How Often Does the US Go After Another Nation's Leader?

The US has run plenty of covert raids. Capturing a sitting president of another country is something else. Here’s where Venezuela fits in the historical record.

As an elder Millennial, my first reaction to the news that the US had conducted a covert operation on Jan. 3, 2026, to capture Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, was one of déjà vu. I still remember exactly where I was (a parking lot in Michigan) when the news broke that the US had conducted a covert operation to find and kill Osama bin Laden in 2011 (a woman near me just started shouting, “They got him!”).

At first glance, the two missions seem similar: under an American president’s orders, the US military conducted a top-secret mission in a foreign country with a named individual as the target. In neither mission was Congress notified ahead of time, both were hailed by their respective administrations as feats that would make America and the world safer, and the legality of both have since been debated (albeit to different extents).

But one big difference is that bin Laden was not the head of state of another country, while Maduro was (or is, depending on your view). Of course, being the leader of al-Qaeda, one of the most prominent terrorist organizations in the world and the group responsible for 9/11, is nothing to sneeze at, but it doesn’t feel like going after another sovereign nation’s leader.

Maybe a more analogous event in US history is when we captured Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003. There are also a lot of parallels to our seizing of Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1989–90. What about the US involvement in the 2011 operation that ultimately led to a mob’s capture and killing of Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi? What about literally any other operation before I was born that I may not even be aware of? In general: How does what just happened in Venezuela compare with previous US military operations?

As someone who gets stressed by long descriptions of history but loves a good categorization, I thought, Surely someone has made a chart I can look at to understand all this. Alas, I was unable to find one (if you have one, please send it to me). So, like a mom unable to find a healthy snack alternative for my kids, I had to make it myself.

Let’s categorize!

To figure out where Venezuela fits in the scheme of US military operations, we need to answer the question, “Of what is this an instance?” That means defining some categories it might fit into. To do this, we are going to join the elite secret club of categorizors, or, as I like to call it, “Operation Make Sense of It All.”

Now, the first rule of Categorization Club is that you don’t talk about categorization at cocktail parties or people will stop inviting you (lol, JK, no one invites me to cocktail parties). The second rule of Categorization Club is, you need a boundary.

Initially, I was going to evaluate all US military interventions in other countries since forever, but quickly realized this would be extremely difficult. I then thought it might be elegant to include everything since 1900, but I got hung up on whether Hitler’s killing himself in a bunker at the end of World War II counted as a US-caused death of a leader. So, for (relative) simplicity, I decided to do what many fancy international-relations scholars do, which is to begin my analysis after World War II, for the primary reason of, “Well, it was different before that.”

The third rule of Categorization Club is that you should start super strict and then expand your criteria, lest you end up in an embarrassing situation like having to demote a beloved planet long after a fun mnemonic got burned into generations of children’s brains.

To better understand how the recent events in Venezuela compare with similar events in US history since WWII, I started by searching for other events that fall under these criteria:

1. A military operation

2. Carried out in a foreign country

3. With an explicit target of a named head of state

4. Conducted by US forces (not proxies)

5. Resulted in the killing or trial of that individual by the US.

Just using the first two criteria doesn’t narrow things down much: according to a 2023 congressional report, the US Armed Forces have been used abroad in 316 non-peacetime instances since the end of WWII (with the number even higher if we include 2024, 2025, and these very busy early days of 2026).

Narrowing further

Adding in the third criterion reduces the list considerably, from more than 300 to about a dozen. Depending on whether we count repeated attempts to target the same person as one event or multiple, the US has been involved in around 12 operations targeting a named head of state. These include:

• Iran (1953): The US helped fund a coup to remove Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh from power (“Operation Ajax”).

• Guatemala (1954): The US was involved in a coup to remove president Jacobo Árbenz (“Operation PBSUCCESS”).

• Cuba (1960s): The US made many attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro.

• Congo (1961): The US was involved in the assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.

• South Vietnam (1963): Members of the US military met with and encouraged South Vietnamese generals who led a coup against President Ngo Dinh Diem and assassinated him.

• Chile (1970–1973): The US carried out many activities, often covertly, to bring an end to the presidency of Salvador Allende.

• Haiti (1994): The US was heavily involved in operations to remove president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (“Operation Uphold Democracy”).

• As well as our other cases mentioned above, including

  • Panama (1989–90) (“Operation Just Cause”),

  • Iraq (2003) (“Operation Red Dawn”),

  • Libya (2011) (“Operation Odyssey Dawn” by the US, and later “Operation Unified Protector” under NATO),

  • and Venezuela (2026) (“Operation Absolute Resolve”).

Because we’re now counting only heads of state, bin Laden is officially downgraded to dwarf-assassination status (“They got him again!” she cried from the parking lot).

I should also note that the US has been involved in many other military operations that almost fit the head-of-state criterion. For example, the US invaded Grenada in 1983 in “Operation Urgent Fury.” But, this invasion took place just after Grenada’s previous prime minister, Maurice Bishop, had been removed from power and executed, thus violating our criterion that the target itself be the head of state.

The final filters

Our dozen cases shrink even further when we add the fourth criterion, that the operation be carried out by the US directly rather than through indirect support, for example through funding opposition groups or providing military aid to groups that ultimately carried out the operation. In fact, the only cases that remain are Noriega in Panama, Hussein in Iraq, and Maduro in Venezuela.

If we want to be generous, we could include Gaddafi as a boundary case. The intervention against him was NATO-backed, and the US military did play an active role, though we did not ultimately capture him ourselves. If we want to be picky, we could rule out Hussein, because although the US directly captured him, he was ultimately tried and executed by the Iraqi interim government.

