President Donald Trump ordered the military operation in Venezuela to capture Nicolas Maduro. But in the aftermath, Marco Rubio is in the spotlight.<\/p>\n
Tasked with overseeing the transition of a post-Maduro Venezuela, Rubio has stepped into his fourth \u2014 and potentially riskiest \u2014 Trump administration role, and the coming weeks and months could define his standing as one of the president\u2019s top advisers. A fixation for Rubio for more than a decade, Venezuela has now become a high-stakes gambit for Trump that could shape his own legacy.<\/p>\n
And at a news conference with Trump following the stunning capture of Maduro and his wife, an emboldened Rubio put other world leaders on notice they could be next.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t play games while this president\u2019s in office because it\u2019s not gonna turn out well,\u201d Rubio said.<\/p>\n
As Maduro and his wife were making their first court appearance in New York on federal narcoterrorism and conspiracy charges on Monday, the challenges of a U.S.-led transition were coming into focus. Rubio was already softening the president\u2019s pronouncements that the U.S. would \u201crun\u201d Venezuela for an unspecified period of time.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not running — it\u2019s running policy, the policy with regards to this,\u201d he said during an interview on NBC\u2019s \u201cMeet the Press,\u201d contradicting Trump\u2019s message. Rubio said the U.S. military forces that have been amassed near Venezuela would stay put for now, and a quarantine on sanctioned Venezuelan oil would remain to pressure the country\u2019s new leader, Maduro\u2019s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, to fall in line.<\/p>\n
Democrats, already seething over the administration\u2019s decision to keep Congress in the dark on the Maduro operation, now question how far the administration will go.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere will this go next? Will the president deploy our troops to protect Iranian protesters? To enforce the fragile ceasefire in Gaza? To battle terrorists in Nigeria? To seize Greenland or the Panama Canal? To suppress Americans peacefully assembling to protest his policies?\u201d said Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia.<\/p>\n
The 54-year-old former senator from Florida has been at the forefront of the increasingly aggressive and complex foreign policy of Trump\u2019s second term. Trump first tapped him to serve as secretary of state, then added national archivist and interim national security adviser to his portfolio as the president has consolidated leadership positions across his administration.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a remarkable trajectory for Rubio, said Republican strategist Matthew Bartlett, a former senior State Department official in the first Trump administration.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow he is not just influencing, but directing, leading just a remarkable engagement in our hemisphere, and potentially, remaking a new order, \u201c Bartlett said. \u201cHow that plays out will truly be not just the President\u2019s legacy, but certainly Secretary Rubio\u2019s legacy too.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rubio has had key roles in other major foreign policy initiatives, any one of which is a heavy lift \u2014 from Trump\u2019s efforts to maintain a peace agreement between Israel and Hamas and end the war in Ukraine. But inside Trump\u2019s inner circle, Rubio has owned Venezuela. For him, it\u2019s personal: As a Cuban American senator in Florida, Rubio was focused on the abuses in Venezuela for 15 years, first under Hugo Chavez and now Maduro. The effort is popular in his home state, where many Venezuelans and similarly displaced Cuban Americans, including Rubio\u2019s own parents, sought sanctuary from repressive regimes.<\/p>\n
Cuban government television announced over the weekend that 32 Cuban combatants died in the U.S. military action against Venezuela. And Cuba, where the economy has been battered by a U.S. embargo, had been relying on sanctioned oil shipments from Maduro until the Trump administration\u2019s quarantine.<\/p>\n
Rubio framed Maduro\u2019s arrest as a warning to the \u201cincompetent senile men\u201d running Cuba, saying \u201cif I lived in Havana and I were in the government, I\u2019d be concerned, at least a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n
With Rubio at his side, Trump increasingly ramped up pressure on Venezuela, including a U.S. military campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats that has roiled the Western Hemisphere and significantly escalated on Saturday with Maduro\u2019s capture and removal to the U.S.<\/p>\n
The policy is a significant escalation from Trump\u2019s first term, when his administration increased and expanded sanctions on Venezuela. Trump publicly threatened to use military action if necessary and the U.S. officially recognized former opposition leader Juan Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela in 2019. But pressure stopped there.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think as Rubio persuaded him, he began to see that it was going to be potentially very important,\u201d said John Bolton, who served as Trump\u2019s national security adviser during the first administration and who is now one of his sharpest critics.<\/p>\n
But if Rubio has shown Trump the potential value of a more aggressive response, he now has to deliver on what Trump wants. And his influence with the president \u2014 and position as the face of his Venezuela policy \u2014 could cut both ways.<\/p>\n
\u201cRubio\u2019s job is to accomplish something close to what the president says can be accomplished,\u201d said Neumann, who served as ambassador to Afghanistan, Bahrain and Algeria during the George W. Bush administration.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s between a rock and a hard place,\u201d said Neumann.<\/p>\n
Rubio\u2019s positions have already seemed to shift. The U.S. is not turning to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize, or Edmundo Gonzalez, who greatly outpolled Maduro in the 2024 election that Maduro then stole. Last January, Rubio called Gonzalez Venezuela\u2019s rightful president.<\/p>\n
After meeting with exiled Venezuelan opposition figures last May, Rubio also called for the release of Maduro\u2019s political prisoners and the restoration of democracy in Venezuela. Neither of those goals has been raised by Trump or Rubio since Saturday.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnfortunately, the vast majority of the opposition is no longer present inside of Venezuela,\u201d Rubio said during Sunday\u2019s \u201cMeet the Press\u201d interview.<\/p>\n
He also said elections in Venezuela are \u201cpremature at this point\u201d despite the country\u2019s constitution calling for the vice president to succeed to the presidency and organize elections within 30 days.<\/p>\n
The U.S. has not had a diplomatic presence in Venezuela since 2019. The State Department is making preparations for possibly reopening the U.S. embassy in Caracas if Trump decides to take that step, according to a senior State Department official.<\/p>\n
American diplomats who focus on Venezuela currently are based in neighboring Colombia. More than half the countries in Latin America also currently do not have confirmed U.S. ambassadors. Those vacancies, coupled with the Trump administration\u2019s cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S.\u2019s chief international broadcaster Voice of America, leave Rubio with fewer regional allies and resources.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe challenges he faces would in conventional times cause him to rely heavily on his senior staff at the State Department and counterparts at USAID and Voice of America,\u201d said Douglas Lute, a retired Army general and former ambassador to NATO. \u201cThat just emphasizes the challenges he faces.\u201d<\/p>\n
Richard Fontaine, the chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security, said Rubio\u2019s dual-hatted roles as secretary of state and national security adviser complicate his ability to be the point person on a challenge as big as Venezuela.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a reason why you have not since Henry Kissinger has the role of National Security Advisor and Secretary of State been held by the same person,\u201d Fontaine said. \u201cThere are only 24 hours in a day and you can only be in one place at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump ordered the military operation in Venezuela to capture Nicolas Maduro. But in the aftermath, Marco…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":222272,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-222271","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/222272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}