“As senators woke up Saturday with questions on President Donald Trump’s audacious decision to order the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, one of their old colleagues was ready with answers.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio worked the phones in the wee hours of the morning and, in the days since, has played an outsize role in not only formulating the administration’s strategy in Venezuela but explaining it to skeptical lawmakers wary of a protracted military commitment.
That outreach has been to his former Republican colleagues as well as Democrats, including those who see him as a rare Trump official with whom they can maintain a trusted and respectful relationship amid profound policy disputes.
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“Marco has been evangelical on Latin America for a long time, for a long time — I mean, he’s, you know, a pretty classic neocon who believes that America will generally be greeted as liberators,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), another former Foreign Relations colleague. “I didn’t vote for him because I thought he was going to suddenly agree with me on the importance of military restraint overseas.”
Added Kaine, “At the end of the day, he’s going to do what Trump tells him to do.””
“With the Trump administration exerting control over Venezuela, Cuba has lost one of its principal economic patrons and oil suppliers. The island, already in economic dire straits, will face even deeper financial problems unless it finds another government willing to provide it with the oil it once received from Venezuela — the import of which until a week ago it exchanged for money and personnel. Cuba has dodged collapse for decades but Maduro’s capture poses perhaps the greatest threat to the regime since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And a failed state could lead to an exodus of Cubans looking for refuge in the United States.”
“In addition to the 14 shootings involving ICE agents, 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025. That figure makes 2025 the deadliest year for the agency in more than 20 years and matches the previous record high set in 2004, as the administration moved to detain an unprecedented number of people.”
“Minnesota officials said Thursday that federal law enforcement are freezing out state investigators from the investigation into the deadly ICE-related shooting of a 37-year-old woman.”
“In dropping government recommendations Monday that children routinely receive shots for four diseases, Kennedy’s allies believe they are closer to realizing a top priority: a country in which people who claim vaccine injuries can more easily sue vaccinemakers for millions in civil court.
Manufacturers of those vaccines would no longer be shielded from liability, the plan’s proponents assert, and could be driven from the market amid an influx of lawsuits alleging injuries from their products. In that scenario, the anti-vaccine movement would have a high-profile opportunity to shape the public narrative about childhood shots in courts nationwide.
Kennedy and Health and Human Services Department officials announced that longstanding recommendations that children receive flu, meningitis, hepatitis A and rotavirus vaccines were downgraded to a category known as “shared clinical decisionmaking,” meaning patients are encouraged to confer with health care providers before getting the shots.
In all, the number of “routine” vaccine recommendations — which assume vaccination as the default — have now been cut by a third, from 18 to 11, since 2024.”
“”I DOUBT NATO WOULD BE THERE FOR US IF WE REALLY NEEDED THEM,” Trump blasted on Truth Social, while insisting the U.S. would still defend alliance members. “We will always be there for NATO, even if they won’t be there for us.”
Under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, NATO’s collective defense clause, an attack on one member of the alliance is considered an attack on all. The provision has been formally invoked only once — in response to al-Qaida’s 9/11 terror attack against the U.S.”
“I think we’re in a situation where we have not gotten regime change. The same group, minus only Maduro, is still in power, and it’s not at all clear just how much intimidating force that we’ve really got.
There are pressure points. I think they’re in trouble on oil exports and so on. But what are China and Russia and Iran and Cuba going to do in the face of that, just sit back and watch it happen? So, I’m not at all sure what day-after planning there was, because I’m not sure we’re finished with the day yet.
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Trump talked about getting the oil, and I think there would have been a legitimate argument that U.S. oil companies kind of get first dibs to come in — not that we would take it, but that we would get some preference in terms of the ability to present proposals — and we should, at a minimum, get some of that production and maybe a lot of it.
But that’s not how Trump looks at it. He just wants to take control of it, and that’s how he’s going to pay for the military force and sort of everything else he’s been promising.
I just think that’s the kind of limited vision he has. He focuses on what he thinks he understands, the tangible economic asset.
The idea that American oil companies are just lining up to go invest in Venezuela is just flatly wrong, and the idea that somehow there will be a quick transformation of the incredibly dilapidated Venezuelan oil infrastructure that’s going to suddenly turn the production back online is fantasy, too.
It’s going to take tens of billions of dollars over a sustained period of time before they get this thing back up and running the way it used to be.
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I think we do have full authority under international law to go after Maduro because what we would consider the legitimate government today is the opposition, with Maduro having stolen both the 2018 and 2024 presidential elections.
When you basically go back to dealing with the old regime and undercut the legitimate government, you’re giving Russia and China the precedent that they don’t have.
There’s nobody in Ukraine calling for Russian intervention, and the government of Taiwan certainly isn’t calling for Chinese intervention.
So the Venezuelan case as it stands now is quite different from those, but that’s not the way Trump’s behaving, and it’s the mistakes he’s making today that lend greater credence to a Russian or a Chinese effort to say, well, we’re just doing what the U.S. did in Venezuela.
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what if they decide they’re not going to do what we want six months from now? Where are we going to be at that point? And I don’t think Trump has addressed that.”
“Industry analysts have warned that even in the best of circumstances, it would take tens of billions of dollars and more than a decade to completely rebuild Venezuela’s oil fields. Oil executives have told POLITICO that it would be a tough battle to convince their shareholders to make such an investment when other oil fields around the globe offer easier returns.”
Venezuela is a direct security threat to the United States because they cooperate militarily with countries like Iran who considered giving missiles to Venezuela that can hit the US.
Because the Maduro regime is still in charge in Venezuela, it seems likely that these military ties will continue, even if they take a temporary pause.
Venezuela isn’t simply ruled by a dictator or a military junta, but by criminals who are in criminal enterprises to get rich. That makes it harder to negotiate away the rulers because the government is actually run by criminals who want to maintain their criminal enterprises.
Venezuela is a more homogenous country than Iraq, and it has a history of democracy before the authoritarian socialists took over.
Making a profit of Venezuelan’s oil will be difficult. Venezuela is in deep debt; those debtors will demand the first cut on any profits. Efficiently exploiting Venezuela’s oil will require tons of investment in both oil drilling and the infrastructure of the country.Trump doesn’t think like a businessman, but a Marxist. He sees resources and wants to steal it for his whims. The US is a wealthy country who can trade for what it needs; it doesn’t need to use force to take resources in another country.
Trump appeared to have meen riffing when he said that the US would run Venezuela. There appears to be no plan for the US to run Venezuela.