“Not running Venezuela” while the Navy chokes its oil until it opens to foreign investors is just ownership without paperwork, and everyone knows who gets first call. This is regime change priced in barrels, enforced by force, sold as policy.
Rubio Stresses U.S. Plan to Coerce Venezuela Rather Than Govern It
The secretary of state said that a military “quarantine” on some oil exports would stay in place to put pressure on the country’s acting leadership.Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday appeared to pivot away from President Trump’s assertion a day earlier that the United States would “run” Venezuela, emphasizing instead that the administration would keep a military “quarantine” in place on the country’s oil exports to exert leverage on the new leadership there.
When asked how the United States planned to govern Venezuela, Mr. Rubio did not lay out a plan for a U.S. occupation authority, like the one that the George W. Bush administration put in place in Baghdad during the Iraq War, but instead spoke of coercing a Venezuelan government run by allies of the jailed leader Nicolás Maduro to make policy changes.
U.S. forces will continue to prevent oil tankers on a U.S. sanctions list from entering and leaving the country until the government opens up the state-controlled oil industry to foreign investment — presumably giving priority to American companies — and makes other changes, he said on “Face the Nation” on CBS News.
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Trump Plunges the U.S. Into a New Era of Risk in Venezuela
President Trump opened a new chapter in American nation building by toppling Venezuela’s leader and promising U.S. intervention in running its affairs.President Trump’s declaration on Saturday that the United States planned to “run” Venezuela for an unspecified period, issuing orders to its government and exploiting its vast oil reserves, plunged the United States 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 U.S. forces, Mr. Trump told reporters that Delcy Rodríguez, who served as Mr. Maduro’s vice president, would hold power in Venezuela as long as she “does what we want.”
Ms. 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 Mr. Maduro was still Venezuela’s head of state. “What is being done to Venezuela is a barbarity,” she said.
Mr. Trump and his top national security advisers carefully avoided describing their plans for Venezuela as an occupation, akin to what the United States did after defeating Japan, or toppling Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Instead, they vaguely sketched out an arrangement that sounded like a mix of economic coercion and a guardianship over the country: The United States 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.
By Sunday morning, with Mr. Trump’s repeated declaration that the administration would “run” Venezuela ricocheting around foreign capitals, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser, complained that people were “fixating” on the president’s declaration.
“It’s not ‘running’” he said, clearly distancing himself from Mr. Trump’s words. “It’s running policy, the policy with regards to this.”
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