Liberal norms are an iterative game. We can't play that game unilaterally. It is a bilateral game.
Dictators don't respect your attempts to play this game with them. If you try to play this game with them, they will use your attempts as a weapon against you.
For example, the liberal pursuit to get Ukraine to surrender its nuclear weapons. Or the liberal pursuit behind UNSC Resolution 1701, where Hezbollah pinkie promised not to keep its arms.
These people don't think like you do. They see your restraint as a weakness to exploit, not as a quality to reciprocate.
This is why I advocate only for selective bilateral liberalism as a foreign policy. Play the liberalism game with parties who want to play that game. Respect the sovereignty of democracies. Get that iterative game running.
But for dictators, at least those without a nuclear deterrent who follow a policy of cruelty, show them overwhelming power, and kill them in targeted strikes whenever the opportunity presents itself.
It didn't work in the early 2000s. But why would you use past capabilities to reason about current capabilities? The world changed, and our reasoning needs to be updated accordingly. It took 3 years and a ground invasion to find Saddam. What I am proposing is to locate Maduro and send a JDAM to him.
A more relevant case study is the war between Israel and Hezbollah, where targeting senior leadership worked. Israel killed two successive leaders until they found someone willing to sign a surrender in all but name, and ceased the rocket attacks. This would not have been possible in the early 2000s.
Yes, targeting senior leadership was exactly what the Bush administration attempted in Iraq. And they were hugely successful at it! The problem was never that the firepower was underwhelming...
You don't want that.