What all of this means is that what just happened in Venezuela is extremely unusual.

It’s true that the US has been involved in a lot of military interventions abroad, and we’ve played meaningful roles many times in the removal or assassination of heads of state around the world.

We’ve also been part of plenty of operations against prominent targets who were not heads of state, including bin Laden in 2011 and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi 2019. We’ve also carried out operations against higher-ups in foreign governments, such as Qasem Soleimani, a top Iranian general, in 2020 (on January 3 of that year, six years to the day before the Venezuela operation, so really it’s on us for being surprised this time).

But if we consider just military operations, in a foreign country, with an explicit target of a named head of state, conducted by US forces, that resulted in the target’s death or capture and trial in the US, the only other case that squarely matches what just happened in Venezuela is Panama.

I promised you a chart. Here you go, with one of my most beautiful artist’s renderings yet:

US military operations abroad that directly target a named head of state are very rare

Spatial depiction of the frequency of different types of US military operations abroad since the end of World War II

Sources: Congressional Research Services and my own penchant for rectangles

What’s that, you want another chart? Amazing, because here’s one that summarizes some specific comparisons between the cases we talked about most.

Only the US operation in Panama meets all of the same criteria as the Venezuela operation

List of key features of the five most similar US military operations to Venezuela since World War II

Source: My ever-dazzling graphic design gifts

Everything marked with a green checkmark fully matches the relevant criterion. Bin Laden gets a red X for not being a head of state (though he did head an organization that declared war against the US, so, again, he was no slouch). The yellow circles indicate that criteria are almost met, as discussed above. The most important takeaway, however, might be that the Osama bin Laden operation has the coolest name, and it’s not even close.

What does this mean for how things in Venezuela might turn out?

This of course is not to say that the Panama and Venezuela operations are identical — far from it. For example, the US already had an established military presence in Panama before the operation and Panama’s military was dissolved shortly after the operation concluded, whereas the US had no prior presence in Venezuela and much of Venezuela’s military and regime otherwise remains intact.

We’ve also interrogated only the more tactical aspects of the operation. A different set of criteria about, say, US interventions for regime change, or to disrupt drug trafficking, or even where certain natural resources were involved, might lead to a very different narrowing of cases.

There is also the matter of legality: many critics of the US operation in Venezuela argue that it is a violation of international law for the US to invade and interfere with a sovereign state, and a violation of constitutional law to use military force without the prior authorization of Congress. Defenders of the operation argue that this type of military force does not require congressional authorization, and that it was not an act of war.

This operation is in good company with the other dozen or so cases we’ve considered: most have been either largely deemed illegal or at least considered legally controversial, both internationally and domestically, for similar reasons.

For now, however, insofar as the current categorization is useful, here are two parting charts that offer some brief comparisons with how things turned out in some of the previous military operations. First is a chart showing the liberal democracy score for some of our hero countries since 1945. A score of 1 on this scale is a “perfect” democracy (I include the US for comparison; the most recent highest-scoring country in this dimension is Denmark, at 0.88), and 0 means a country exhibits none of the characteristics of a liberal democracy, such as free, fair, and competitive elections, protections of civil liberties, constraints on executive power, an independent judiciary, and strong rule of law.

Democracy trends after operations targeting heads of state vary by country

Annual Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Liberal Democracy Scores for five countries from 1945 to 2024.

Source: Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project

Maduro’s capture is not on this chart because, alas, the dataset runs only through 2024, though we are all excitedly awaiting the 2025 release any day now (double alas, it’s going to be another year after that for 2026). Notice, however, that after Noriega’s capture, Panama’s democracy score increased substantially and stayed there. After Hussein and Gaddafi’s captures, however, there was a modest increase in scores followed by a tapering off, though in both cases the numbers remained above their pre-operation levels. While we cannot infer causality from this chart alone, it does illustrate that a variety of outcomes are possible in Venezuela.

Finally, does successfully carrying out an operation to take down a high-profile target affect Americans’ approval of the president who led the operation? The answer, at least for these cases, seems to be… eh, not really?

Presidential approval ratings do not seem to persistently change after the completion of a US military operation against a head of state

Presidential approval ratings over their entire term(s) in office, annotated with the date of a US military operation against a head of state (or bin Laden). Note that H. W. Bush was in office for only four years, while the data for Bush, Jr., and Obama span eight years each.

Source: Gallup

It’s hard to tell a story from any of these graphs that the military operations discussed here did much to move the needle on presidents’ job approval.

Parting thoughts

When I started researching this article, I expected to unearth a lot more examples of US military operations that were pretty similar to what just unfolded in Venezuela. I’ve been quite surprised to find that there is very little precedent for what just happened, at least according to the categorization metrics I’ve laid out.

In the case of Panama, which is similar along the criteria I’ve used, there remain many meaningful differences from what we just witnessed in Venezuela. For one, Panama is a much smaller country, with a much smaller population, and it had already spent decades under US influence by the time of Operation Just Cause. Unlike in Venezuela, the US also already had a military presence of more than 10,000 troops in Panama leading up to the operation. And the US did not try to run Panama after the fact.

Of course, as stated in the fourth rule of Categorization Club, no categorization is perfect, and I invite you to explore other dimensions in which we can compare the capture of Maduro with other events in history.

This brings me to the fifth and most important rule of Categorization Club: Please come join us! So far it’s just me, a bunch of rectangles, and that lady from the parking lot.