Driving Maduro from power may prove to be the easy part

The president assembles a fleet of warships off the shores of an oil rich country run by a brutal dictator. He orders hundreds of air strikes against the dictator’s assets, which forces him from power. The president proudly proclaims, “Without putting a single U.S. service member on the ground, we achieved our objectives.”

No, that’s not a scenario for President Trump in Venezuela. That was President Barack Obama’s Operation Odyssey Dawn — the 2011 American military operation that helped overthrow Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi. 

The operation, which Obama came to regard as his “worst mistake,” holds lessons for Trump’s quest to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro (his “days are numbered”) in which Trump hasn’t ruled out using American military force.

Getting rid of the dictator, as Obama learned, is sometimes the easy part. After Gaddafi’s overthrow, Libya ceased functioning as a cohesive country and descended into chaos. The Islamic State gained traction. Libyan migrants flooded Europe. Militias stormed an American consulate and killed the ambassador and three other Americans.

Perhaps Trump thinks that he can stabilize a post-Maduro Venezuela by installing Edmundo González, who won 67 percent of the vote in the 2024 presidential election, which Maduro simply ignored. But González and the best-known opposition leader, 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado, will not be the only actors in a post-Maduro Venezuela, and they could be the weakest.

Any democratic Venezuelan government will have to contend with Maduro’s generals and senior intelligence officials, drug trafficking guerrilla groups, gangs like Tren de Aragua, and pro-Maduro government paramilitary forces. Who is going to stop Tren de Aragua from taking over the oil fields, if not the U.S.?

Libyan-style chaos in Venezuela could impale Trump on the “Pottery Barn Rule” of American intervention in foreign countries — “you break it, you own it” — and force him to do the kind of nation-building he has condemned as “wrecking far more nations than they built.”

The record does bear out his observation. According to one study, the only American successes in the 20th century — defined as a transition to democracy — were Germany and Japan after World War II and Grenada and Panama in the 1980s. The U.S. totally defeated and militarily occupied Germany and Japan, which allowed it to build democratic institutions. Democracy in Grenada and Panama was successful in large part because of their small size.

But if you include the failures in Iraq and Libya this century, there have been were four times as many failures as successes. And the failures were costly in American lives and wealth and —especially in the case of Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq — left bitter memories. Some countries are too ethnically fragmented, traumatized, and lacking in functional government institutions to be successfully rebuilt.  Americans have neither the competence — much of the time we don’t understand the societies that we are trying to rebuild — or the patience for sustained nation building commitments.

It is almost touching, our faith in our ability to heal other countries, but it is also arrogant. To President Obama, the mistake in Gaddafi’s ouster, which he maintains was the “right thing to do,” was not planning “for the day after.” This means that the “day after” Gaddafi fell, the U.S. and its allies, or at least the United Nations, should have been on the ground rebuilding that nation, as though it was just a matter of rolling up our sleeves and getting the job done.

To paraphrase a saying about second marriages, nation-building reflects the triumph of hope over experience. Trump may yet become the next president to fall into the nation-building trap.

Gregory J. Wallance was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations and a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team, which convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. He is the author of “Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia.”