The United States massed thousands of troops, planes and ships off the coast. Their ostensible purpose: to stop a corrupt dictator’s drug trafficking and money laundering. But since that dictator had stolen his country’s most recent election, another goal of Washington’s military buildup was to defend democracy and reinstate the election’s rightful victor. The US even placed a bounty on the dictator’s head, offering a significant reward for information leading to his arrest. There was, as usual, another barely acknowledged objective behind the troop movements. All of it added up to American plans for regime change in …

No, we are not talking about Donald Trump’s current obsession with Venezuela, but “Operation Just Cause,” US President George H.W. Bush’s December 1989 invasion of Panama.

The similarities between what is happening now in Venezuela and what happened in the lead-up to that earlier incursion are noteworthy. But the differences in outcomes between the attack on Panama and any actual assault on Venezuela could be even more striking—and dangerous.

First, the Panama backstory.

The purported principal reason Bush sent US troops into Panama was to arrest that country’s leader, General Manuel Noriega, whom federal courts in Tampa and Miami had indicted for drug smuggling. There was a political purpose, too. Washington strongly supported Guillermo Endara, the US-educated leader of an opposition coalition international observers believed had won Panama’s 1989 election, only to see Noriega annul the results and install his own candidate as president. The Bush administration publicly claimed its invasion was to “protect the integrity” of a 1977 treaty signed by President Jimmy Carter to cede control of the Panama Canal to Panama by 2000, but many of Bush’s supporters privately hoped he would use the invasion to scrap the treaty.

Bush mobilized 25,000 military personnel for Operation Just Cause. On the first night of the invasion—December 20, 1989—Endara was sworn in as Panama’s new president. Two weeks later, Noriega himself surrendered. In 1992, Noriega was sentenced to 40 years’ imprisonment in the United States after being found guilty of drug trafficking, money laundering and racketeering.

Mission accomplished? Yes, and no.

The costs were high, the accomplishments minimal. While Noriega died in a US prison in 2017, Endara’s government proved unpopular and was itself defeated in 1994. According to the US Department of Defence, it spent close to $165 million—$4.7 billion today—to arrest just one indicted drug trafficker. The broader human cost: 26 Americans and more than 500 Panamanians died in the conflict. The Panama Canal treaty survived, but it remains an irritant to Donald Trump, who threatened to “take back” Panama by force, if necessary, early in his second term.

All of which brings us back to Trump and Venezuela.

Like Bush, Trump has played the narcotics card and supports regime change in Venezuela. But he’s upped the Bush ante, claiming President Nicolas Maduro’s government itself is a “narco-terrorist regime” with which the US is at war. He has ordered the largest military buildup in the region since 1989’s Panama invasion, authorized the air force to bomb small boats, killing the crews of vessels he claims are ferrying drugs to the United States, green-lit the CIA to undertake military missions inside Venezuela, and even mused about “land-based” attacks inside Venezuela.

Will Trump actually invade Venezuela?

It depends. The US president is hypocritical, erratic and irrational. He claimed, for example, that his government is targeting suspected Venezuelan drug smuggling vessels ferrying fentanyl into the US. Experts say Venezuela is not a major source of the fentanyl sold in the US. More recently, Trump undermined his own claims to be fighting a war on drugs when he pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president, who was convicted last year and sentenced to 45 years in US prison for conspiring to transport hundreds of tons of cocaine into the U.S. and making millions in bribes from cartel leaders like Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. Trump argued Hernández had been treated “very harshly and unfairly.”

Mike Vigil, the former American Drug Enforcement Agency chief for international operations, counters that pardoning Hernández reveals how Trump’s entire anti-drug effort is “a charade—it’s based on hypocrisy.”

But Trump is also—always—transactional. What he really wants from Venezuela—his own larger objective—is control of its oil reserves, the largest proven reserves in the world. He is also determined to bring about regime change, and overthrow Nicolás Maduro, a major irritant from Trump´s first presidency.  If he can’t achieve that by threats and bluster, there is always the possibility he may blunder into an actual invasion.

But the outcome could be very different from what happened in Panama in 1989.

At the time of that invasion, Panama’s population was under three million, and its Defence Forces numbered just 16,300 active personnel. Venezuela is a much larger country with a population of 30 million and an active military of over 110,000, supplemented by the recently announced call-up of 200,000 volunteers to the militia.

At the time of the Panama incursion, the US Southern Command was based in Panama and already had a permanent garrison of more than 13,000 troops on the ground. The US has no official military presence in Venezuela.

Although the US, with the world’s largest and best-equipped military, would almost certainly ultimately prevail in any armed conflict with Venezuela, the costs, both financial and reputational, could be enormous.

As Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a US think tank, notes, the American record of “meddling in the political affairs of countries” has been “abysmal. Although the United States sometimes succeeded in removing leaders it did not like … regime change interventions often created new adversaries and left local populations worse off … An intervention in Venezuela is likely to produce similarly bad outcomes.”

We still don’t know where Trump’s threats against Venezuela will lead, but we can be reasonably certain that the impact will be significantly worse than in 1989.

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