Masterstroke: Trump’s Venezuela Coup Ends The Iraq Syndrome 

Something crucial happened with President Trump’s actions in Venezuela.

President Trump substantively killed the Iraq syndrome.

The Iraq syndrome arose in Americans’ minds concerning our role in the world after the failure of the Iraq War and the subsequent occupation.

You have to go back in history to understand this. In the aftermath of the disastrous Vietnam War, America’s foreign policy establishment fell into disarray. According to a lot of experts, the Vietnam War hadn’t been lost because of a combination of terrible war strategy and domestic discontent, they argued. Instead, the new conventional wisdom said the Vietnam War never should have been fought in the first place. Not only that, but America had to fundamentally rethink its role in the world.

The new conventional wisdom suggested that the United States should stop engaging in aggressive foreign policy in its own interests. Instead, the United States ought to pursue a more dovish or isolationist foreign policy in order to avoid quagmires. This conventional wisdom came to be known as Vietnam syndrome.

Undergirding the Vietnam syndrome was a thinly veiled anti-Americanism; the belief that America was not good, but a malign force on planet Earth. Former Princeton professor Richard Falk said at the time, “I love the Vietnam syndrome because it was the proper redemptive path for American foreign policy to take after the Vietnam defeat.”

In other words, America was guilty, as we learned in Vietnam, and now we ought to withdraw from the world and acknowledge our guilt.

But the Vietnam syndrome in the real world came with serious costs. The world without a strong America is a far worse world. An America dedicated to self-castration on the international stage ushered in the Cambodian genocide, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran, among other foreign policy tragedies.

By the mid-80s, Ronald Reagan had decided that it was time for America to move beyond the Vietnam syndrome. In 1983, the Reagan administration intervened to depose a Marxist government in Grenada, a successful intervention that cost few American lives and restored that small island nation to freedom. And just a few months later, Reagan’s defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, spelled out six standards to be met prior to a military intervention.

1) A vital interest had to be at stake.

2) The United States had to be prepared for outright victory.

3) America needed to have clear political and military goals.

4) America had to be willing to adjust its strategy continuously.

5) Public support had to be maintained.

6) All other options had to be exhausted.

The Reagan administration and the subsequent George H. W. Bush administration ended the Vietnam syndrome with the Weinberger Doctrine in 1989.

The United States intervened in Panama to arrest dictator Manuel Noriega, restoring democracy to that nation. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush initiated Operation Desert Storm to eject Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. That intervention was specifically designed to fulfill Caspar Weinberger’s criteria.

And so the Vietnam syndrome was basically dead.

Then came the Iraq War and the war in Afghanistan, which revived it.

Both wars began with specific missions. The Afghanistan War was designed to depose the Taliban regime and prevent the installation of another regime friendly to al-Qaeda. The Iraq War was designed to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Both of those objectives were achieved in the early going, but then the aftermath in both countries turned into an exercise in large-scale nation building, a project that lasted years and cost over $1 trillion and the blood and lives of thousands of American troops.

Ever since, critics of American foreign policy have basically revived the Vietnam syndrome in the form of an “Iraq syndrome,” the idea that every single conflict in which the United States is involved must or will become Iraq — not, contra the usual definition, a justified skepticism of intelligence findings, or fear of nation building — but a full-scale restoration of the Vietnam syndrome: Every single foreign policy intervention is supposed to become Iraq or Afghanistan.

You hear this repeated ad nauseam from the horseshoe Left and the horseshoe Right.

Unsurprisingly, just as with the Vietnam syndrome, the Iraq syndrome ushered in a period of American retreat and international chaos, predominantly led by Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Withdrawal from Iraq led to the rise of ISIS under Barack Obama, Iranian proxies around the region grew, and that eventually resulted in the cataclysm of October 7, 2023.

Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. servicemembers and prompted, at least in part, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. China looked at the United States and the world and decided that it was going to spread its tentacles throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

But now, on the tail end of Joe Biden’s catastrophic foreign policy presidency, an Iraq syndrome presidency, just as Ronald Reagan once did, President Trump has now put the Iraq syndrome to bed.

Trump has done so with what could be called the “Trump Doctrine.” That’s a term that I defined back in November 2024 with the following criteria: First, America’s interests are paramount, and they include a lot of things, from freedom of the seas to the strength of American allies in contentious regions, to U.S. oil interests. Second, America’s interests must be carefully calibrated to our investment in them. Big interest means big investment, small interest, smaller investment. Third, all measures and means necessary to achieve America’s interests are on the table, from diplomacy to military interventionism. And fourth, all of this should be made very public all the time. The threat should be on the table. The threat of the gun should always be on the table.

President Trump has done this. I said this was his doctrine in November 2024. In the last year, he has done it twice. First, he did so with the June 22, 2025, B-2 strikes on Iran’s nuclear reactor at Fordow, reestablishing America’s deterrence power in the Middle East, reshaping the geopolitics of the region in dramatic fashion.

Despite all of the caterwauling from his supposed allies declaring that World War III would break out because they had been captured by Iraq syndrome, President Trump moved ahead. President Trump has done the same with the ouster of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.

In pursuing these actions, Trump has reestablished American deterrence globally. He’s made clear America’s enemies are on notice — FAFO — and he’s demonstrating that such action doesn’t need to lead to a quagmire or to a full-scale, nation-building exercise draining America’s attention and resources.

The Iraq syndrome should be dead. If it is, it died at the hands of President Trump.

America is indeed once again feared on the global stage, which is an incredible accomplishment given where we were just one year ago.

This is what many of us voted for.

At least those of us who actually would like to make America great again in the world.