On Interventionism

• Published: 4 January 2026 — Last updated: 4 January 2026 — Written: 4 January 2026 •

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this entry was prompted by the recent extraction and arrest of Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, by US forces. To preface, let me just say that while the rippling effects of this development are yet to be seen, I do not believe that preemptive assertions that this will just be "another Iraq" or "another Afghanistan" are well-founded.

Many Americans' opinions about American interventionism in foreign countries is derived from the memories of the catastrophic nation-building attempts in Iraq and Afghanistan, conveniently forgetting successful case studies of reconstruction, such as in West Germany and Japan, post-World War II.

This is the unhappy truth: Western failure to nation-build in Iraq and Afghanistan was not born of the inherent folly of interventionism, but instead because of the inherent incompatibility between Western and local cultures. The Germans and Japanese wanted to rebuild. The Iraqis and Afghans could not even agree upon what "rebuilding" meant. Thus, no amount of Western assistance could ever create from scratch (democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism), what had no cultural precedent or scaffolding to begin with.