November 18, 2025, 8:57 pm
Author – Alain Stephens
The United States is amassing power off Venezuela’s coast. Warships, Marine detachments, and surveillance aircraft are flowing into the Caribbean under the banner of “counter-narcotics operations.” Military officials have presented Donald Trump with various game plans for potential operations. The U.S. president is openly tying Nicolás Maduro to narco-terror networks and cartel structures, while dangling both “talks” and threatening the use of military force in the same breath. It’s all pushing toward the culmination of crowning Maduro and his government America’s next top “terrorists” — the magic movie-script label that means the bombs can start heating up.
Then comes the media warm-up act: a New York Times op-ed by Bret Stephens, published on Monday, assuring readers in “The Case for Overthrowing Maduro” that this is all modest, calibrated, even reasonable.
“The serious question is whether American intervention would make things even worse,” Stephens writes. “Intervention means war, and war means death. … The law of unintended consequences is unrepealable.”
The column’s argument is simple: Relax. This isn’t Iraq, a conflict Stephens helped cheerlead our way into and proudly declared in 2023 that two decades later, he doesn’t regret supporting the war.
“There are also important differences between Venezuela and Iraq or Libya,” he continues. “They include Trump’s clear reluctance to put U.S. boots on the ground for any extended period. And they include the fact that we can learn from our past mistakes.”
Venezuela, Stephens argues, provides grounds for intervention against criminals in a failing state. Maduro is corrupt, the threat is real, and Trump’s moves are not the opening shots of a war but the necessary application of restrained power. It’s an argument Americans have heard before. And it’s as familiar as the hardware now cruising toward Caracas.
Everything Old Is New Again
The echoes of Iraq are everywhere: the moral certainty, the insistence on a narrow mission, laws stretched to accommodate force, the journalist class nudging readers toward the idea of escalation. The Times leans on that posture — the intellectual confidence that if a dictator is cruel enough, if his country is chaotic enough, then U.S. firepower is not only justified but prudent and even moral.
But step back. There’s nothing limited about an aircraft carrier strike group, including the world’s largest warship, moving into position near a country the United States has spent years sanctioning, isolating, and trying to politically dislodge. There’s nothing modest about weaving “narco-terrorism” into the policy narrative, a label that conveniently sidesteps congressional authorization. And there’s nothing reassuring about the president telling reporters he’s open to “talks,” while simultaneously telegraphing retaliatory force if Maduro doesn’t yield.
This is not law enforcement. It is coercive statecraft backed by military power. And when the press uncritically repeats the administration’s framing, the escalation becomes easier to swallow.
We’ve Seen This Movie Before
Iraq should have been the end of innocence in American foreign-policy thinking. We toppled Saddam Hussein; what followed was not liberation but vacuum. Power didn’t flow to democratic institutions — it scattered, producing insurgency, sectarian collapse, and a national debt Americans will never pay off.
We’ve watched this choreography before too. In 2002, the Washington Post assured readers that toppling Saddam and invading Iraq would be — I kid you not — a “cakewalk.” But the New York Times once again led the way: A 2001 piece titled “The U.S. Must Strike at Saddam Hussein” framed Saddam as driven by “hatred intensified by a tribal culture of the blood feud”, and that preemptive war was America’s moral duty. By 2003, the Times was profiling “Liberals for War,” laundering the idea that even longtime doves were ready to get on board.
And then there was the big one: In September 2002, the front-page report insisting Iraq’s access to “aluminum tubes” was “intensifying its quest for bomb parts,” a claim that became one of the Bush administration’s most potent talking points despite falling apart under scrutiny. Less than two years later, the Times quietly admitted what the country already knew: Its coverage “wasn’t as rigorous as it should have been” — an apology that did nothing for the dead, the displaced, or the war that never ended.
The argument that a conflict with Venezuela is any different hinges on the fantasy that U.S. firepower can topple a foreign regime without creating irreversible instability. But Venezuela is already in economic freefall. Its state infrastructure is brittle. A miscalculation — a strike, a naval confrontation, a retaliatory move from Maduro — could fracture what remains of the country’s governance.
Even in articles and political rhetoric selling the safe insistence this isn’t anything like Iraq, it’s hitting the familiar beats: Redefine the battlefield as a courtroom, call the targets “terrorists,” and pretend the spectators won’t notice. It’s the old Washington parlor trick — war recast as paperwork, missiles disguised as “measured responses.” But beneath the soothing language is the real hazard: This posture locks the United States into a glide path toward escalation. It casts Maduro as a stationary object America can strike without consequence, right up until he isn’t. Because the moment a U.S. service member dies in some hillside village most Americans couldn’t find on a map last week, or a destroyer gets hit by something unseen in the dark, the mission will shed every polite euphemism. It won’t be “limited.” It won’t be “precision interdictions.” It will become the only war frame Washington and the political media never hesitates to embrace: American vengeance, expansive and unbounded.
The Myth of “Limited” War
The press should be asking harder questions, not just about the Pentagon’s talking points, but about what kind of wars we’re willing to inherit. What do we expect these campaigns to become once they outlast the news cycle and the political administration that started them? What do they cost us in dollars, in decades, in the quiet bleed of national attention? Americans are already living through a squeezed economy; we can’t afford another open-ended conflict with the only measure of success being the upkeep of a strained momentum to throw bodies and dollars at finishing what we ultimately started.
But that’s easy to forget from a corner suite in Washington or a standing desk in Manhattan. From that distance, war looks like a policy instrument, a rhetorical jousting match, an intellectualized game played on someone else’s terrain. But the last two decades of living through America’s post-Iraq unraveling should have taught us otherwise. A sharper press, the right questions, and a robust, skeptical stance toward American intervention abroad could have spared lives: service members lost to missions with no endpoint, civilians flattened as “collateral damage,” entire regions left to absorb the shockwaves long after Washington moved on.
That’s the distance the press should be interrogating — between the people who greenlight these missions and the people who have to live inside them. Because if we don’t ask these questions now, we’ll end up asking them years later, after the bills come due and the country pretends it never saw this coming.
The post War in Venezuela, Brought to You By the Same People Who Lied Us Into Iraq appeared first on The Intercept.
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Author: Alain Stephens
