For months, as the US has built up military forces around Venezuela, attacking alleged drug boats and seizing sanctioned oil tankers, the big question was whether the US would escalate to a campaign of regime change against the government of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.
After the dramatic events of Saturday morning, that question would appear to be answered — in some ways.
Obviously, Maduro himself is now out of power. After a dramatic late-night Delta Force raid on his safe house in Venezuela, he and his wife are now on board the USS Iwo Jima, headed to New York, where they will face charges of drug trafficking and narco-terrorism.
But as for what’s happening in Venezuela itself, the situation is still fluid, and a press conference held on Saturday afternoon by President Donald Trump and his top national security officials raised as many questions as it answered, though it did underline some core themes of this administration’s foreign policy.
Trump said multiple times that for the foreseeable future, the US would be “running” Venezuela. In particular, he said it would largely be run by “the people that are standing right behind me” on stage at Mar-a-Lago, a group that included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Daniel Caine, and homeland security adviser Stephen Miller.
But Trump was vague about what “running” Venezuela actually means and did not seem to indicate that US officials would be taking direct power in Caracas. He noted that the vice president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, had been sworn in, claimed that Rubio had spoken with her, and that “she’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again.” (In her own first statements, Rodríguez called for Maduro’s return and vowed that Venezuela would not be a US “colony,” so it’s not quite clear what assurances she gave Rubio.)
This would seem to indicate that the administration is willing to leave Rodríguez or other top regime figures in power, at least for the time being, which jibes with what some lawmakers claim they’ve heard from the administration but not with what most people would consider “running” the country.
Trump said that US military forces in the region would remain in place and that he “retains all military options until United States demands have been fully met and fully satisfied,” including a much larger second strike, but did not precisely spell out what those demands were.
One topic he did dwell on was oil. Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, though production has lagged in recent years as the country’s infrastructure has deteriorated.
Oil wasn’t a major part of the administration’s rationale for military action (which focused much more heavily on drug trafficking) until mid-December, when Trump and Miller began publicly accusing the Venezuelan regime of having stolen American oil resources. (Maduro’s mentor and predecessor, Hugo Chavez, completed the state takeover of Venezuela’s oil industry, including several American projects, but most of the takeover actually happened in the 1970s under a democratically elected government.)
Asked about an ongoing American presence in Venezuela, Trump said, “we’re going to have a presence in Venezuela as it pertains to oil. We are sending our expertise. … We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth, out of the ground.” He went so far as to suggest the US could sell this oil to other countries, including China and Russia — Venezuela’s current security partners.
Notably not mentioned was “democracy” or a demand for new elections.
The Venezuelan opposition, led by recent Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado has, for months, been cheering on the Trump administration’s actions on Venezuela, but Trump was dismissive of her on Saturday, saying they had not been in contact and describing her as a “nice woman” who “doesn’t have the support within, or the respect within the country” to take over.
Machado had issued a statement earlier in the day, praising the US for having “fulfilled its promise to uphold the rule of law” and calling for Edmundo Gonzalez, considered by the US and many other governments to have been the rightful winner of the 2024 Venezuelan election, to be immediately sworn in as president. Trump made no mention of Gonzalez.
“It’s clear this wasn’t motivated by deep concern for bringing democracy to Venezuela, or assisting the Venezuelan people or creating an alternative governance structure,” Michael Shifter, an adjunct professor of Latin American studies at Georgetown University, told Vox. “It was really just aimed at Maduro.”
The situation is still fluid and much may still be unknown even by the key decision-makers, but if we take Trump purely at his word, we appear to have a situation in which the current government of Venezuela will be left in place — minus Maduro — in exchange for oil concessions to the United States.
What does this tell us about Trump’s foreign policy?
Trump made several references to the Monroe (or “Don-roe,” as he’s updated it) Doctrine and asserting “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere,” a theme also underlined in his recently released national security strategy. He suggested that action against the left-wing governments of Colombia and Cuba is still a possibility. And he criticized previous presidents for ignoring growing problems in the hemisphere as they “fought wars that were 10,000 miles away.”
On the other hand, Maduro’s ouster caps a week in which Trump ordered airstrikes in Nigeria over the persecution of Christians and threatened them in Iran over the killing of protesters. Trump clearly sees the US as more than just a regional power.
Conservative foreign policy “restrainers” were hopeful when he took office that Trump would usher in an era of more judicious use of military force. Clearly, Trump is not averse to military action, in the Western Hemisphere, the Middle East, or anywhere else. But he prefers these actions to be quick and decisive, with limited goals and adversaries with little capacity to retaliate. The capture of Maduro was a textbook example. “He f’d around and he found out,” as Hegseth put it.
A full-fledged regime change operation could risk plunging the country into chaos and drawing the US military into a quagmire. Immigration restrictionists were worried that it would (ironically, given the administration behind it) trigger a new wave of migration from the country that is already the source of one of the world’s largest refugee populations.
Regime collapse might still be in the cards, given the precarious state of the Venezuelan state and the numerous senior leaders and armed groups that may vie for power in Maduro’s absence.
Trump may have brushed aside comparisons to previous US interventions in Latin America, claiming those were simply done under incompetent presidents, but the echoes of past US actions are likely to reverberate in the region.
“The history of US military intervention in Latin America has not been a happy one,” Shifter said. “And while I think there’s no sympathy or solidarity with Maduro, per se, I think [other governments are] asking, ‘If Trump could do this, why can’t he do it to us?’”
Certainly, the administration is not acting as if there are constraints on the president’s ability to use military force. US officials have made the case that the operation was not “illegal” because of the indictments against Maduro and the illegitimacy of his rule, though neither would supersede the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of military force against another country’s sovereignty.
True, the US carried out a similar operation to capture Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega in 1990 (Noriega surrendered 36 years ago to the day, in fact), but that operation was similarlycriticized and condemned by the UN General Assembly.
The capture of Maduro also shows the ongoing blurring of law enforcement and military functions under this administration — not only did FBI agents participate in the raid, but Trump, during his press conference, consistently digressed from Venezuela to the recent troop deployments in Washington, DC, Memphis, and other cities, which he portrayed as part of the same overarching project.
Will voters buy it? Just 25 percent of voters and about half of Republicans supported military action in a December poll. MAGA defector Marjorie Taylor Greene noted correctly on Saturday that, despite Trump’s claim to have prevented tens of thousands of drug deaths with his Venezuela campaign, the vast majority of these deaths are caused by fentanyl, which does not come from Venezuela. (The alleged Venezuelan drug boats were probably carrying cocaine, primarily for the European market.)
Trump’s bona fides as a drug warrior were also undermined by his recent pardon of a Honduran president convicted of a much more active role in trafficking in the very New York court where Maduro is likely to be tried.
In short, it will be difficult for the administration to push back against the most cynical interpretations of its motives, and it’s not clear they’re even trying. In the George W. Bush era, it was anti-war protesters accusing the US of going to war for oil. In the Trump era, it’s the president saying it.
