Trump on Interventionism: Assessing Iran and Venezuela

Trump’s revamped foreign policy, based on replacing the post-World War II neoliberal order and avoiding “forever wars,” has come under considerable criticism for violating its own terms with two recent global shakeups: The capture of former Venezuelan leader Nicholas Maduro in January and the ongoing war in Iran since February 28. Both cases undoubtedly offer examples of foreign intervention. But intervention under a new security framework serving strategic interests, as opposed to mere ideological alignment, may not stray from the Trump Administration’s national security strategy after all. Assessing the factors that led up to intervening in Iran and Venezuela identifies a new era of U.S. foreign involvement put into action—an approach more limited in scope and geopolitically relevant to U.S. interests. 

Identifying a Shifted Foreign Policy: Conditions Before Intervening

First, it is important to understand how Washington’s transformed foreign policy approach is likely to unfold when implemented in specific foreign policy cases. The president’s “America-First” doctrine has indicated a step back from foreign involvement, which would rule out any attempt at intervention, much less regime change. However, restraint in a literal sense is more likely rhetoric than a plausible course of action for any actor today, let alone the global superpower. When taking a look at the official National Security Strategy released Dec 4, we are offered a more in-depth explanation, specifically on what triggers involvement in which regions. What the NSS, or even the National Defense Strategy released by the Pentagon a month later doesn’t mention is the inevitable degree of risk any instance of foreign intervention yields. Using Iran as an example, the need to shock an already weakened and repressive regime to empower cooperative factions doesn’t guarantee total success, nor does it rule out risks of prolonged conflict. This risk is real, but inherent risk alone does not negate the potential benefits of intervening.

Both regimes in Iran and Venezuela share two conditions that made U.S. intervention viable and thus necessary: The target regime was already highly unpopular with the local population, and suffered preexisting conditions of internal fragmentation and weakness, to varying degrees. Both conditions encourage intervention sans a large-scale boots-on-the-ground campaign, facilitating a swifter regime transformation that doesn’t squander either side’s human and financial capital, as was the case in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Venezuela as a Case Study

The U.S. military led a swift two and a half hour operation to capture Maduro, who was succeeded by his vice-president just two days later. The reason for this extraction, as widely discussed, is mainly twofold: To uproot Chinese and Russian influence on America’s southern flank and prevent the proliferation of narcoterrorism. The first line of reasoning was underscored by the large sums of Chinese and Russian investments and financial bailout in Venezuela, which aligned with the NSS’s emphasis on protecting the Western Hemisphere, also known as the "Trump Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine. With zero American casualties, the toppling of a widely unpopular dictator illustrates a type of regime change model that is both smaller in scope and geopolitically necessary to U.S. strategy in the western hemisphere.

Iran as a Case Study: What do we want and will we achieve it?

Ongoing U.S.-Israeli strikes in Iran, despite the armed conflict’s more precarious nature, still don’t signal a relapse in current U.S. strategy. Regime change in which the regime is decapitated entirely does not align with this administration’s goals, nor is it truly feasible. Throughout Washington’s engagements with Tehran under the second Trump administration, the end goal has been more or less consistent: A relatively cooperative Iran that doesn’t engage in nuclear enrichment, pose a ballistic missile threat, and does not sponsor terrorist proxies. The challenge has been that on-and-off negotiations have not yielded success. Regime-change focused on toppling the Islamic Republic cannot achieve this, and instead, could produce a power vacuum that will further destabilize the shatterbelt West Asia region. Applying military pressure on the current regime to achieve behavior change in Tehran has better chances of yielding the desired results.

The timing of these strikes is especially significant in identifying the strategy behind a newer model of foreign intervention: This is the weakest the regime has been in the Islamic Republic’s nearly 50-year history. Sanctions have severely weakened the Iranian economy, most recently seen with the collapse of the Rial on December 28th. Recent geopolitical developments like the fall of Assad in 2024, the Israeli-Hamas war, the 12-day war in June between Israel and Iran, as well as Khamenei’s assassination, have weakened the regime, its proxies, its power projection capabilities, and its regional influence. At home, unrest and civil disobedience have persistently been at an all time high since the 2022-23 Mahsa Amini protests, which flared up again recently with the Rial’s collapse, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of protesters. 

With a multitude of both foreign and domestic pressures, the regime’s relative weakness creates an opportunity for the U.S. to apply further pressure without the need for boots on the ground. This ongoing use of air power in collaboration with Israel undoubtedly falls under intervention, and potentially regime change, but also represents a new model whereby the U.S. can expend less capital in foreign conflicts to achieve a strategic objective. 

The recent setback of Iran blocking the Strait of Hormuz and its retaliatory attacks on the Gulf Arab nations, hints that the current air campaign will be longer than the Trump Administration anticipated, highlighting the inherent risk this operation yields. The rising price of crude oil as a result has been another constraint on the Trump White House.

Domestically, the resignation of National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent, a military veteran and former CIA officer, has created an even larger crisis for President Trump. For the United States, and especially Iran, ammunition stockpiles are finite. Neither Washington nor Tehran will benefit from a prolonged conflict, so it is in Iran’s interest to comply and come to the negotiating table, whether done covertly or publicly. Trump faces additional stakes given the political clock for the midterm elections in November, and now opposition from within his camp. But for Iran, its stakes are much higher as the U.S. risks destabilizing the regime. 

Both cases of Iran and Venezuela are innovative attempts to transform regimes, or at least their behavior. They clearly show that this administration’s foreign policy is anything but restrained. American grand strategy has not ruled out foreign intervention, but there is a new approach towards managing global crises through what is supposed to be limited engagement.  The old ways of regime change aimed at instilling ideological alignment through large-scale operations over an extended period of time has been replaced with smaller and more cost-effective than operations geared towards tangible outcomes in keeping with strategic interests.