in Venezuela: that force can decisively produce a favorable political outcome without unbearable cost. In both cases, initial tactical victories—toppling the Taliban and Saddam Hussein—were swift. However, the long-term strategic outcomes were catastrophic: decades of insurgency, hundreds of thousands of deaths, trillions of dollars spent, and the collapse of state institutions into prolonged fragility or civil conflict. These cases expose the final, most destructive stage of the logic previewed in Venezuela: kinetic action that shatters the state, followed by an ad-hoc, under-resourced, and politically unsustainable commitment to state-building. The lessons are stark: even with immense resources and explicit occupation, forging a stable political order from the outside is often impossible. Without such a commitment—as in Libya—the vacuum is even more violently filled.

How those lessons map onto Venezuela’s options

• Sanctions & FTO labels: Useful to tighten pressure, but they risk hardening Maduro’s staying coalition and legitimizing future kinetic measures framed as counter-terrorism — a legal elasticity that can be abused and that does not automatically produce political alternatives.

• Targeted maritime strikes / interdictions: They can degrade trafficking and signal resolve, but each strike that causes civilian deaths or ambiguous collateral harm will intensify political mobilization inside Venezuela and fuel accusations that the U.S. is pursuing regime change by other means. That dynamic already played out in the domestic responses to recent strikes.

• Covert support and elite fragmentation: Historically the riskiest path. Covert tools can work, but covert success often begets long-term blowback — from Iran 1953 to Chile 1973 — and when foreign patrons compete, the country becomes a proxy battleground like Syria.

• Air campaign/no-fly zone without stabilization: The Libya precedent is stark: remove the leader, then watch state institutions fail. Unless coercive options are paired with credible, funded post-crisis plans (and regional buy-in), the aftermath will likely be worse than the original problem.

• Full-scale invasion and occupation: The Afghanistan and Iraq cases stand as the definitive caution against this path. They demonstrate that even the most massive application of military power and nation-building resources cannot guarantee a stable, friendly outcome and can instead drain a superpower's will and capacity. For Venezuela, this option exists in the background of every escalation, a specter of the ultimate failure of policy.

A responsible alternative — politically costly, but necessary

If Washington and its partners truly seek a stable outcome in Venezuela, they must make the hard choices that history demands: secure regional legitimacy, agree up-front on stabilization commitments before coercive measures that could produce regime dislocation, guarantee legal transparency for any lethal actions, and set up burden-sharing for humanitarian and migration risks. That is expensive and politically painful — which is exactly why past actors skipped it and why past interventions went wrong.

Conclusion: a choice, not an inevitability

The United States is not yet at war with Venezuela. But the combination of lethal interdictions, terrorism designations, and stepped-up intelligence and naval activity is a policy trajectory with very familiar exit ramps. History is not destiny, but it is a hard tutor: covert coups breed resentment; air campaigns without post-conflict plans breed chaos; full-scale invasions breed generational quagmires; proxy wars breed lasting conflict. Washington can still choose a different, harder path—one of legal transparency, regional burden-sharing and political investment—but doing so requires acknowledging the full costs, not merely the short-term optics of “surgical” pressure. Until it does, every maritime strike, every sanction and every new juridical label risks being the first step in a replay of mistakes, from Tehran to Tripoli to Baghdad and Kabul, that the hemisphere can ill afford.