Demonstrators outside the Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse as Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro awaits his arraignment hearing on Jan. 5, 2026, in New York City. Photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images

Last weekend, the United States unleashed one of the most intense overseas military operations it has seen in decades. In a meticulously planned strike involving dozens of aircraft, helicopters breaching Caracas airspace, and elite special forces, U.S. troops struck multiple sites across Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, flying them to New York to face conspiracy and drug trafficking charges. The raid, executed early in the morning with what the U.S. described as precision strikes and disabled air defenses, stunned the region and drew international condemnation for violating Venezuelan sovereignty.

The American public’s response to the capture of Nicolás Maduro has been stark and muted, marked more by concern than triumph.

The Senate handed President Donald Trump a rare institutional rebuke on Thursday, advancing a war powers resolution aimed at restricting his authority to launch further military action against Venezuela without Congress. In a narrow 52-47 vote, five Republican senators joined every Democrat to move forward with an attempt to reclaim the constitutional role of Congress in declarations of war — a dramatic crack in GOP unity. That fracture didn’t come because of partisanship, but because lawmakers from both sides are growing uneasy with open-ended military adventurism that has dragged the country closer to another pointless conflict.

In the fevered rhetoric around Venezuela, even skeptics of Trump’s saber-rattling have been smeared as pro-Maduro sympathizers among GOP and conservative bastions.

From a purely tactical standpoint, the operation was a textbook display of American might: fast, overwhelming, and successful, with U.S. forces in and out of Venezuela before most of the world had even processed what was happening. But almost immediately, that show of force collided with a harder reality at home: Only 1 in 3 Americans say they support it, an unusually low level of approval at the very outset of a U.S. military operation.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken January 4 to 5 found that just 33 percent approved of the U.S. removing Maduro, while 72 percent reported their concerns about the U.S. getting too involved in Venezuela. Support breaks sharply along party lines, with Republicans backing the operation at far higher rates than Democrats and independents.

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Historically, Americans have given new conflicts much more leeway. For example, Gallup found that just after George W. Bush launched the 2003 invasion of Iraq, about 75 percent of Americans backed it— support that only eroded years later. Even larger majorities backed the 1991 Gulf War and the 2001 Afghanistan War. Hell, even America’s bloodiest wars started with broader public backing: In August 1950, 65 percent of Americans said it was not a mistake to defend South Korea, according to Gallup polling at the time. And when the U.S. further escalated the war in Vietnam, roughly 60 percent of Americans said in August 1965 that sending troops to fight was not a mistake, although support cratered years later.

Today’s polls show the exact opposite: a sharp lack of faith from the very beginning of our war games in Venezuela.

In Gallup’s words, Americans ordinarily “give the benefit of the doubt to U.S. leaders when a war is initiated” — but this time, the benefit of doubt has collapsed. The Trump administration’s response has been swift: to label such doubters as enemies of the state.

Trump’s war Cabinet has faced a cascade of questions — about legality, transparency, and whether the operation sets a dangerous precedent. As Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy put it bluntly, the strike was “wildly illegal,” and added that the administration “lied to our face.”

Trump responded by mocking his critics, calling Democratic skeptics “weak, stupid people,” and scoffing that they should stop asking whether the operation was constitutional and instead just say “‘Great job.’”

Republicans went a step further, labeling doubt as disloyalty. In Florida, Sen. Ashley Moody scolded that detractors are failing a patriotic purity test: “Do not become the mouthpiece of our foreign adversaries,” she said — the implication being that if you approach kicking up international conflicts with caution or demand transparency, you’re obviously on board with narco-terrorism.

Critics of Israel’s war in Gaza were told that opposing the bombing meant siding with Hamas. In the lead-up to the Iraq War, anti-war protesters were smeared as being “anti-troop” or terrorist sympathizers. Now, skepticism about U.S. actions in Venezuela is being treated the same way — as defending Maduro, rather than a demand for answers. It’s a familiar maneuver: Collapse moral questions into us-versus-them loyalty tests, then brand dissent as sympathizing with the enemy. But perhaps because Americans have lived through where that logic leads — and paid a great toll — they’re rebuking this binary propaganda outright.

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For half a century, the United States has tried to swap out “evil” regimes by force and mostly failed. From Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan, the pattern is the same: regime-change wars launched with promises of stability that only deliver chaos. Scholars tracking U.S. interventions since World War II have found armed regime change rarely works and often leaves countries more violent, less stable, and openly hostile to U.S. interests. Even sympathetic think tanks now describe decades of U.S. interventions as a long history of failure, blowback, and unintended consequences, not expanding democracy or making the homeland more safe.

Americans didn’t just watch this unfold — they paid for it. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone cost trillions of dollars, killed thousands of U.S. troops, and ended without achieving their stated core political goals. Years later, majorities now say those wars were not worth fighting. Pew Research found that 62 percent of Americans believe the Iraq War wasn’t worth it, and similar numbers say the same about Afghanistan. As the wars dragged on, the public lost patience.

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And if foreign policy scorecards weren’t enough, Americans have watched the war on drugs back home lead to the same dead end. Decades of costly operations aimed at crippling the cartels and narco-terror organizations with no systemic follow-through — whether in Mexico, Colombia, or Panama — have never reached the promised endgame to stymie the flow of drugs, only created a “hydra effect” where new leaders and splinter groups emerge to fill any void.

Back at home, overdoses kill more than 100,000 Americans a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recently adjusted figures, largely caused by synthetic opioids that Venezuela does not produce — a body count that dwarfs the violence in many of the countries we’ve made “free” again.

Force alone doesn’t dismantle networks or actually protect Americans.

Meanwhile, cocaine, heroin, and fentanyl continue to flow through the same hemispheric routes that U.S. policy has spent billions trying to close, underscoring that force alone doesn’t dismantle networks or actually protect Americans.

Polling consistently shows Americans want Washington to focus on domestic problems, not launch foreign interventions — a shift that cuts across party lines, including much of Trump’s base. For many of those voters, “America First” was never about rebranding regime change; it was about fewer foreign entanglements, fewer open-ended conflicts, and fewer blank checks overseas. Trump initially campaigned on isolationism, retroactively highlighting his opposition to the Iraq War and promising to “to stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about.” That pledge carried real weight, which is why even some of his strongest supporters now warn that new regime-change operations risk repeating the same failures that degraded public trust in the first place.

After two long decades of the “war on terror,” the bill has come due to the tune of about $8 trillion spent. That’s roughly $23,000 per average American taxpayer, money that could’ve been spent on health care, education, or an endless number of programs to improve people’s real lives. And perhaps worse, it left the nation’s ego badly bruised after watching nearly 1 million lives slowly extinguished with little to show for it. It’s no wonder voters are wary of new conflicts. This skepticism — and the demand for transparency that comes with it — isn’t weakness; it’s wising up.

More importantly, a vigilant public acts as a safety brake on reckless wars. In countries where no one can question the leader, war often becomes a bottomless black hole for lives and money. For instance, in one recent autocrat’s war, an estimated 60,000 to 70,000 soldiers died in just a single year, more than in all that nation’s wars since World War II. That kind of meat-grinder carnage is only possible when leaders face zero accountability or public pushback. The only thing that separates that outcome from ours is friction — created by asking questions, creating public pressure, and refusing to rubber-stamp bloodshed.

By now, the nation understands that being skeptical of new foreign wars doesn’t make you pro-Maduro or pro-terror. We’re just tired of pointless wars. And that exhaustion, born of cost and consequence, is exactly what keeps Americans safer.

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