The 1989 US seizure of Panama’s strongman Manuel Noriega has as soon as once more entered international discourse, this time as analysts seek for historic parallels to Washington’s dramatic operation in Venezuela that led to the seize of President Nicolás Maduro and his spouse. However for geopolitical professional Brahma Chellaney, the Noriega comparability, whereas superficially interesting, obscures greater than it reveals.
In a put up on X (previously Twitter), Chellaney argued that though Maduro’s seize carries acquainted authorized framing — centred on drug trafficking prices and felony indictment — the resemblance to Noriega largely ends there. “Maduro’s seize appears superficially just like the 1989 US seizure of Manuel Noriega due to the acquainted authorized framing,” he wrote, “however the resemblance largely ends there.”
In keeping with Chellaney, the nearer and extra instructive parallel is the 2003 seize of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. The US logic driving Maduro’s seizure, he famous, was rooted not in battlefield defeat however in delegitimization and pursuit. As with Saddam, Washington reframed the goal from an objectionable ruler into an existential safety menace, branding Maduro’s regime a “narco-terrorist” enterprise in a lot the identical method Saddam was portrayed as a worldwide menace linked to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.
This narrative shift, Chellaney emphasised, was important. By recasting a geopolitical confrontation as a safety crucial, the USA laid the groundwork for extraordinary navy intervention. “In each circumstances, this narrative shift was important,” he noticed. “It transformed a geopolitical battle right into a safety crucial.”
Chellaney additionally highlighted the putting similarity within the manhunt dynamic. Like Saddam after the autumn of Baghdad, Maduro was not defeated in open fight. As a substitute, he turned a fugitive on his personal soil, pursued by deep intelligence penetration, informant networks and large monetary bounties. Years of financial strangulation by sanctions, Chellaney argued, weakened inner loyalties and sharply narrowed Maduro’s room for manoeuvre.
This extended strain marketing campaign in the end set the stage for a closing, surgical treatment — echoing Saddam’s seize in his “spider gap” — slightly than a standard navy overthrow. “The defining similarity, then, will not be the chargesheet however the methodology,” Chellaney wrote, pointing to an extended marketing campaign of isolation and pursuit culminating in seize.
Chellaney’s evaluation situates the Maduro operation inside a broader US intervention playbook, one which blends authorized narratives, financial coercion and intelligence-driven manhunts. Whereas the long-term geopolitical fallout from Venezuela stays unsure, his comparability underscores how previous interventions proceed to form Washington’s strategy to confronting adversarial regimes.
