Something crucial happened with President Donald Trump’s recent actions in Venezuela. In fact, taken together with his earlier moves abroad, they mark the substantive death of what might be called the “Iraq syndrome” — a paralyzing mindset that has distorted American foreign policy for more than two decades.

The Iraq syndrome emerged after the failure of the Iraq War and the long, costly occupation that followed. In the American mind, it became shorthand for a broader fear: that any U.S. use of force overseas would inevitably spiral into a quagmire. But this was not the first time such a syndrome had taken hold.

To understand Iraq syndrome, one has to go back to Vietnam.

In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, America’s foreign-policy establishment fell into disarray. A new conventional wisdom took hold among elites: The war had not been lost because of bad strategy or domestic unrest but because it never should have been fought at all. From this conclusion flowed a much larger claim -- that the United States needed to fundamentally rethink its role in the world.

This worldview, later known as the “Vietnam syndrome,” argued that America should abandon assertive foreign policy in favor of restraint or outright withdrawal, lest it stumble into further disasters. Underlying this posture was a thinly veiled anti-Americanism: the belief that the United States was not a force for good but a malign presence on the world stage. As former Princeton professor Richard Falk put it at the time, “I love the Vietnam syndrome because it was the proper redemptive path for American foreign policy to take after the Vietnam defeat.”

In other words, America was guilty -- and the appropriate response was retreat.

That retreat carried real costs. A world without strong American leadership proved far worse than its critics anticipated. America’s self-imposed paralysis helped usher in the Cambodian genocide, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

By the mid-1980s, Ronald Reagan decided it was time to move past Vietnam syndrome. In 1983, the United States intervened in Grenada, deposing a Marxist government in a swift operation that cost few American lives and restored democracy to the island. Shortly thereafter, then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger articulated six criteria for military intervention: a vital interest at stake, a commitment to victory, clear political and military goals, continuous strategic reassessment, sustained public support, and the exhaustion of nonmilitary options.

Together, the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations applied these principles in Panama and during Operation Desert Storm. By 1989, Vietnam syndrome was effectively dead.

Then came Afghanistan and Iraq.

Both wars began with clear, limited objectives. The war in Afghanistan aimed to depose the Taliban and prevent al-Qaeda from regaining sanctuary. The war in Iraq sought to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Those goals were quickly achieved. What followed, however, was years of large-scale nation-building -- at enormous cost in blood and treasure. The result was a revival of the old paralysis, now rebranded as the “Iraq syndrome.”

This was not a reasonable skepticism about intel- And a February 2025 paper from the Berkeley Research Group noted that a survey of restaurant operators showed that nearly 89 percent reduced employee hours to help offset increased costs. The survey also found that 35 percent of operators reduced supplemental employee benefi ts to offset the higher costs created by the wage law.

“We have the playbook from California. We know what happened to the restaurant industry out there after they passed this policy out there.”

—Kristen Thompson

The Berkeley Research Group also found that menu prices at California’s fast-food restaurants increased by 14.5 percent between September 2023 (the month the wage legislation was signed into law) and October 2024, which was nearly double the national average during that time.

“California fast food restaurants also increased automation and technology adoption to offset rising labor costs,” the Berkeley Research Group paper stated. “Therefore it should not be surprising that the number of employees per restaurant is declining.”

At an October study conducted by members of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, James Leewright, president and CEO of the Oklahoma Restaurant Association, noted that adjusted for cost-of-living differences, a $20-an-hour wage in California was comparable to a $14-per-hour wage in Oklahoma—less than the minimum wage that SQ 832 would impose in Oklahoma.

Thompson, like many other small-business owners, says there is no reason to think the bad outcomes generated by California’s wage law won’t occur in Oklahoma if the same wage policy is imposed here.

“We have the playbook from California,” Thompson said. “We know what happened to the restaurant industry out there after they passed this policy out there.”

During House lawmakers’ October study, Peter Hansen, director of research and policy analysis at the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), warned that the impact of an artificially high wage law would reduce state GDP by roughly $700 million by 2035 compared to what would happen if no change were made to the state’s minimum-wage law.

He also warned that net job losses were likely in Oklahoma by 2031 and 16,000 jobs could be lost by 2035 if the state’s minimum- wage law is increased dramatically.

Amanda Hall, policy and research director for the State Chamber Research Foundation, warned that a $15-an-hour minimum wage would be especially devastating for rural communities, since it would hike payroll costs by 10 to 20 percent.

Tying Oklahoma’s wage law to California’s cost of living will not only create economic harm across the state but also change the trajectory of many working families for the worse, Thompson noted.

“These family restaurants that have been around forever, they’re passed down from generation to generation, and it’s part of who these people are, their family legacy,” Thompson said. “If something like this were to pass, how many of them would be lost.