In the wake of President Trump’s recent foreign policy success in capturing Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela's socialist dictator, in around four hours, without a single loss of American life, a long-standing psychological constraint on American power may finally be coming to an end.
According to conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, something far more significant than a single military operation has occurred: the effective death of the “Iraq Syndrome.” Much like the Vietnam Syndrome before it, Iraq Syndrome, he argued, has shaped how Americans view the use of force abroad, instilling a reflexive fear that any U.S. intervention will spiral into a costly, immoral, and unwinnable situation.
"Something more important has happened here," Shapiro said on Tuesday's episode of the Ben Shapiro show. "President Trump has substantively killed the Iraq Syndrome. The Iraq Syndrome that arose in Americans' minds about our role in the world, arising from the failure of the Iraq War, and subsequent occupation."
Shapiro went on to explain how, after the Vietnam War, experts took advantage of the situation to reframe America's place in the world in a way that said "the U.S. should stop engaging in aggressive foreign policy in its own interests. Instead, the U.S. ought to pursue a more doveish or isolationist foreign policy in order to avoid quagmires." This, Shapiro argued, made the world a worse place, where Pol Pot was able to commit genocide in Cambodia, where the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and the Islamic Republic of Iran rose to prominence.
President Reagan was the one to nullify what came to be known as Vietnam syndrome, using American forces to intervene abroad. Reagan's Defense Secretary, Caspar Weinberger, then laid out the criteria that should be used before American forces intervene abroad.
However, Shapiro argued, the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, revived Vietnam Syndrome, in the form of Iraq Syndrome. While both wars achieved their stated objectives early on, U.S. officials attempted to engage in "large-scale nationbuilding," an unworthy project that was not beneficial to the United States, cost over a trillion dollars, the blood of American servicemembers, and ultimately ended in failure.
🇺🇸🇻🇪🇮🇶 Ben Shapiro declares that the era of “Iraq syndrome” is over and that Trump's "Venezuela coup" has changed the appetite of Americans for endless wars overseas
— HOT SPOT (@HotSpotHotSpot) January 7, 2026
"America's interests are paramount and they include a lot of things—from freedom of the seas to the strength of… pic.twitter.com/BbPkLvVHG2
Shapiro went on to argue that since these wars, "critics of American foreign policy have basically revived the Vietnam Syndrome in the form of an Iraq Syndrome. The idea that every single conflict in which the United States is involved must become Iraq or will become Iraq."
Like Vietnam Syndrome, Shapiro argued, Iraq Syndrome contained the belief that America was an evil force in the world, a view that many Democrats and some Republicans hold today, and one that is detrimental to how Americans see their country in the world.
However, with successful interventions in both Iran and now Venezuela, Shapiro argued that President Trump, like Reagan before him, has officially put this idea to bed.
On the left, Democrats have increasingly embraced the idea that the United States is not merely flawed, but fundamentally malignant, an imperial force whose involvement abroad is presumed immoral by default. This worldview treats American restraint as a moral good, even when that restraint allows far worse actors to fill the vacuum. It is a posture that excuses atrocities, empowers adversaries, and shrinks U.S. influence and our ability to act on our own interests.
But the problem is no longer confined to the left. On the right, figures like Tucker Carlson and Dave Smith have helped persuade many conservatives that any use of American power inevitably leads to another Iraq, another endless occupation, another trillion-dollar mistake, another betrayal of the national interest. This reflexive isolationism mirrors the very Vietnam-era thinking conservatives once rejected, replacing strategic judgment with paralysis and treating intervention itself as the original sin.
President Trump has brought this kind of thinking to an end.
