“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain allegedly quipped. On January 3, 1990, Panamanian Commander Manuel Noriega surrendered to US forces, who carried him off to face drug charges. Thirty-six years to the day later, US forces swooped into Venezuela, abducting President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, following decades of hostility between the oil-rich socialist country and the United States. The pretext offered: Maduro had to be taken to the US to face drug charges.
The coincidence is a reminder that the US has a long history of both covert and military intervention in Latin America: President Donald Trump, as extreme as he might be, isn’t an outlier among American presidents in this regard. And despite the right’s attempt to paint Trump as some sort of peacenik (Compact, 4/7/23; X, 10/14/25), he is no less an imperialist than his predecessors.
And that’s precisely why many of the nation’s leading editorial pages are hailing Maduro’s capture.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board (1/3/26) called the abductions “an act of hemispheric hygiene,” a dehumanizing comparison of Venezuela’s leaders to germs needing to be cleansed.
For the Journal, the abductions were justified because they weren’t just a blow to Venezuela, but to the rest of America’s official enemies. “The dictator was also part of the axis of US adversaries that includes Russia, China, Cuba and Iran,” it said. It called Maduro’s “capture…a demonstration of Mr. Trump’s declaration to keep America’s enemies from spreading chaos in the Western Hemisphere.” It amplified Trump’s own rhetoric of adding on to the Roosevelt Corollary, saying “It’s the ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine”—a nod to the long-standing imperial notion that the US more or less owns the Western Hemisphere.
Hellbound and Down 