Panama, Iraq, and Venezuela
By Darrell Lee
American interventionism has finally come full circle. Over the last four decades, the United States has refined the violent art of removing authoritarian leaders, moving from the blunt force of the 20th century to the complex nation-building of the early 2000s, and finally returning to the surgical precision of the manhunt in 2026. By tracing the capture of Manuel Noriega in Panama, the hunt for Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and the extraction of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, we witness a superpower learning a brutal lesson: it is far easier to capture a dictator than it is to build a country.
The story begins in Panama, the archetype of the post-Cold War manhunt. On December 20, 1989, President George H.W. Bush launched "Operation Just Cause." The objective was personal, localized, and explicitly criminal: the removal of Manuel Noriega, the de facto dictator of Panama and a former CIA asset turned drug trafficker. The United States did not rely on proxies or economic sanctions to do the heavy lifting; it sent 26,000 troops to overwhelm the Panamanian Defense Forces.
The mechanics of Noriega’s capture reflect a time when American power was blunt, overwhelming, and theatrical. After U.S. Navy SEALs destroyed his private jet and Army Rangers seized the airport, Noriega fled to the Apostolic Nunciature (the Vatican embassy) in Panama City. The U.S. military surrounded the building. In a bizarre display of psychological warfare, troops blasted heavy metal music—from Van Halen to The Clash—at the embassy day and night to wear down the dictator's resolve. On January 3, 1990, Noriega surrendered. He was not treated merely as a fallen head of state but as a common criminal; agents immediately flew him to Miami to face drug trafficking charges. The entire operation lasted only a few weeks. It established a precedent: the United States reserved the right to police its "backyard" by physically arresting heads of state who crossed the line.
Fourteen years later, this model expanded into the monstrous scale of the Iraq War. On March 20, 2003, President George W. Bush authorized "Operation Iraqi Freedom." Unlike the localized police action in Panama, this was a massive geopolitical restructuring involving over 170,000 coalition troops. The target was Saddam Hussein, a leader the U.S. had previously supported during the Iran-Iraq war, mirroring the "former asset" dynamic seen with Noriega.
However, the capture of Saddam Hussein diverged sharply from the quick resolution in Panama. The conventional war toppled the Ba'athist government in weeks, symbolized by the toppling of the Firdos Square statue on April 9, 2003. Yet, Saddam vanished, sparking a nine-month search that fueled a growing insurgency. American intelligence eventually tracked him to a farm near Tikrit. On December 13, 2003, during "Operation Red Dawn," U.S. forces found the dictator hiding in a "spider hole"—a small, subterranean bunker. The contrast with Noriega is telling. Noriega surrendered in a diplomatic sanctuary wearing a crisp uniform; Saddam was pulled from the dirt, disheveled and disoriented, by soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division.
While Noriega faced a U.S. federal court, the U.S. handed Saddam over to the new Iraqi Interim Government to face a chaotic local tribunal, leading to his execution on December 30, 2006. The aftermath of the Iraq invasion taught American policymakers a brutal lesson: physical capture is the easy part; the vacuum left behind creates decades of chaos. The cost of the Iraq War—trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives—effectively killed the taste for nation-building.
This brings us to the modern era and the case of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. For years, it appeared the U.S. had abandoned physical intervention in favor of "lawfare" and economic strangulation. In November 2016, under the Obama administration, a U.S. federal court convicted Efraín Campo Flores and Franqui Francisco Flores de Freitas—the nephews of Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores—of conspiring to import 800 kilograms of cocaine into the United States. Evidence presented at trial painted the First Lady and the First Family not as bystanders, but as active managers of a drug trafficking ring that utilized the presidential hangar to move product. The characterization of the regime as a criminal enterprise was cemented in November 2017, during this first Trump administration, when Maduro’s security forces lured six executives from Citgo—the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela's state oil company—to Caracas for a budget meeting. The "Citgo 6," five of whom were U.S. citizens, were arrested by masked gunmen and imprisoned for years in the Helicoide intelligence prison. Maduro utilized them as human bargaining chips in a cynical game of "hostage diplomacy" to leverage relief from U.S. sanctions, signaling to Washington that his government operated less like a state and more like a cartel. To combat this state-sponsored piracy, the United States turned to its Navy. On March 26, 2020, the DOJ indicted Maduro for narco-terrorism. It seemed the U.S. was content to trap him in a cage of sanctions. On April 1, 2020, U.S. Southern Command surged destroyers, littoral combat ships, and Coast Guard cutters into the Caribbean. This blockade wasn't a prelude to invasion, but a counter-narcotics dragnet designed to intercept the "Cartel of the Suns'" shipments, effectively treating the Venezuelan navy as an accomplice to organized crime.
