Risks of U.S. Intervention in Venezuela: Could Libya’s History Repeat Itself?

Justin Logan and Lawrence Monterrey wrote in the Cato Institute: Last week, the Trump administration announced that the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford and its accompanying strike group, including three Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers, would be transferred from the Mediterranean to the U.S. Southern Command area of responsibility.

These forces will join a substantial fleet already operating in the Caribbean, which in recent months has increasingly conducted operations against suspected drug-smuggling vessels. These operations have been aimed at “weakening and dismantling” the cartels that the U.S. government designated as foreign terrorist organizations earlier this year.

The arrival of an aircraft carrier strike group raises serious questions about the true intent of operations in the Caribbean, especially given rising tensions with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Trump’s administration openly discussing potential strikes on targets inside Venezuela. The Miami Herald has reported that such attacks could occur “within days or even hours.”

The size and composition of the gathered forces are not optimized for classic counter-narcotics missions but are designed more for a sustained air and naval campaign. In fact, the number of U.S. naval assets in the Caribbean now surpasses those deployed in 2011 for Operation Odyssey Dawn off the Libyan coast—a campaign that involved extensive bombing and ultimately led to the collapse of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime.

In some circles, calls for military action against the cartels have gradually shifted toward pressure for regime change in Venezuela, and the United States has assembled the forces necessary for such action. If Trump triggers an intervention following the “Libya model,” there is a real risk of repeating one of the most disastrous U.S. foreign policy mistakes—a mistake that led to civil war, a refugee crisis, and regional instability.

In March 2011, the United States and its NATO allies, with the backing of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, launched airstrikes against Libya under the banner of humanitarian intervention. The stated mission was to prevent mass killings by Gaddafi’s forces, but within months, the campaign evolved into a regime-change operation.

The naval forces gathering in the Caribbean mirrors the deployment in the Mediterranean in the lead-up to Operation Odyssey Dawn, except that today’s capabilities—augmented by an aircraft carrier strike group and access to U.S. mainland bases—are far greater. Even if this display of power is purely symbolic, the risk of unintended escalation or mission creep, similar to Libya, is not negligible. The main lesson of Libya is not the speed with which a second-rate force was overwhelmed by the U.S. military, but the unpredictable and negative consequences that followed.

The Libya model relied on indirect support through air and naval power without deploying ground forces. The initial six-month phase involved hundreds of sorties and Tomahawk missile strikes from U.S. and allied vessels.

About six months later, Gaddafi was killed, and the United States declared victory. However, Libya quickly descended into chaos, the country fragmented among militias and rival territories, extremist groups including ISIS took root, Libyan weapons spread across North Africa, and regional instability intensified. Libya’s collapse turned the Mediterranean into a pathway for human trafficking and mass migration—a crisis whose consequences European countries are still grappling with. Libya is not a model to emulate but a stark warning about the unintended consequences of externally imposed regime change.

Today’s Venezuela faces many of the same dangers Libya did in 2011: an authoritarian leadership, a collapsed economy, and a population suffering under repression and shortages. However, military intervention will neither solve these problems nor prevent fentanyl from entering the United States; it will likely exacerbate them.

Venezuelan armed forces remain loyal to Maduro, and U.S. intervention would likely inflame Venezuelan nationalism, prolong internal conflict, open the door to Russian or Chinese involvement as proxy actors, and further destabilize neighboring countries already burdened by refugees. In such chaos, the primary beneficiaries are likely to be the cartels rather than the military.

The resulting humanitarian crisis will undoubtedly generate calls for further U.S. intervention. Advocates will argue that ground forces are necessary to deliver humanitarian aid, restore essential services, or protect civilians from the Venezuelan military’s potential war crimes. This is the slippery slope of foreign interventions that has been traveled repeatedly.

Operation Odyssey Dawn and the subsequent chaos in Libya serve as a powerful reminder that even “limited” interventions can quickly become disasters. A Venezuelan uprising against Maduro, if it occurs, would be a victory for human freedom, but the U.S. military should not be used as a tool of revolution. The United States must resist the temptation to repeat history’s mistakes.