The United States appears once again to be edging toward a tragically familiar precipice: another attempt to reshape a foreign government, this time in Venezuela. It’s an awful idea. When will we ever learn?

This is personal for me. I am haunted by a plain fact of my biography: I was the ABC News White House correspondent in 2003 when the Bush administration took our country to war in Iraq.

Did I do my job? Was I skeptical enough? Did I challenge President George W. Bush and his foreign-policy team aggressively enough? Did I give the American people the information and understanding they needed to fully exercise their civic power at that critical moment of our history?

I’ve thought long and hard about those questions over the years; they’ve kept me up some nights. The answer, of course, is obvious and inescapable: I failed. I did the best I could to inform the public and hold power to account—but it wasn’t good enough. I played a small but not insignificant role in one of the great American disasters, and I will take that verdict to my grave.

So. The rough beast of regime change now comes slouching round Washington again. The echoes I hear are ominous and full of screams.

This week in The New York Times, columnist Brett Stephens explains why he supports US-sponsored and -supported regime change in Caracas. Stephens’ argument reflects the thinking you hear coming out of Trump’s national-security team, and some in Congress. The hawks are flying again in Washington.

The main justification Stephens offers for using US military power and pressure to topple the government of Nicolás Maduro is—surprise—vague: “…the larger challenge posed by Maduro’s regime is that it is both an importer and exporter of instability.”

Ah, yes. Our old friend, “regional instability.” Stephens warns that “…close economic and strategic ties to China, Russia and Iran give America’s enemies a significant foothold in the Americas.”

Here we go again.

Now, I understand the old, practical wisdom of the Monroe Doctrine, fading in relevance as the world becomes smaller but still potent. This, however, is a cartoon-version of whatever wisdom is left in that old policy. A Trumpian plot against Venezuela? Because…China?? Brazil has much closer economic ties to China than Venezuela does, and I’d argue much closer strategic ties. China and Brazil for years have sought to establish themselves as co-leaders of the Global South. Venezuela—thanks to the ruinous policies of its awful government for a generation—is a pipsqueak nation, and a basket-case ally of Beijing. Brazil is a serious world power.

Other countries in South America are far more economically dependent on China than Venezuela; China is Chile’s largest trading partner, accounting for 40 percent of Chilean imports—more than twice Venezuela’s imports from China.

You can judge for yourself the merits of the rest of Stephens’ argument. My concern here is that they echo—in more reasonable tones—the mad designs and screeching claims coming out of the Trump administration.

My friends, it feels to me like we may be weeks away from taking military action against Venezuela. I hope that sounds foolish in six months. But just look at the serious military buildup in the last several weeks in the Caribbean:

All this looks like the military steps you’d take to topple Nicolás Maduro, the wretched, crooked tyrant ruling in Caracas. And the killing has already begun.

Over the past three months, the U.S. military has conducted at least 21 known strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, resulting in over 80 deaths. The strikes, often carried out by military helicopters or MQ-9 Reaper drones, involve firing missiles at speedboats (often referred to as “flippers”) allegedly carrying narcotics. Videos of the explosions were often gleefully posted on social media by U.S. officials.

The first shots in every war ever started fuel fantasies of victory and fateful overconfidence among the men thirsting for conflict. It seems no different to me here. Regime change always looks fabulous on paper.

That this impulse to use US power to topple governments around the world persists, after a century of evidence warning us off, is astonishing. And it’s dangerous, especially in this hemisphere.

Washington’s recurring fantasy that we can engineer political outcomes in Latin America through pressure, covert action, or outright intervention has produced a legacy of instability, resentment, and blowback that still scars the region and our own reputation. To repeat that folly now—at a moment of deep domestic division and constrained resources—would be reckless in the extreme.

American interventions in Latin America have rarely delivered what they promised. That historical record is not ambiguous. In a sense, it is a gift. A warning. The failures of the past call out to us, like Marley’s ghost, to change our ways before it is too late.

Now consider the administration preparing to launch this campaign of regime change in South America. The Trump foreign-policy apparatus—when it has been coherent at all—has been defined by impulsiveness, factional conflict, magical thinking, Niagaras of falsehoods, and a remarkable unwillingness to absorb bad news.

The idea that this cast of characters, cycling in and out of government roles and cable-news studios, is capable of a disciplined, long-range, regionally informed plan to midwife a democratic transition in Venezuela is, frankly, delusional.

And the risks of miscalculation here are enormous. Venezuela is not an empty theater awaiting the staging of some glorious US liberation campaign. It is a country of 28 million people shaped by colonialism, oil dependency, deep inequality, and generations of political conflict. Maduro’s hold on power—while illegitimate and brutal—is undergirded by military patronage networks, Cuban intelligence support, criminal syndicates, and—more than anything else—a proud, fierce anti-imperialist nationalism that will only awaken and intensify if Washington takes overt steps toward regime change.

And then there is the Venezuelan opposition. It is impossible not to admire the courage of Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado, who has risked so much resisting a repressive government. But is the Venezuelan opposition truly a reliable partner? That is far from certain. It always is.

And think of the human and financial costs to our country. At this time. We need to take care of our own people, not squander our resources on this pointless adventure.

We are a nation stretched perilously thin right now: domestic polarization, spiraling debt, a people demanding a better American life and furious at the failure of our government to achieve it. Every dollar, every intelligence asset, every adviser we sink into a Venezuelan adventure is a dollar, an asset, a career civil servant not focused on problems that actually matter to American security. Escalation—even “limited” escalation—has a way of devouring resources that were never intended for it.

The question is not whether Nicolás Maduro is a tyrant. He is. The question is whether toppling him by U.S. pressure or covert action will produce something better—for Venezuelans or for Americans. The historical answer is clear. The practical answer is clearer. And the moral answer—given our own unfinished struggles at home—should be clearest of all: this is not our fight to wage.

The United States must resist the urge to repeat its old mistakes in Venezuela, before the cost—in lives, treasure, credibility, and the broken hearts of men and women who could have stopped or stalled another war, but didn’t—comes due once again.