Monday, when Jessica Tarlov asked on The Five how anyone could think “regime change” might work in Venezuela, given how spectacularly it failed in Iraq and Afghanistan, she thought she sounded clever. As usual, she thought she had a point. But she was completely wrong.
Her skepticism is understandable, even if her universalism and condescension are not. Americans have been burned by foreign-policy hubris. Iraq and Afghanistan produced chaos, insurgency, and strategic failure. But the real question isn’t whether regime change ever works. It’s why it sometimes does and why it sometimes never had a chance.
The answer lies not in personalities or wishful thinking but in culture, trust, and institutional memory, the foundation stones of any society.
Regime Change Has Worked Before
The claim that “regime change never works” collapses under even cursory scrutiny. Postwar Germany and Japan were regime-change operations in the most literal sense. Their governments were dismantled, ruling ideologies delegitimized, and political systems rebuilt under foreign supervision. Both emerged as stable, prosperous, high-trust societies aligned with the West.
That success was no accident. Nazism and Japanese militarism were parasitic overlays, not civilizational foundations. Underneath the poisonous political philosophies, Germany and Japan already possessed literacy, bureaucracy, discipline, and impersonal institutions. Remove the parasite, and the host survives.
That distinction — parasite versus foundation — is decisive.
In Germany and Japan, regime change was restorative. In Iraq and Afghanistan, it was constructive: an attempt to build Western institutions from scratch in societies that had never operated that way. One can work. The other almost never does.
The WEIRD Reality Most Pundits Don't Know
To understand why, you need a framework deeper than ideology. That framework is WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, a concept developed in cultural psychology and anthropology and synthesized in Joseph Henrich's The WEIRDest People in the World.
The uncomfortable truth is that the social assumptions behind modern Western institutions are not universal. They are historically rare. Most societies organize trust personally through family, clan, tribe, or sect. Obligation is owed to people, not abstract systems. Rules are enforced through honor and shame, not internalized conscience.
WEIRD societies are different. They rely on impersonal trust: trust in strangers, offices, procedures, and laws that apply even when no one is watching. People follow rules not merely from fear of punishment, but because violation feels morally wrong. Guilt replaces shame. Internal restraint replaces constant surveillance.
Courts, elections, bureaucracies, markets, and contracts can function only under those conditions. These are not cosmetic traits; they are preconditions for modern governance.
This is where American foreign policy went wrong.
The left and right failed differently when addressing change like this, but they failed together. The left assumed universal human behavior: Fix material conditions, redesign institutions, and culture will follow. The libertarian right assumed universal incentives: remove state distortion, and order will emerge. Both treated culture as downstream.
It isn’t.
Culture is upstream of everything. Institutions do not create trust; trust creates institutions. Laws do not generate norms; they codify norms that already exist. Iraq and Afghanistan failed not for lack of resolve, but because American leadership across Republican and Democratic administrations treated societies as plug-and-play systems. Swap out a regime, install new software, and expect the system to boot.
That is not how human societies work.
Why Venezuela Is Structurally Different
Venezuela is not Iraq or Afghanistan, tribalistic and fractured at its base. It is a WEIRD society—imperfectly, degraded by socialistic abuse and criminal malfeasance, but unmistakably.
Before Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro hollowed out the state, Venezuela had courts, contracts, property law, bureaucracy, urbanization, and widespread literacy. Venezuelans were socialized to expect an impersonal rule of law. They knew what legitimacy felt like. Chávezism did not create Venezuelan society. It captured it.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the state was always an overlay atop tribal and sectarian structures. Remove it, and fragmentation followed. In Venezuela, though, institutions were corrupted but not erased, and the population remembers what normal looked like.
That memory makes restoration possible, even likely, if all the criminal elements are removed. Venezuela's WEIRD culture makes not just recovery but real prosperity a possibility.
It also explains why Venezuelan socialism proved brittle. High-trust societies cannot sustain low-trust governance indefinitely. Once trust collapses, compliance becomes performative, corruption becomes rational, and elite legitimacy evaporates. When belief goes, coercion alone fails. That dynamic does not exist in the same way in non-WEIRD societies.
What Trump Is — and Is Not — Doing
Much commentary from the left hinges on the phrase “regime change,” often used as an accusation rather than a description. But it is not clear that Donald Trump is pursuing regime change in the nation-building sense Americans have learned to distrust.
There is a difference between toppling a regime and removing illegitimate elites through legal and economic pressure. What distinguishes the current Venezuela posture, assuming public reporting holds, is restraint: leadership-focused, legality-framed, non-occupational, and limited. There is no talk of nation-building. No constitution-writing. No moral crusade. No promise to fix Venezuela.
That restraint is not weakness. It is cultural literacy.
In WEIRD societies, legitimacy cannot be imposed without poisoning it. Restoration must be recognized internally, not credited to foreign power. Clearing space for Venezuelans to rebuild their own institutions is not empire. It is sanitation. Donald Trump and his administration are apparently wise enough to realize this, unlike any administration in at least the last thirty years or so.
Trust, Restoration, and the Limits of Power
This brings us back to the real crisis: collapsing trust, not as a vague social concern, but as the factor that determines whether regime change restores order or detonates it. Trust is the invisible infrastructure of WEIRD societies. It allows people to obey laws they dislike, accept outcomes they did not choose, and follow rules when no one is watching. It makes courts legitimate, contracts meaningful, and elections survivable. When trust exists, institutions absorb shocks. When it collapses, institutions become costumes, worn but no longer believed in.
Iraq and Afghanistan failed because interventions assumed trust where none existed. Venezuela’s crisis is different because trust once existed there, and its collapse is recent, visible, and widely recognized as illegitimate. That means something real can be restored. Restraint matters. In a high-trust society, legitimacy cannot be imposed without poisoning it. The goal is not to govern Venezuela, but to remove those who destroyed trust and allow the social memory of legitimacy to reassert itself.
As Ronald Reagan understood, high trust does not mean blind trust. Trust, but verify. Honor codes exist, and so do audits. Freedom is extended, and cheating is punished when detected. That logic scales upward. A society capable of impersonal trust can survive elite removal because authority is not purely personal. Courts can function again. Contracts can mean something again. Order can return without mass coercion.
Nothing here guarantees success in Venezuela. History never does. But it explains why success there is plausible in a way it never was in Iraq or Afghanistan. Denying that distinction is not prudence. It is cultural blindness.
Civilization is not plug-and-play. It is a fragile inheritance. And trust is the part most easily broken and hardest to rebuild.
