It is becoming increasingly apparent that the U.S. may be preparing for some kind of military intervention or covert action in Venezuela to dismantle drug trafficking networks operating in the country and possibly even to topple the country’s autocratic leader, Nicholas Maduro. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a longtime vocal critic of the Venezuelan president, sees an opportunity for the Trump Administration to act against what he views as an “imminent threat” to American security. Maduro, who is widely considered to have blatantly cheated his way to victory in the country’s most recent presidential election, is preparing his people to resist a potential invasion from the U.S.
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While it is too early to tell what will transpire in the South American nation, the simmering conflict resembles one that took place just over 1,000 miles west of Venezuela 36 years ago. In targeting Maduro, the Trump Administration is drawing from the playbook President George H.W. Bush used in Panama in 1989 against dictator and drug trafficker Manuel Noriega. That invasion provides a template for action today against Venezuela. Yet the results of the American interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11—which also deployed the Panama model—offer a warning for our current leaders as to how to wield it.
Noriega’s history with the U.S. began in the 1950s when the CIA recruited him as a paid informant. That launched a long career in which he served as a Cold War asset for the U.S. in its confrontation with Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, and other Caribbean communists. In the 1970s, the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Ga., equipped him with the tools he needed to serve as Panama’s intelligence chief. By the middle of that decade, the CIA was paying Noriega $110,000 per year. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents also found him useful when they were looking to bust small-time Panamanian drug dealers.
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Despite this long relationship, Noriega proved to be a highly unreliable Cold War partner. While on Washington’s payroll, he supplied Castro with intelligence on U.S. operations and helped facilitate the shipment of weapons from Cuba to various Marxist insurgent groups.
Meanwhile, he amassed a mammoth personal fortune through his links to Colombia’s drug cartels — his net worth was estimated as high as $800 million by the end of the 1980s. At the time, he served as his country’s top military officer, a post from which he oversaw the repression of political opponents and the intimidation of journalists. Still, for most of its time in office, President Ronald Reagan’s Administration saw Noriega as a useful partner in its effort to roll back Sandinista power in Nicaragua. CIA Director William Casey put it bluntly: “He’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard.”
By 1988, however, Noriega’s behavior had become an outright embarrassment for Washington. The U.S. was championing human rights and the rule of law in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as the Iron Curtain crumbled. But that rhetoric sounded hollow in the face of its dalliance with a drug-smuggling double-dealing despot like Noriega.
That February, the U.S. Justice Department indicted Noriega on charges of cocaine trafficking, with Miami-based U.S. Attorney Leon B. Kellner stating that the Panamanian leader “utilized his position to sell the country of Panama to drug traffickers.” Far from being deterred, Noriega ratcheted up his authoritarianism. Ahead of Panama’s national elections in 1989, his henchmen attacked opposition leaders and their supporters, detained U.S. forces stationed in the country, and harassed reporters. Then he nullified the election, outraging American officials. U.S. Ambassador Arthur Davis condemned the strongman’s “cowardly act” and expressed support for the opposition candidate, Guillermo Endara.
On Dec. 15, Noriega declared his country to be in a state of war with the U.S. A day later, a member of the Panamanian Defense Forces (PDF) killed a U.S. Marine officer after a tense exchange at a checkpoint in Panama City. The PDF subsequently tortured a U.S. naval officer and his wife, who witnessed the incident. Noriega had become an enemy of Washington, and it was only a matter of time before the U.S. would move against him.
President Bush saw the situation as an opportunity to reassert American power abroad after the demoralizing experience of the Vietnam War. In Noriega, he saw an increasingly anti-American drug runner who threatened not only democracy in Panama, but the stability of the region. On Dec. 20, Bush explained to the American people that he had authorized an invasion of Panama to safeguard the lives of American citizens living in the country, bring Noriega to justice for drug trafficking, and “protect the integrity of the Panama Canal treaty” of 1977 (through which the U.S. returned control of the Canal to the Panamanians).
Bush dispatched 27,000 American troops to the Central American country. The intervention—the largest U.S. military operation since Vietnam—lasted only a few weeks and was considered a success despite the deaths of 24 Americans and hundreds of Panamanians. On Jan. 3, 1990, U.S. troops arrested Noriega. He was convicted of drug trafficking, racketeering, and money laundering and sentenced to 40 years in prison. Gen. Maxwell R. Thurman later wrote, “The Republic of Panama was reborn as a democratic nation after twenty-one years of military dictatorship. Twenty-three U.S. servicemen gave their lives so that the Panamanian government could begin the task of rebuilding democratic institutions and economic opportunities for all of the Panamanian people.”
The mission was successful because it had a narrow, clear objective and the U.S. deployed overwhelming force to achieve it. This approach stemmed from the influence on President Bush’s thinking of Reagan’s Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and his own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, who believed that U.S. interventions should be as decisive as possible, with clear and attainable objectives. American forces in Panama had an achievable goal — arrest Noriega and bring him back to the U.S. for trial. As Powell said about Panama, “Nobody even remembers the Panama war. You don’t ever hear of it. But I viewed it as the template of how we should do things.”
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This model also served Bush well during the first Gulf War in 1991. President Bush set a clear, measurable goal—pushing Iraq out of Kuwait—and stuck with it, resisting the temptation to go to Baghdad as U.S. forces routed the Iraqi military.
Venezuela’s Maduro shares some similarities with Noriega. By suppressing dissent and interfering in his country’s elections, he appears to be as hostile to democracy and the rule of law as the Panamanian leader was. The U.S. has indicted Maduro and other members of his regime on charges of drug trafficking and “narco-terrorism,” much like Noriega and his cronies. While Maduro’s ideology is perhaps more in line with Cuba’s Castro and he never enjoyed the kind of courtship from Washington that Noriega once did, he has ruled with a similar disregard for human rights and a penchant for anti-American bravado. What happens next is anyone’s guess, but if the Trump Administration does decide to move forward with a military intervention to execute a swift arrest, U.S. forces will confront an ill-equipped Venezuelan army alongside armed militias, much like Panama’s armed forces and its “dignity battalions,” which achieved infamy for bludgeoning Noriega’s opponents during the 1989 election.
The Panamanian invasion, therefore, offers a template for a swift, relatively painless U.S. military intervention. But while this model worked well for Bush both in Panama and Kuwait, that doesn’t mean it is guaranteed to work. After 9/11, Bush’s son, George W. Bush, dispatched American forces to the Middle East, specifically to Afghanistan and later Iraq. Yet, unlike his father, who had clear, narrow war aims, he embraced murkier goals that demanded larger, more longer-term military efforts. The result proved disastrous.
The disparate experiences of the two presidents Bush suggest that if the Trump Administration decides to intervene militarily in Venezuela, they’d be wise to adhere more closely to the Panamanian example and have a short-term, narrow objective, like arresting Maduro on drug-trafficking charges, as opposed to a long-term stability project like Iraq and Afghanistan, which could galvanize anti-American sentiment and draw the U.S. into protracted, unwinnable conflict.
Aaron S. Brown is a historian and the author of The 1970s and the Making of the Modern U.S.-Mexico Border (Bloomsbury Academic) and has written for the Washington Post and History News Network.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.