It's looking like Trump is preparing to go to war with Venezuela. Here is part of what Max Boot has to say about that in The Washington Post:
The United States has a long record of fomenting regime change in Latin America, whether under the rubric of the Monroe Doctrine in the 19th and early 20th centuries or the fight against communism during the Cold War. This strategy has seldom worked out well, even when successful, and it has led to deep-rooted resentment of “The Colossus of the North.” Yet, for some reason, President Donald Trump seems eager to reprise this ignominious history in Venezuela.
U.S. military interventions in Haiti (1915-1934), the Dominican Republic (1916-1924) and Nicaragua (1926-1933) led to the rise not of democracy but of brutal despots: François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Rafael Trujillo and Anastasio Somoza. The CIA-backed overthrow in 1954 of Guatemala’s elected leftist president Jacobo Arbenz helped lead to a bloody 36-year civil war. It also radicalized many Latin Americans, including a young Argentine doctor named Che Guevara who happened to be in Guatemala when the coup occurred.
The CIA’s 1961 Bay of Pigs operation, designed to topple Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, was a notorious fiasco that embarrassed the new president, John F. Kennedy. It also led Castro to agree to the stationing of Soviet nuclear missiles on his soil to protect his regime from further attacks, resulting in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
Things sometimes worked out better when Washington was able to mobilize overwhelming military might against small countries for fast, in-and-out operations — e.g., Grenada, 1983, Panama, 1989. But Venezuela is far from small: It has a slightly larger population than Iraq did when U.S. troops invaded that country in 2003. It has also proved resistant to U.S. efforts to overthrow its dictatorial regime. . . .
Trying to foment regime change by military force or covert action is likely to backfire and simply feed anti-Yanqui sentiment in Latin America.
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