However, the target on Maduro’s back was painted by more than just drug charges. Venezuela sits atop the world's largest proven oil reserves, a strategic prize that Maduro had increasingly mortgaged to American adversaries. By the mid-2020s, Caracas had become a beachhead for Chinese and Iranian influence in the Western Hemisphere, hosting military advisors and engaging in joint drills. Furthermore, U.S. intelligence had gathered concrete proof that the Maduro regime was acting as a clearinghouse for sanctioned Russian energy. By importing Russian condensate to dilute Venezuelan heavy crude and utilizing a shared "ghost fleet" of tankers to obscure origins, Caracas was helping Moscow evade the Western financial restrictions. Maduro was no longer just a ruler who uses political power to steal his country's resources and export illegal drugs to the rest of the world; he had become a vital logistic node for America's global adversaries.
In September 2024, during the Biden administration, U.S. officials seized Maduro’s presidential plane in the Dominican Republic. One year later, now in the second Trump administration, in September 2025, the endgame began. The Trump administration initiated "Operation Southern Spear," a radical shift in rules of engagement that designated drug traffickers as "narcoterrorists" subject to lethal force. On September 1, 2025, the U.S. Navy conducted its first airstrike on a Venezuelan vessel, killing 11 alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang. Secretary of State Marco Rubio bluntly summarized the new doctrine: "Instead of interdicting it, on the president's orders, we blew it up." By the end of the year, over 35 strikes had killed at least 115 people. This kinetic campaign culminated in a total naval quarantine in December, effectively severing the regime's lifeline.
On January 3, 2026, in a stunning reversal of the "lawfare" trend, Trump authorized a brazen overnight raid into the heart of Caracas. Unlike the massive invasion of Panama or the sprawling war in Iraq, this was a surgically precise extraction carried out by the Army’s Delta Force, guided by months of CIA tracking.
U.S. forces breached the presidential palace and located Maduro in a hardened "safe room" within the compound. Reports indicate he attempted to seal himself inside but failed to close the heavy steel door before the team breached the perimeter. The operation sparked an immediate semantic battle in the global media, with leaked memos revealing that BBC journalists were instructed to use the term "captured" rather than "kidnapped," highlighting the blurred lines of 21st-century intervention. Just as Noriega was flown to Miami on January 3, 1990, Maduro was flown out of Venezuela exactly 36 years later, on January 3, 2026. U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi announced that Maduro and his wife would be transported to the Southern District of New York to face narco-terrorism charges, appearing in a Brooklyn courthouse on January 5, 2026, to plead not guilty.
The capture of Maduro marks the synthesis of the Panama and Iraq models. In 1989, the U.S. invaded to arrest a criminal. In 2003, the U.S. invaded a region to change it. In 2026, the U.S. used the overwhelming military force of 1989 but applied it with the laser focus of a counter-terrorism raid, strictly avoiding the "nation-building" trap of 2003. We have moved from the "Spider Hole" back to the "Extraction." The seizure of Maduro confirms that while the tools of war change, the core American instinct remains: when the legal and financial pressure fails, the United States is still willing to send a team in the middle of the night to bring the target to a courtroom. The "Sanctions List" was not the end of the strategy; it was merely the waiting room for the raid.
If you are undecided whether this action by the Trump administration was a good idea, look at who is being critical. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum "categorically rejected" the intervention, viewing it as a dangerous precedent. Her government is particularly alarmed because President Trump has used similar justifications (combating drug cartels) to hint at potential future military action on Mexican soil. She emphasized that Mexico is a sovereign nation that cooperates on security but will not accept foreign intervention. Colombian President Gustavo Petro issued the strongest warning, stating he would "return to arms" (referencing his past as a guerrilla fighter) if the U.S. launched similar strikes in Colombia. He also revealed that he had fired Colombian intelligence officers who were feeding the U.S. "false information" and rejected accusations that his government was facilitating cocaine trafficking. Cuba's Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez stated that Cubans were "prepared to give their lives" against any U.S. intervention, viewing the capture of their closest ally as a direct threat to their own regime.
Considering the chain of events began in 2016, the criticism of the US government shouldn’t be the removal of a socialist dictator aligning himself with communist and dictatorial enemies of the U.S. and an international criminal, but what took so long? If this action sends a chill down the spine of others of his type, or the Mexican government that has a long history of either ignoring or supporting drug cartels in their country, so much the better.
Darrell Lee is the founder and editor of The Long Views, he has written two science fiction novels exploring themes of technological influence, science and religion, historical patterns, and the future of society. His essays draw on these long-standing interests and apply a similar analytical lens to politics, literature, art, culture, and historical events. After retiring from a 36-year career as a software and systems engineer on the Space Shuttle and then the Space Station programs, he now splits his time between rural east Texas and Florida’s west coast, where he spends his days performing variable star photometry, dabbling in astrophotography, thinking, napping, fishing, and writing, not necessarily in that order.