No one should mourn for Nicolás Maduro, and the U.S. military extraction of the Venezuelan dictator was a military tour de force.
Those are the only two positive things to be said about President Donald Trump’s latest made-for-TV foreign operation, which has squandered American guns and taxpayer money on a lunatic venture based entirely on lies.
Contrary to prior White House claims, the removal of Maduro had nothing to do with drug cartels, terrorism, or threats to U.S. security. Nor was it meant to restore democracy to Venezuela (as Trump stiffs exiled opposition leaders and stifles talk of future elections).
Instead, based on the president’s own words, this monthslong exercise was aimed at taking control of Venezuela’s oil. It was also aimed at reinforcing Trump’s personal role as virtual emperor of the Western Hemisphere (and expediting the collapse of Cuba).
Trump’s emperor complex has also renewed threats to seize Greenland or bludgeon longtime NATO ally Denmark into selling the autonomous island.
In truth, the administration’s Venezuelan adventure threatens to drag America into another foreign quagmire and undermine U.S. security around the world.
After years of denouncing GOP hawks and Democrats over regime change gone bad in Baghdad and Kabul, Trump now says he intends to “run” Venezuela and manage its oil — indefinitely. While he fixates on the derring-do of the Maduro extraction, the president’s proposals for follow-up are incoherent and contradictory. His intense focus on our hemisphere distracts U.S. attention from the growing Russian and Chinese threats in Europe and the Indo-Pacific.
As Anne Patterson, a former U.S. ambassador to Colombia and Ecuador who also served as assistant secretary of state for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, told me: What is a carrier strike group doing in the Caribbean?
“We’ve been fighting this drug war for decades, but it is a huge public health problem, not a security threat. It is nothing like China circling” — with ships and planes — “around Taiwan,” she said.
Instead of facing reality, the White House is trying to sell Trump’s fantasies to the public with an endless stream of falsehoods and fake facts.
For starters, the Venezuelan regime change will hardly affect the U.S. drug problem. Fentanyl is the drug that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, and Venezuela neither makes nor exports fentanyl. That drug is manufactured in Mexico using precursor chemicals from China. (Some cocaine passes through Venezuela, but it goes mainly to Europe.)
In other words, the fentanyl problem Trump claims to be addressing can only be resolved via negotiations with Mexico and China.
Moreover, the U.S. Department of Justice has just dropped criminal charges that Maduro led a drug cartel. The reason for this shift? As Latin America experts have told me, the so-called Cartel de los Soles — cited by Trump officials as a terrorist threat — was not a real organization at all. It is a Venezuelan slang term used for officials corrupted by drug money, including the Maduro regime.
Now that the Justice Department plans to bring Maduro to trial, perhaps Attorney General Pam Bondi realized she could not present fake facts about cartels under oath. Maduro is a corrupt thug who no doubt made money off drug dealers, but he did not lead a terrorist cartel.
Again, a distinct downgrade from the monster threat the White House has painted as justification for its raid.
The Trump team has also put forward no plan for a transition from Maduro’s corrupt, repressive government to one that might curb what drug dealing does go on. He has not even spoken to opposition leaders in exile who won the 2024 election before Maduro stole it.
Instead, the president has chosen to recognize Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, and her brutal interior and defense ministers, who have increased repression against political opponents since Maduro was taken.
“In fact, the government remains the same,” I was told by Venezuelan native Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, the head of the Washington Office on Latin America. “Are we seeing a transition without a transition for another strongman more conducive to American interests? Venezuelans want an answer.”
In truth, Trump is himself acting like a strongman, insisting he will “run” Venezuela indefinitely. He seems to believe that by enforcing U.S. (and his personal) control of all Venezuelan oil sales and revenues, in a cockamamie scheme that appears both illegal and unmanageable, the repressive regime in Caracas can be forced to do U.S. bidding.
When asked by the New York Times whether the U.S. would “remain Venezuela’s overlord” for more than a year, the president replied, “I would say much longer.”
Why? What possible reason is there for Trump to expend U.S. resources on running Venezuela? Even the lure of oil money makes little sense.
The president insists there are fortunes to be made if U.S. oil companies return to develop its enormous oil reserves. But apart from Chevron, which remained in the country, large U.S. companies are reluctant. That’s because it will take tens of billions of dollars in investment to make the country’s neglected fields viable, global oil is abundant, prices are low, and Venezuela’s future is uncertain.
If Venezuela pumps more oil and drives global prices down further — as Trump is demanding — it will negatively affect the interests of oil producers on the U.S. mainland. In fact, large producers’ interest in Venezuela is so tepid that Trump is actually offering to use taxpayer money to subsidize the return of U.S. companies to the country.
To sum up, neither drugs, nor cartels, nor terrorism, nor oil are valid or legitimate reasons for taking out Maduro, especially as we are leaving his thuggish government in place.
What’s worse, his Venezuelan venture appears to be inspiring Trump to fantasize about other snatch operations or military takeovers — in tragic imitation of a Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping.
Asked in the Times interview if there were any limits on his global powers, Trump said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
These are the words of a wannabe dictator.
If they don’t awaken more GOP legislators to vote to curb his future use of military force in Venezuela — via a bipartisan bill now under Senate debate — then they will be complicit in the trashing of U.S. security by an egomaniac who believes his own lies.
Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for The Philadelphia Inquirer, P.O. Box 8263, Philadelphia, Pa. 19101. Her email addressis trubin@phillynews.com.
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