Millions of Venezuelans fled the country because of hunger and violence

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Although Latin Americans are widely celebrating the United States’ abduction of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, some voices, predominantly western progressives, have condemned the operation as destabilizing, illegal and immoral. Don’t listen to them: their arguments are specious and rife with contradictions.  

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These critics often claim that Washington’s past misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan prove that regime change in Venezuela will fail — but the cultural, political and historical contexts of these countries are incomparable. 

American nation building was unsuccessful in the Middle East because it imposed western political norms upon a population that neither understood nor wanted them. Without democratic traditions, Iraq and Afghanistan’s institutions devolved into swamps of corruption and patronage, while ethnic and religious sectarianism raged unencumbered. 

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But Venezuela only descended into authoritarianism in the 2000s, following four decades of democratic rule.The country has all of the cultural and institutional assets needed for a stable post-authoritarian transition, including a resilient civil society, unifying sense of national identity and consolidated opposition movement.  

In this way, Venezuela is more analogous to Panama than any Middle Eastern case study. 

Panama became a dictatorship in the 1980s under General Manuel Noriega, following several decades of flawed democratic rule. Like Maduro today, Noriega was personally implicated in international drug trafficking and money laundering, which eventually prompted the United States to