President Donald Trump’s declaration on Saturday that the US planned to “run” Venezuela for an unspecified period, issuing orders to its government and exploiting its vast oil reserves, plunged the US into a risky new era in which it will seek economic and political dominance over a nation of roughly 30 million people.
Speaking at his Mar-a-Lago private club just hours after Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela, and his wife were seized from their bedroom by US forces, Trump told reporters that Delcy Rodríguez, who served as Maduro’s Vice-President, would hold power in Venezuela as long as she "does what we want".
Rodríguez, however, showed little public interest in doing the Americans’ bidding. In a national address, she accused Washington of invading her country under false pretenses and asserted that Maduro was still Venezuela’s head of state. “What is being done to Venezuela is a barbarity,” she said.
Trump and his top national security advisers carefully avoided describing their plans for Venezuela as an occupation, akin to what the US did after defeating Japan, or toppling Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Instead, they vaguely sketched out an arrangement similar to a guardianship: The US will provide a vision for how Venezuela should be run and will expect the interim government to carry that out in a transition period, under the threat of further military intervention.
Even after Rodríguez contradicted Trump, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser, said he was withholding judgment.
“We’re going to make decisions based on their actions and their deeds in the days and weeks to come,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. “We think they’re going to have some unique and historic opportunities to do a great service for the country, and we hope that they’ll accept that opportunity.”
Trump suggested on Saturday that while there were no American troops on the ground now, there would be a “second wave” of military action if the US ran into resistance, either on the ground or from Venezuelan government officials.
“We’re not afraid of boots on the ground,” Trump said. Asked who, exactly, would be running Venezuela, he said "people that are standing right behind me, we’re going to be running it", pointing to secretary of state Marco Rubio, defence secretary Pete Hegseth, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine.
Trump paired that with a declaration that a key American goal was to regain access to oil rights that he has repeatedly said had been “stolen” from the US. With those statements, the President opened a new chapter in American nation building.
Trump’s actions on Saturday cast America back to a past era of gunboat diplomacy, when the US used its military to grab territory and resources for its own benefit.
A year ago this week, he openly mused, also at Mar-a-Lago, about making Canada, Greenland and Panama parts of the US. Now, after hanging in the White House a portrait of William McKinley, the tariff-loving President who presided over the military seizure of the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico, Trump said it was well within the rights of the US to wrest from Venezuela resources that he believes had been wrongly taken from the hands of American corporations.
The US operation, in seeking to assert control over a vast Latin American nation, has little precedent in recent decades, recalling the imperial US military efforts of the 19th and early 20th centuries in Mexico, Nicaragua and other countries.
New York Times News Service