In the tea room of his Mar-a-Lago resort on Saturday morning, Donald Trump triumphantly announced the details of an overnight US mission to overthrow and capture Nicolás Maduro in the center of Caracas.
But the US president went further: He also pledged that Washington would now “run” Venezuela until further notice, raising the prospect of heavy-handed, overt US involvement in the Latin American country.
“We are not doing this in vain,” Trump told reporters alongside his top national security and military officials. “We want to surround ourselves with good neighbors. We want to surround ourselves with stability. We want to surround ourselves with energy.”
At first glance, the US operation in Venezuela marks a clear deviation from the non-interventionism that has been the hallmark of Trump’s stated foreign policy goals.
Trump, who declared himself the “President of Peace” this year, not only returned to the White House promising to keep his country out of foreign conflicts, but his recent national security strategy mocked the previous administration’s “decades of meaningless ‘nation-building’ wars.”
Yet Trump has now committed the US to establishing Venezuela, a country two and a half times the size of Germany with a population of about 28 million, as a temporary protectorate.
He offered some details about how it might work.
The US President said that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would “work together with the Venezuelan people to make sure that we have the Venezuelan right”.
“We’re not going to do this with Maduro and then go away like everybody else, walk away and say ‘let it go to hell,'” Trump said. “We will run it properly. We will run it professionally. We will have the largest oil companies in the world and invest billions of dollars.”
Trump appeared to dismiss Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado, who is popular inside the country, as an alternative.
“I think it will be very difficult for him to be a leader, he doesn’t have the support,” he said. “He doesn’t have respect.”
Machado has called on his ally Edmundo Gonzalez, whom polling station data shows was the real winner of the presidential election stolen by Maduro last year, to take power. But Trump did not mention Gonzalez.
Soon after the US operation, Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s second-in-command, emerged as Washington’s chief negotiator. “I think he was just sworn in … and he’s ready to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” Trump said, adding that Rubio had spoken to him.
But later Saturday, Delsey appeared on Venezuelan television with key members of the government, and mentioned Maduro’s U.S. extraction without giving any indication that she had officially become his successor.
He stressed that Maduro is still “the sole president of the country” and demanded his immediate release. He said, “The Venezuelan people are suffering. They are angry at Maduro and the kidnapping of the first lady. What is being done to Venezuela is barbarity.”
Some members of the Venezuelan opposition were surprised by the US strategy.
“My opinion: impeccable military operation, bizarre political planning,” opposition leader Pedro Burelli, close to Machado, wrote on Twitter after Trump’s press conference. “Venezuela is broken and needy, but it is not about to surrender to absurd whims… The word ‘bizarre’ doesn’t even begin to describe what we just heard.”
Venezuelans fear that regime hard-liners like Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello could now step into the power vacuum. Rubio’s challenges in rapidly strengthening US ties to Venezuela will be exacerbated by the lack of a permanent US presence in the South American nation. The US closed its embassy in Caracas in 2019.
Meanwhile, the Chavista movement, named after its founder Hugo Chávez, who ruled Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013, is strongly anti-imperialist. Trump’s Saturday remarks emphasizing the potential of the country’s oil industry for American companies could provide Chavistas with a powerful propaganda weapon.
Any attempt to establish an occupation force would face a hostile response from Venezuela’s ultranationalist government and armed forces, as well as a network of well-armed neighborhood militias.
In recent decades, US regime-change efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have all faltered.
Trump refused to rule out sending more US troops to Venezuela, saying he was “not afraid” to deploy US troops, hinting that they may be needed to protect the oil field. Nor did the US President mention the need to restore democracy or hold new elections – justifications for previous US military interventions abroad.
However, Trump has invoked the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, named after President James Monroe, to establish American dominance in the Western Hemisphere.
“The Monroe Doctrine is a great thing, but we’ve pretty much dismantled it,” Trump said.
Trump’s domestic critics criticized the president’s lack of strategy and promises to deepen US involvement in Venezuela.
Democratic Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia told reporters, “Looting a nation is the opposite of governing a nation, and that would be my main concern about Donald Trump and the people he would entrust with this completely ridiculous mission.”
Some Republican critics were also cautious.
Republican Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania said, “The only country that should ‘run’ the United States is the United States itself.”
He said, “The United States must join the international community in monitoring and overseeing free and fair elections in Venezuela, providing the Venezuelan people with a path to true democracy.”
Additional reporting by Lauren Feder
