It would require a highly selective memory to regard the abduction of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro and his wife on 3 January as Washington’s return to an imperialist policy that it supposedly abandoned in 1945, or even 1918.

There’s something disingenuous about the sudden reappearance of the term ‘imperialist’ in Western media outlets which previously applied it only to Russia. For – to limit ourselves to the post-cold war era – it is in a very similar manner that Washington returned to largescale military operations in 1989 under President George HW Bush, after long years of ‘Vietnam syndrome’. Like the recent intervention in Venezuela, the invasion of Panama and the abduction of its dictator Manuel Noriega, in blatant violation of international law, were also presented as an anti-drug police operation.

This initiated a new sequence of US interventions, culminating in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 under George W Bush. The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan following the attacks of 11 September 2001 quickly turned into quagmires from which the US only managed to extricate itself after significant losses – in 2011 in the case of Iraq, and a decade later in that of Afghanistan.

These two major fiascos – Iraq in particular, since it involved far higher stakes and deployed vastly greater US resources – revived the Vietnam syndrome. The lessons drawn from that earlier experience – avoid any prolonged occupation, set limited objectives, use massive force at the outset but for a short period, favour remote strikes over sending in ground troops – were reinvigorated, after having been deliberately ignored by George W Bush’s administration. His successor, Barack Obama, who prided himself on having opposed the invasion of Iraq, broke records for the use of remote strikes, especially involving drones. Donald Trump pursued the same course during his first term as did Joe Biden.

What is so new then about Trump’s act of international piracy (…)

Full article: 2 142 words.

Gilbert Achcar

Gilbert Achcar is emeritus professor at SOAS, University of London, and author of The Gaza Catastrophe: the Genocide in World-Historical Perspective, Saqi/University of California Press, London/Berkeley, 2025.

(3) Quoted in Douglas Jehl with Dexter Filkins op cit.

(4) Donald J Trump, Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again, Regnery Publishing, Washington, 2011, republished 2016 with a new subtitle, Making America Great Again, and again in 2024, with a new preface from far-right commentator Stephen Bannon.

(8) Comment to the media in response to Nicolás Maduro’s abduction, 3 January 2026.