The U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean is confusing the MAGA faithful. With rumors swirling of an imminent operation to topple Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, the president’s supporters are asking what happened to “America First”? Tucker Carlson recently remarked it was a “little strange” that the U.S. was telling another country, “we don’t like your leadership — leave or we’ll kill you.” Trump’s former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, asked on his podcast, “Is this just a breeding ground for neocon 3.0?” Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has warned that if Trump pursues regime change, “a lot of people will feel abandoned.”

But Trump isn’t the first president to pledge restraint as a candidate, only to embrace regime change in office. Texas Governor George W. Bush promised to dispense with “nation-building,” but, as president, launched the two largest nation-building missions since World War II. Barack Obama criticized Bush for attacking Iraq, a country “posing no imminent threat.” But Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi posed no imminent threat when Obama backed a NATO intervention to overthrow him.

What drives presidents to believe they can solve their problems with regime change? As much as their critics may deny it, there is a logic here, one that almost every post-World War II president has embraced. Even if the logic itself is flawed, successive presidents have come to believe that overthrowing leaders can be easier than negotiating with them.

An aborted deal

Trump himself embraced this logic during his first term, when his administration increased sanctions to help Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó challenge Maduro. But sanctions failed to budge Maduro, and worsened the country’s economic and humanitarian crisis, which had already led scores of Venezuelans to seek refuge in the United States. This time, Secretary of State Marco Rubio appears to be pushing for regime change as a way to address immigration, drug trafficking, and Chinese and Russian influence in the region, while depriving Cuba an ally. But, Maduro appears to have offered most of this and more, with a deal giving the U.S. access to Venezuela’s oil and mineral wealth. We can only speculate on why Trump refused it, or if he’s even ruled it out. But the history of regime change operations is replete with leaders, whose attempts to strike a deal failed to save them from regime change.

Wars of choice

Most regime change targets are a lot like Maduro – they’re politically vulnerable and facing pressure to accept changes that could destabilize their regimes. As I show in my 2019 book, it’s the leader’s inability to accept these demands that sets the stage for a confrontation. Had the demands been easier to swallow, the leader would have accepted them already. But as the crisis escalates, the leader confronts a dilemma. If he concedes, he could expose his weakness, triggering a domestic challenge. If he resists, his foreign adversary may overthrow him. To navigate this predicament, leaders weigh the odds of each outcome, mixing resistance with offers to negotiate, depending on which enemy they fear more.

Even if the logic itself is flawed, successive presidents have come to believe that overthrowing leaders can be easier than negotiating with them.

It was this predicament that led Saddam Hussein to dodge U.N. inspections throughout the 1990s. He couldn’t afford to reveal he lacked the weapons he used to deter his regional and domestic enemies. So he resisted, while quietly reaching out to Washington, offering to be America’s “best friend in the region bar none.” Qaddafi confronted a similar dilemma, when the Obama administration demanded he cease his crackdown during the Arab Spring. Qaddafi proposed talks, but neither he nor a successor could promise to respect a ceasefire while rebels remained armed. As one Obama administration official explained, “NATO and its allies weren’t going into Libya as peacekeepers to referee a protracted stalemate between loyalist and rebel forces, and they couldn’t pretend that was their role. To solve the problem, Qaddafi had to go.”

Why don’t leaders just retire to a dictator’s paradise somewhere? Exile carries risks. Panama’s Manuel Noriega had refused U.S. deals to coax him from power. A one-time CIA asset who had helped funnel aid to the Contras, Noriega’s violent repression and drug-trafficking finally made his crimes too difficult to ignore. The Reagan administration offered him a deal that one official likened to “getting the fox out of the henhouse, then giving him quarters next door.” But the drug cartels had threatened Noriega; out of power, he’d be defenseless. So, the Panamanian dictator tried rallying domestic support instead. Hoping to exploit anti-U.S. sentiment, he declared a state of war with the United States and ordered his forces to harass Americans in the Canal Zone.

Promises of a “cake walk”

Defiant leaders make for tempting targets, but it’s the belief they’ll be easy to depose that makes regime change hard for presidents to resist. Prior to the Iraq invasion, proponents declared the war would be a “cake walk,” and that American soldiers, as Vice President Dick Cheney claimed, would “be greeted as liberators.” Often these assurances come from opposition leaders, like Iraqi National Congress head Ahmed Chalabi, who have incentive to minimize the expected costs. But Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who mostly planned the invasion, had never intended to do nation-building. They wanted to install Chalabi and leave Iraq within months. Obama had the same plan for Libya – hand power to the National Transitional Council and go.

Regime change proponents rarely put much thought into the postwar phase. They often think they can cut costs by dislodging the leader, not the regime. But leadership change either creates the power vacuums that emerged in Iraq and Libya, or leaves the regime intact, ensuring the new boss is the same as the old boss. This is why Colin Powell, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pushed for the 1989 invasion of Panama. Though he would warn against regime change in Iraq, Powell argued that “dumping Noriega would not end the problem. His power base was the PDF (Panamanian Defense Force).” Leaving that intact would mean “another PDF goon would rise up to take his place.”

The Panama invasion was a stunning success, but three ingredients were critical to its success: luck, money, and U.S. troops. Operation Just Cause was the largest airborne operation since World War II with over 200 aircraft and 26,000 combat troops. But roughly half the force was already in Panama and knew their targets well. U.S. military planners were fortunate Noriega ignored signs of an imminent invasion. He spent the night before with a prostitute rather than fleeing to the hills to organize resistance. Still, PDF units held out, engaging in fire fights with U.S. forces until Noriega surrendered from the papal nunciature, where he had sought refuge.

But leadership change either creates the power vacuums that emerged in Iraq and Libya, or leaves the regime intact, ensuring the new boss is the same as the old boss.

But Noriega’s capture was just the beginning. Blind Logic, the aptly named postwar plan, underestimated the task of stabilizing a country devastated by years of sanctions, corruption, and repression. It had assumed U.S. forces could just install Guillermo Endara, the winner of the May 1989 elections that Noriega had stolen. But with the U.S. itching to leave, Endara was forced to rely on elements of the PDF to build a new police force to provide security. A year later, members of this force organized a coup, which U.S. troops put down. It would take a billion U.S. dollars (roughly $2.6 billion today) in assistance and four years until the U.S. formally ended its postwar operations.

Divining Trump’s plans for Venezuela is nearly impossible, but the chances of an outcome like Panama’s are low for two reasons. First, Trump’s sensitivity to costs makes him unlikely to stay the course if Venezuela’s military retreats and organizes guerilla attacks. Second, the president’s opposition to democracy promotion suggests he’s unlikely to commit the resources for a democratic transition. Even if U.S. troops can quickly nab Maduro and pacify resistance, the president who dismantled USAID is unlikely to offer the aid needed to stabilize the country.

All this suggests Trump will go for leadership change, just as his predecessors did in Iraq and Libya. Trump’s military buildup may convince Maduro to seek exile. But this will produce a Maduro clone, who will also struggle to appease the U.S. without undercutting his own power. Maduro’s successor could offer to cooperate in exchange for U.S. help securing power, but this would mean propping up a dictator. The only way to get a different leader is to invest the resources to get a different regime, which Trump is unlikely to do. The U.S. military buildup now makes it hard for Trump to reverse course. Trump may soon learn the lesson his predecessors ultimately did, that replacing a leader is harder than toppling one.